Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering

Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 07, 2024

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process.

Both Facebook and Instagram have deleted screenshots of a post I made on Twitter (or whatever you call it now) which reads as follows:

Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror.

In the reasons given for this censorship, both Facebook and Instagram said “It looks like you shared symbols, praise or support of people and organizations we define as dangerous, or followed them.”

My appeals against this removal have been denied, saying the post “does not follow our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations.”

Hours later, Instagram removed a second post citing the same reasons, this one about Lebanon and Hezbollah. It was two screenshots from a longer Twitter post which reads as follows:

Hezbollah are just Lebanese people. There’s this framing of “liberating Lebanon from Hezbollah” like they’re some kind of invasive, alien presence, when they’re an entirely native fighting force organically arising from the injustices and abuses inflicted by Israel and the west.

The imperial spin machine always does this. The empire uses narrative to try and de-couple the people it wants to kill from the rest of the population in the nation they are targeting in order to legitimize the violence they want to inflict upon the country. They want to take out a certain government or element within a nation that conflicts with their interests, so they start babbling about “terrorists” or “evil dictators” or “regimes” in order to make it seem like they’re not just attacking a country and murdering people who disobey them.

If they can uncouple a nation from the people in that nation who they want to kill in the eyes of the public, then they can portray that killing as a heroic act of liberation from a force which doesn’t belong there. If they can get you to believe that, then they can get you to believe they’re killing people for the benefit of the nation they’re attacking, instead of for their own benefit.

It’s literally always solely and exclusively for their own benefit, though. It’s literally always a lie.

As you can see, both of these posts are just criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States, the nation where Meta is based. Meta has an extensive history of working hand in glove with the US government to regulate speech.

This is indistinct from government censorship. If the US government designates its enemies as “terrorists” and massive Silicon Valley platforms are censoring criticism of US wars against those enemies in order to be in compliance with US law, then the US government is just censoring speech which criticizes US warmongering, using a corporate proxy in Silicon Valley.

Meta has been ramping up censorship of speech that’s critical of Israel and its US-backed atrocities for a while now, with a sharp increase that was anecdotally noticeable immediately after the company announced back in July that it would be instituting vague new censorship protocols against the word “Zionism”. After that move, critics of US foreign policy like Aaron Maté, Jonathan Cook, and Tadhg Hickey began reporting that their posts about Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza were being unexpectedly taken down on Facebook.

I also had one of my articles which was critical of Israel removed from Facebook in July, which the platform refused to reinstate. This followed other acts of censorship that Facebook has been imposing on my account since last October, all for my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza.

Last November Facebook deleted a Twitter screenshot from my page which read, “You don’t understand man, Hamas uses human shields. Really really advanced human shields, the kind where there aren’t even any Hamas members anywhere near them. It’s just 100% human shield with 0% combatant, the most secure kind of shield there is.”…………………………………………………………………………

I think it’s important to document all this in detail because Meta is such a massive tool of US imperial narrative control. Facebook has a staggering three billion users worldwide, and Instagram has two billion. It’s impossible to overstate the impact that censoring speech in a pro-US direction will have on worldwide human communication.

From my earliest days at this gig I’ve been making a point of forcefully criticizing the world’s mightiest and most tyrannical power structure and then documenting the various ways the imperial narrative managers have worked to diminish my reach. I’ve been algorithmically throttled on Facebook since 2017, I’ve been permanently banned on TikTok and keep encountering censorship there under my new account, and I was even banned from Twitter until some commentators with larger voices than my own intervened on my behalf.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and the manipulation of information on the internet is a major agenda of the US-centralized empire toward that end. These pricks won’t be happy until we’re all a bunch of mindless, bleating sheep. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/meta-is-aggressively-censoring-criticism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=149899947&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email