Regardless of where people stand on the issue of religion there is almost one thing unanimously agreed upon: freedom of speech. Both freedom of religion and freedom of speech are part of the first amendment in the United States. Tools like the Internet are supposed to broaden our ability to practice freedom of speech and create an open dialog. Unfortunately sometimes these get corrupted.
Enter Facebook.
On October 29th CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) posted an article titled The Danger of Celebrating Halloween detailing how “Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of : the Luciferian Spirit…” The article has since been deleted from the CBN website although a Google cache still exists.
But don’t try showing your friends on Facebook. Any attempt to post it will result in an error message saying the content is blocked due to the fact it has been reported as “abusive” by Facebook users.
Well that’s really broad… Is it “abusive” because of its religious context? Did CBN ask for it to be blocked after they took down the article? Who decides what is “abusive” and how many Facebook users does it take to report it?
Unfortunately Facebook hasn’t disclosed any of this. As of right now what you share with your friends on Facebook is restricted by a random minority of users deeming something “abusive”.
I believe the word they’re really looking for is “offensive”. Most likely a small fraction of Facebook users were offended by the article (perhaps embarrassed) and reported it as “abusive”.
Facebook’s disjointed policy on abusive links can be found here. It contains 336 “answers”, most of them irrelevant, but has no explanation of how or why their system determines what to censor.