Facebook Moves to Silence Lockdown Protesters in Stunning Display of Power

Facebook, and founder Mark Zuckerberg have an enormous amount of power, and not everyone is in agreement that they are using it for good.

The social media giant is undoubtedly one of the most trafficked domains in the history of cyberspace, and has become a veritable second internet in many ways.  Instead of Googling “plumbers near me” and sifting through Yelp reviews, we can just ask our trusted “friends” who they’ve used, and how it went.

But there is an inherent risk of trouble with this data-collection, in that much of it is anecdotal and, perhaps, outright false.  Some of this misrepresented information is even introduced to the conversation purposefully, often by provocateurs who are trying to damage the reputation of their political rivals.

In today’s virus-divided world, where half the country wants to get back to work and the rest of us want to slow them down, Facebook is taking a heavy-handed approach to keeping the peace.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that posts and pages attempting to organize protests against stay-at-home orders will be banned as “misinformation.”

The Facebook CEO confirmed that the posts would be banned to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on a segment of Good Morning America.

Stephanopoulos asked Zuckerberg how the company deals “with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a lot of these protests to defy social distancing guidelines in states. If somebody trying to organize something like that, does that qualify as harmful misinformation?”

“We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down,” confirmed Zuckerberg, while at the same time saying that it’s important “that people can debate policies.”

The question on many minds now is just where Facebook derived the authority to make decisions on acceptable risk in the 21st century.