Don’t Even Mention Tommy’s Name!

Facebook’s latest updated “community standards” seem to preclude even the mention of Tommy Robinson’s name. Violators of the rule may have their posts summarily taken down, and their accounts suspended.

Danish television is less politically correct than most outlets west of the Iron Curtain, so the Facebook representative in the clip below has to face some (mildly) critical questioning.

Many thanks to Tania Groth for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:15   First Facebook closed down the radical right wing activist Tommy Robinson’s profile.
00:19   Then Facebook started deleting profiles that supported Tommy Robinson.
00:23   And now Facebook are starting to delete posts that merely mention Tommy Robinson’s name.
00:28   Is that a way to deal with our common communication?
00:31   This is what I, in a moment, will be asking Facebook’s Nordic Communication Chief Peter Münster.
01:05   Facebook has removed me. I had 1.2 million…
01:09   I was the most interacted political Facebook page in Britain.
01:13   I had a reach and an interaction that politicians could only dream of.
01:19   If I went live, I would have 20,000 people watching me instantly,
01:22   that would then spread to millions by the next day.
01:25   When the radical right-wing activist Tommy Robinson railed against immigration
01:30   and Islam, his message once had a wide reach on Facebook.
01:34   That is no longer the case. In February he was banned from Facebook and his page was closed.
01:41   And not only that, lately his banning has had other consequences.
01:47   Lately a number of Danish Facebook users have found that their Facebook posts have been removed,
01:52   Apparently because they have merely mentioned Tommy Robinson.
01:55   And that has resulted in intense condemnation.
01:58   Is our freedom of speech being destroyed? and why are the authorities not reacting? writes
02:03   New Conservatives’ Lars Boje Mathiesen in his blog in Jyllands Posten.
02:07   The same question is asked by the legal practitioner and member of SF, Leif Donbaek,
02:11   in Ekstra Bladet [newspaper]: whether a privately owned American company
02:15   should unilaterally be dictating how we handle public debate.
02:19   While he, by the way, at the same time calls Robinson a giant idiot.
02:24   After sharing his blog on Facebook he too has been penalized,
02:28   and can neither post nor comment on Facebook for the next 24 hours.
02:33   And on their web page the Free Press Society writes
02:37   that Facebook has threatened to close their Facebook page,
02:40   and just this evening they inform us that they have been banned from posting on their page.
02:45   Furthermore, Chairwoman Aia Fog says that she has been blocked
02:48   for thirty days for writing about Tommy Robinson.
02:51   According to Aia Fog the ban doesn’t come directly from Facebook itself,
02:55   but “from strong political forces
02:59   that more or less put pressure on social media.”
03:04   That explanation sounds very much like Tommy Robinson’s own.
03:07   That’s why I said it’s good to be seen! Because I have become
03:10   completely unpersoned from all social media.
03:13   Even Snapchat, Instagram… and the maddest thing is, I’ve done nothing wrong!
03:18   They run with these lies, they keep saying that I promote violence against Muslims.
03:22   Show me where… show me ONE screen-shot that I’ve done.
03:28   Peter Münster, Nordic Communications Chief for Facebook
03:32   The guy we just saw here, Tommy Robinson, is he so dangerous
03:35   that merely mentioning his name makes the world a dangerous place?
03:39   Well, for starters, the problem isn’t so much mentioning his name,
03:42   the problem is that he falls under a category that we consider to be hate preacher,
03:47   that is, people who use their status in the public sphere
03:52   to organize hate or to encourage violence against a minority.
03:57   And we don’t permit that. We don’t permit the sharing of hate speech or racist attacks,
04:02   but we don’t in general permit people who predominantly have this as a major part of their
04:09   public work, public profile, to encourage people to something similar, so… it IS a tough sanction.
04:15   That is a tough sanction against him, he’s cut off, but what is happening now
04:20   is that people who just mention Tommy Robinson have their posts removed,
04:24   get blocked, or threatened to be removed from Facebook.
04:28   How does that work? Well… our rules don’t explicitly forbid talking about Tommy Robinson.
04:34   You are allowed to write that you don’t like him,
04:38   or that he’s an idiot as was mentioned in the intro,
04:41   …and then he was blocked. Yes, and that’s another question, but for starters,
04:46   what you aren’t allowed to do according to our rules is show support,
04:50   or positively promote, or in other ways give representation to these hate preachers.
04:55   What does that mean, to give representation? —Well, that means that if we have a policy that
05:00   a man like Tommy Robinson is not allowed to have a profile or a page,
05:05   then of course it doesn’t work if he has a following who are on Facebook
05:09   who can say “I have spoken with Tommy Robinson today,
05:12   and he asked me to say to everybody such and such…” (OK) We also have a policy for that.
 

4 thoughts on “Don’t Even Mention Tommy’s Name!

  1. Facebook = nazis & communists all rolled into one. There is not a one of them that Tommy can’t beat in a one on one debate about Islam!

    Mark Zuberberg’s foot soldiers have to be either the most ignorant or scuzzy (or something that sounds like that) people on earth because people simply can’t be that dumb. Who do they think are blowing up people all over the world?

    Mike from Brooklyn

  2. Thank you Mark of West Seneca NY for the Smart History link.

    As Twain said: ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’

    To fellow Brooklynite Mike, I think we are dealing with a combo of ‘willed ignorance and scuzzines,’ but also something mysterious that will take future historians (if we have any) many hours of effort to work out.

  3. I run a Facebook page called The Religion of Peace (which is not affiliated with the website of the same name). Sometime in May 2018, I posted a Tommy Robinson event, a rally on free speech, that was being held that same month. Last week I was notified that the post went against Facebook’s Community Standards and it was subsequently removed. There was absolutely nothing untoward with the post. It merely showed a picture of Robinson, a Union Jack flag in the background, advertising the location and the date of the rally (May 2018 – someone obviously had to go digging for the post). I was given a 3-day suspension because Facebook says that the post contained ‘hate speech.’ I was given no recourse whatsoever.

    My page has been ‘demoted’ several times for posting ‘false news’ (news that Facebook deems false, that is) and although I have more than 10,000 followers, my posts are now reaching only single and double digits. This is Facebook’s ‘punishment’ for posting things that don’t align with their Satanic world view.

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