Matt Taibbi
Case #
5457

Facebook censors author and journalist Matt Taibbi's report on the "censorship-industrial complex," claiming it is "hate speech": Author and journalist Matt Taibbi published an in-depth report on Racket, his Substack, titled "Top 50 Organizations to Know in the Censorship-Industrial Complex." He then published another Substack article promoting a "Callin Discussion" where he intended to take questions about his research into the "'anti-disinformation' organizations, why the general public will have to keep fighting to keep track of the exploding censorship bureaucracy." To promote this open discussion, he posted a link to the article promoting it on his personal Facebook account. According to purported screenshots that Taibbi subsequently shared to his social media platforms, Facebook removed the post. The screenshot showed that Facebook cited its "Community Standards on hate speech" in censoring the post, though it was unclear how his report on censorship violated hate speech rules. Facebook's hate speech standards state that it "define[s] hate speech as a direct attack against people - rather than concepts or institutions - on the basis of what [it] call[s] protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease." Taibbi indicated that he appealed the decision, but did not receive a response at the time of publication. Update: Facebook representative Andy Stone responded to Taibbi, claiming that "a bug led this post to be mistakenly deleted for a few minutes. When the error was discovered, it was automatically restored."

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