Facebook’s Attack Against the NAP
Hello there again readers and welcome back to Coffee Break Liberty, a blog where we tackle books, news and many other things under the sun where liberty is a guiding principle. If this is your first time here we would like to extend a special warm welcome to you and hope you enjoy yourself while here.
These past few weeks have been a little crazy on Facebook. Recently hundreds of pages with millions of followers were deleted. Most of them were political in nature and most of them were viewed as pages that supported libertarian ideals. It was a fire storm. Journalists like Rachel Blevins had all of her content removed. Pages like “Cop Block” which posts videos of police officers acting poorly had all of it’s content also removed. Liberty Memes, a Facebook page that produces memes generally liberty themed and causing a bit of a stir in the process was also deleted, along with the page they made shortly after, Liberty Memes 2.0. Liberty Memes 3.0 is up right now at the time of this writing but for how long? Smaller libertarian pages that tried to bridge the gap with other groups like “Punk Rock Libertarian” were removed as well. Facebook claimed that these pages were all shutdown shortly before the elections due to fake accounts trying to push the page. No incidents were reported to the page managers or evidence provided. The purge was mostly focused on pages that promoted liberty and the NAP (non aggression principle). We haven’t gone over the the principle in a while so we will go over it again in this post. Additionally we will bring up the scary notion that anyone would find the principle so troubling that they have to attempt to silence it’s voice on the largest social media platform. Finally we will go over the moves we are making to try and stay on social media and the other platform we have moved to.
The NAP is pretty much what it sounds like, a principle of non aggression meaning that those that abide by it will not initiate violence against others but will act in self defense. Forms a violence discussed in previous blog posts are transgressions against property rights, to include one’s income and their human right of self ownership. Not to spend too much time on this topic but the NAP is a peaceful way of living, no violence, no aggression. This principle of non aggression is a pillar in the libertarian way of living. Many of the pages deleted promoted this peaceful path, and yet were banned. That is what worries us a lot here at CBL, a peaceful way of living deemed so dangerous that it must be silenced on social media.
It is this belief that a peaceful way of life calling for non aggression should be silenced on social media that concerns us. The NAP and all that comes with it is seen as such a radical idea that many people that talk about it are considered crazy and or foolish for thinking a way of life can exist without violence being committed against people. Facebook seems to disagree. Those that want to live in peace without violence committed against them clearly need to be silenced as it might promote more freedom among the people.
Finally we want to point out we understand that Facebook has every right to do what they want with their platform. They own it, they can do with it as they please. The recent actions from Facebook though have caused us here at CBL to look to other social media platforms. We have made a sister page on Minds.com, where we will post the same content as on our Facebook page while our actual web page is still up and kicking. We will make more social media moves in the future but for right now we are sticking with just the two platforms at Facebook and Minds.com.
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LWS
