Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has accused online magazine Quillette of violating Facebook community standards, then removed monetization and threatened its page with deletion, according to a post from the magazine’s founder, Claire Lehmann.
“It would be helpful if Meta provided information on what ‘community violations’ Quillette has made,” said Lehmann. “They don’t provide a single example, but just inform me that our page cannot be monetised & is at risk of deletion.”
Mark Zuckerberg Meta Selfie (Facebook)
Lehmann added that a support ticket has been filed with Meta, noting that the company’s AI content moderation systems often flag material on its platforms automatically.
Quillette, founded in 2015, became a hub for academics and essayists who dissented from the intellectual left’s tendency towards censorship and identity politics, gaining a large audience and worldwide recognition as wokeness reached its in the late 2010s.
News of Meta’s censorship of the magazine led to uproar on X/Twitter.
This should worry an extremely broad range of people on left and right alike. This isn’t about anything even approaching hate speech. It’s threatened suppression of measured, thoughtful speech that doesn’t track with the woke orthodoxy. https://t.co/HSStYFoda6
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) November 10, 2023
“This should worry an extremely broad range of people on left and right alike,” said academic Charles Murray, whose 1990s book The Bell Curve shocked the intellectual left of the day by positing a link between genetics and intelligence.
“This isn’t about anything even approaching hate speech. It’s threatened suppression of measured, thoughtful speech that doesn’t track with the woke orthodoxy.”
It’s amazing that even after all of the global uproar surrounding corporate censorship and with the transition of Twitter to X under @elonmusk, that @Meta and others continue to believe that heavy-handed, ideologically motivated silencing of heterodox ideas is desirable–at all. https://t.co/5LU8JA5y0O
— Matthew Nielsen (@matthewnielsen) November 10, 2023
“It’s amazing that even after all of the global uproar surrounding corporate censorship and with the transition of Twitter to X under Elon Musk, that Meta and others continue to believe that heavy-handed, ideologically motivated silencing of heterodox ideas is desirable–at all,” said Matthew Nielsen of the Educational Freedom institute.
A number of other Facebook page owners said that Meta had also censored them with no explanation.
My page was killed too. They said I had three months to appeal my suspension, which I did. A month after that, they said I had two months. Would I like to appeal? I said yes. A month later, I have one month to appeal, would I like to appeal? Etc. No explanation of what I…
— Joel Shepherd Author (@ShepJoel) November 11, 2023
“My page was killed too. They said I had three months to appeal my suspension, which I did,” said Joel Shepherd, a podcaster and science fiction author.
“A month after that, they said I had two months. Would I like to appeal? I said yes. A month later, I have one month to appeal, would I like to appeal? Etc. No explanation of what I supposedly did wrong, nothing.”
Good luck with that. An account I managed got banned (it was a conservative evangelical publisher) and I never found out why. Not method to appeal. Nothing.
— Joe Henegan (@Joe_Henegan) November 10, 2023
“An account I managed got banned (it was a conservative evangelical publisher) and I never found out why,” said Joe Henegen, a marketing employee for The Gospel Coalition. “[No] method to appeal. Nothing.”
Breitbart News reached out to Meta for comment but received no response at the time of writing.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.