Lawmakers across the political aisle on Capitol Hill agreed that Big Tech CEOs have not enough to safeguard children on social media following Senate hearing.

Happy birthday to … Facebook? OK, it’s not every day that we celebrate a business turning 20. But it’s not every day that one of the most-influential social media companies in the world marks two decades impacting our lives.

Note, I didn’t say benefitting our lives. Facebook, and its younger sibling Instagram, are definitely a mixed bag. They have built careers, contributed to the global conversation, given platforms to more than 2 billion people and introduced a censorship regimen to the entire world.

Any time major issues occur, Facebook has been on the front lines of controlling what we say about them – COVID-19, the presidential election, transgenderism and even Israel’s war against Hamas.

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Last May, journalist Matt Taibbi produced what he called the "Top 50 Organizations to Know in the Censorship-Industrial Complex." The report highlighted the influence that government, foundations, academia, fact-checkers and others had on Big Tech, including Facebook and Instagram. Taibbi complained on X/Twitter that Facebook censored the report.

It’s impossible to know how many users experience censorship on Facebook. Posts disappear or get restricted. Even users sometimes don’t know what post was taken down or why. But the censorship has hit a wide range of prominent people – Robert Kennedy Jr., Larry Elder, Glenn Beck and more.

According to Statista, Facebook removed nearly 50 million posts for "hate speech" from winter of 2022 to fall of 2023. The number of spam posts removed in that time is close to 5 billion. And that doesn’t count posts or accounts that were restricted in some way.

One of my favorite examples of Facebook censorship was when the site covered an image of Santa Claus kneeling in front of the baby Jesus. The company placed the words, "violent or graphic content" atop the illustration. The use of what is called an interstitial is common, but few users click on the button to see the image beneath.

The problem of free speech

Boy, I hate even typing those words. Facebook and most other social media companies reflexively censor. Their business model isn’t built on free speech. It’s built on not offending people. Facebook wants to be an ad venue and just suck up your time while it rakes in money. The company doesn’t want users saying anything that makes its........

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