By Scott Tibbs, October 7, 2013
When I see conservatives whine about being persecuted, I often sigh and shake my head. Such was the case with the recent column by David Usher on Townhall.com. Let's examine a couple of Usher's statements:
| Facebook does not have a way to remove or block “Like” spammers injecting hate into the pages of others. |
Actually, they do. When someone is banned by a page administrator, they are not able to comment on timeline posts or even "like" them. Banning both users and pages is actually very easy. The fact that the people running the Facebook page Usher writes about had not yet discovered the "ban" option is not Facebook's responsibility. It also makes Usher look very silly to whine about it when his organization already has the ability to do what he wants to do.
| We are looking into a lawsuit against Facebook. Facebook has a duty to provide software so that we can protect our corporate image. |
Good luck with that. First, a actually filing a lawsuit demanding access to software that you already have access to will not get very far. Second, even if Facebook did not provide the opportunity to block people, I doubt you would get very far. You can always delete your Facebook page if it is causing your that much of a problem. A better option, though, would be to learn to use the software before you threaten to file a lawsuit.
Finally, Facebook is not necessarily "endorsing" the anti-Christan hate speech that you have not taken the effort to block. Facebook takes a pretty laissez-faire position toward speech on their site, even speech that is vulgar and hateful. I personally think they should crack down a little more (and sometimes a little less) but not deleting objectionable content is not necessarily an endorsement of that content.
