Popular Youtuber Mark Dice has been censored twice by Facebook in less than two weeks. His ‘crime’ is free speech. He said that he found an advertisement for Dove brand soap to be in poor taste and that he’d need to buy soap from a rival brand to clean up his ‘puke’.
The advert showed two individuals, ostensibly actors, looking after a child. One of the individuals was said to be a man dressed up as a woman. It was not a pretty sight to say the least.
Facebook didn’t like Dice’s freedom of expression and they didn’t seem to have a sense of humour about it either.
Dice’s Facebook bans are examples of interlocking corporatism at its most dangerous. People should be free to express their likes, dislikes or any other variety of opinions on corporate publicity or corporate products.
If other corporations, in this case Facebook, shut such discussions down, at that point it represents a dangerous monopolisation of corporate power that the state ought to regulate.
It is true that Facebook is a private corporation, but there ought to be sensible government regulated limits on the ability of corporations to limit free communication between individuals.
As I wrote previously in The Duran,
“It is virtually unheard of for a phone or internet provider to ban a customer because of the content of his or her phone conversations or emails or even the photos and videos one can now keep in a cloud storage system.
This applies to conference calls, emails with multiple recipients, etc.
Facebook, Twitter and others should not act differently. Social media is, if you will, a conference call with a wider audience; an email sent to multiple people. Some people elect to privilege and restrict their communications and others can make it fully public. If someone doesn’t like what is being said they can personally block a user just, as one can hang up a phone during an unwanted conversation. It’s just that simple.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others are telecom tools of the modern age, just as the landline was in the 20th century and mobile phones were after they became common in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Governments should force social media companies to refrain from any sort of censorship or removal of users in all instances except when criminal activity is suspected. Anything criminal such as plotting an act of terrorism or preying on children is all ready a criminal offence and it should be dealt with by police and not any private sector organisations, including Facebook middle management. Expressing views, even hateful views is not a crime. It is quite the opposite, it is protected by free speech laws. If someone is offended they can simply not look at the content, just as when one sees a unseemly vagabond on the street, they in many cases, elect to cross the road”.
READ MORE: Social media censorship puts lives at risk
In the case of Mark Dice, his censorship has not affected his life, but it could and possibly has impacted his livelihood. If government can regulate car companies in the interest of public safety and if they can regulate builders for the same reason, they should also regulate companies like Facebook in the interest of protecting free speech. Free speech is as sacred and important a facet of daily life as one’s ability to live in a safe environment.
As a private citizen, Dice has every right to advocate for the purchasing of Irish Spring soap because he disagreed with the content of an advertisement for Dove brand soap.
While many people are analysing the content of the Dove advertisement and Dice’s objections to it, the more important matter is how corporations have bound together to look after their own economic interests at the expense of one man’s right to free speech.
I happen to agree with Dice, I find the advert to be in terribly poor taste, but even if I thought the advert was so good that I ought to go out and buy shares in Dove’s parent company (the mega-globalist corporation Unilever), it should not mean that one ought to be censored for advocating on behalf of another product and doing so in a humorous manner at that.
What’s next, Facebook censoring car reviews, restaurant reviews, reviews of mainstream media outlets?
Mark Dice needs the support of the wider alternative media community. His censorship is a devious act of interlocking-corporatism that must be named and shamed. The fact that Dice speaks for many who don’t understand why the chopping of genitals is now fashionable in parts of the west, is simply a bonus.
Now watch Mark Dice react to his unjust treatment at the hands of Facebook’s corporate machine.
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