On Ron Paul? For some reason, I can't imagine any amount of mass reporting leading to the ban of other prominent politicians, even AOC would be banned ten times if special protections didn't exist

Pure speculation: To prove a point about incoming FB bans you don't have to concentrate on a single person. Get a large number of "not very active, but known and generally acceptable" people. Spam reports for any old posts that can be taken the wrong way. Wait for any success story. You're bound to find someone who isn't currently protected, or someone who will make a review mistake.

To be clear: I'm not saying this is what happened. Only that we know targeted mass-reporting to get people banned happens and is successful, so it's one of possibilities.

>At the same time, I wish people didn't jump to conclusions just yet.

Well, Facebook did jump to conclusions and even moved to action and banned people.

So "jumping to conclusions" is the least people can do in return...

>I suspect and hope this will be reverted very quickly.

That would still be at the mercy of FB, a bad precedent, and perhaps "testing the waters" to see how far they can take it atm.

> and perhaps "testing the waters" to see how far they can take it atm.

This is precisely the jumping to conclusions. We don't know if it's related to the recent bans. FB was pretty open about the reasons for banning Trump and it got an announcement from Zuckerberg. There's lots of people banned every day for wrong reasons and lots not banned for wrong reasons. Of course they're all at the mercy of FB - that's not new.

We find ourselves in a science fiction US where we need to divine the opaque reasons of an all-powerful technological entity that can decide at whim who can or can't speak in this country.

And they do it while enjoying strong protections (Section 230) that most other private businesses don't receive - have this in mind when making the "private web property" argument.

Facebook does not deserve any benefit of doubt. You should assume the worst from one of the most evil companies in the US.

Facebook really only wish they were in a position to be one of the most evil companies in the US, or world.

But they are nowhere close! The competition is just so very, very fierce. Koch industries. Cargill. Archer Daniels Midland. The unit of Bayer formerly called Dupont. The outfit once called Blackwater, Xe, now Academi. Halliburton. Alphabet. Microsoft, even still. Companies more evil even than them, that we don't even know the names of.

I don’t think any of those companies scratch the surface compared to Facebook.

Probably only because you don't know much about them.

Alphabet by itself is far more evil than FB could ever hope for, and they have just started. Other companies directly cause cancer by the millions, or have single-handedly eliminated whole species.

When this thread first dropped, that's what I thought too. But here's a question. Ron Paul is one of the most well known libertarian and free-speech politicians. He is being limited during a free-speech controversy. If this is indeed "just a mistake", how long time is reasonable for Facebook to find and fix this?

If it takes more than 24h - and we are approaching that - but the US is sleeping so let's allow for that, their inaction starts to look malicious.

It's bizarre in that Ron Paul likely would advocate that it's FB's platform and private property and therefore has the right to censor and remove posts, even choosing who they do "business" with. Ron Paul would likely advocate for less government and against government regulation. I want to know and hear from Ron Paul on his take on his FB situation.

You're assuming government regulation is the only solution.

When Facebook or Comcast or Google start censoring opinions they don't like, I want to hear about it on other places like hackernews so that I and my friends can use them less.