Mark Zuckerberg has clearly had enough of being hauled in front of Congress and hectored by a gang of senior citizens and listening to the head of the ACLU slam his company as a vessel for violent hate speech. Because over the past few months, Facebook has done a complete 180 on its position about speech, particularly sensitive political speech. Zuckerberg has apparently been shaken from his non-interventionist approach by announcing that FB wouldn't accept new political ads during the last week of the campaign, and just yesterday announcing that Facebook would crack down on holocaust deniers on its platform.
The company has also launched salvos against QAnon and election-related misinformation, while taking an aggressive approach toward political advertising, and political content in general.
And as global authorities struggle to convince the public that an eventual COVID-19 vaccine will be safe to take despite the expedited approval process, Facebook has decided to give them a hand by banning all content encouraging users to refuse to take a vaccine. It laid out the new global policy in a blog post published Tuesday.
Facebook will draw the line at allowing users who advocate against "mandatory vaccination," which the company said was a legitimate political position (not an argument made in "bad faith" that some on the left insist), to post as normal. They cited an example of a state lawmaker from Virginia who posted "STOP FORCED CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS".
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