Facebook’s Craig Kelly ban is sloping to censorship

Well, Donald Trump was just the first of many, it seems. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday – “Craig Kelly cops one-week Facebook ban for COVID-19 misinformation” – other politicians are fair game when it comes to censorship.  

Now, I’m not a supporter of Kelly, who I view as a slightly toned-down version of Pauline Hanson, but social media companies that take action to suspend the accounts of politicians, or to remove posts they’ve made on the platforms, are indeed, as Leigh Sales proposed recently, walking a fine line. It’s instructive, perhaps, that the same day the Facebook ban of Kelly was announced I posted on Twitter:

We need "woke police" to make sure ppl are liking the right things. Mb Twitter can set up an AI bot to do this, just give people suggestions or else block "likes" that are illegal.

This was in response to a post by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist based in Brazil, who’d written:

I was just reading on smart-liberal media Twitter earlier today that "wokeness" signifies nothing more than asking people to please just be nice and considerate. Who could possibly be opposed to that?

His comment was associated with another post:

SCOOP: The principal of East Side Community School in New York sent white parents this "tool for action," which tells them they must become "white traitors" and then advocate for full "white abolition." 

This is the new language of public education.

Christopher Rufo, the reporter behind the story in question, has this Twitter profile: 

From a story on a far-right website:

Critical race theory watchdog Christopher F. Rufo reported on Monday that the principal of a New York school sent a list of white identities to white parents so that they could try to convert themselves from white supremacists to white abolitionists. 

The East Side Community School teacher even included a white supremacism spectrum for parents to self-identify. 

According to East Side Community School the goal is to become a white abolitionist. But these steps are subjective, not clearly defined and ALWAYS up for evaluation by your peers.

Rufo also published another story recently.  In it, he identified a school in California where students were asked to analyse their identity across a spectrum. 

[The] teacher had the students deconstruct their own intersectional identities and "circle the identities that hold power and privilege" on their identity maps, ranking their traits according to the hierarchy. In a related assignment, the students were asked to write short essays describing which aspects of their identities "hold power and privilege" and which do not. The students were expected to produce "at least one full page of writing." As an example, the presentation included a short paragraph about transgenderism and nonbinary sexuality.

This way of teaching caused consternation among parents of children at the school, reports Rufo.

"We were shocked," said one parent, who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity. "They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old." This parent, who is Asian-American, rallied a group of a half dozen families to protest the school's intersectionality curriculum.

It’s a bit of a step to take to link this type of curriculum with Facebook’s Kelly ban but it’s not hard to do. One thing that’s unquestionably true is that, a decade ago, we never imagined – those of us who are just recent social media adopters – that socmed would develop in the way it has done. Not only has it changed how we form communities, it has changed the way politics itself is performed. Different sectors of the community have seen what can be done, so it’s easy for them to imagine – by changing the way they organise themselves, for example – how it could change other things as well. 

Such as the way children are taught. And what they’re taught. It’s not hard to do if you just put in place a framework – for example, instruction modules for teachers, packaged professionally with accompanying explanatory literature – and then get enough people in positions of influence (such as teachers) to execute the plan. 

Social engineering is not new. Governments have been using PR for generations in order to achieve shared goals. Goals that are framed in public as expressions of the majority’s will. But what’s different now is that it’s not just governments or corporations (companies being the other large stakeholder in the case) who are working to change behaviour.

What kind of role do social media giants have when it comes to regulating the natural impulse people have to use their collective influence to sway public opinion? It’s not hard to understand why people would want, for example, to teach eight-year-olds about racism. They do it because they think that there are structural impediments in society that disenfranchise certain groups of individuals. But what might Facebook or Twitter do to make sure that fringe ideas are not privileged to such a degree that they cause the fragile fabric of consensus to fail?

It seems to me that banning Craig Kelly, while it may appeal to certain sectors of the population – “woke” extremists with their own barrow to push – is to fall into the hands of a minority. I don’t agree with Kelly’s ideas and his speech seems to me to be counterfactual and strange. But – that’s all it is. It doesn’t represent the majority view in the Liberal-National coalition. It is the ravings of an edgelord, and by banning him Facebook is actually in danger of bolstering his viability by appealing to the outraged sense of privilege of those who – for whatever reason – see him as representing their interests. A martyr to non-convention.