IT’S TIME FOR FACEBOOK TO TAKE THE SIDE OF MORALITY AND PATRIOTISM

Summary: Facebook has a choice to make. Quite simply, Facebook needs to consider very carefully whether it proposes to continue functioning as a cheerleader for Russia and her dictator, Vladimir Putin, or whether Facebook instead will find the patriotism it should have found long ago. Will Facebook stand with United States, with our NATO allies, and most importantly at this hour, with Ukraine?  Will Facebook stop facilitating Russian disinformation on its platform. Will Facebook block and ban thosewho cheerlead for Putin, those who are cheerleading against vaccinations, and those who continue to propagate the Big Lie that Donald Trump somehow “won” the election of 2020. The correct, patriotic answer, ought to be simple. That being the case, Zuckerberg will probably do the wrong thing.

By: Ivan Lopakhin, special to Cathedral City Observed

Huntington Beach, March 5, 2022 – With this country, the United States we all profess to love, involved in an undeclared war with Russia over that country’s grotesque invasion of Ukraine, the time is at hand for Mark Zuckerberg to begin to have a serious discussion about where Facebook’s loyalties need to lie.

Do Facebook’s loyalties lie with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who after all just shut Facebook down in Russia (and we may expect Putin’s henchman and puppet Aleksandr Lukashenko to do the same thing in Belarus before much longer, if it hasn’t happened already) or is Facebook prepared to repent of its errors and acknowledge its dependence on a West that has permitted it to flourish so that over the last two decades, Mr. Zuckerberg has become, shall we say, an oligarch?

But, even oligarchs ultimately find themselves dependent upon the goodwill of the constituency they have cultivated. The cultivation of that constituency also necessarily involves the cultivation of those entities which can regulate the activities of oligarchs. Mr. Zuckerberg has a great deal to account for. His flirtation with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in 2016 is just one of the things for which Mr. Zuckerberg can be faulted. His enabling of the junta in Burma when they chose to engage in deliberate genocide against the Rohingya in Rakhine State is another. The numerous activities for which he has been called out by a variety of whistleblowers are still another.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg faces what could be an existential threat, not a mere “flirtation” with Vladimir Putin or Cambridge Analytica, or with the Burmese junta. Zuckerberg now faces the very real possibility of being investigated by the Justice Department, the British Ministry of Justice, the German and French ministries of justice, and a whole variety of democratic state Justice Departments in this country for having facilitated treasonable communications.

Zuckerberg has a rather malodorous reputation for banning comments with which he or his moderators disagree. Indeed, Zuckerberg and his moderators have experienced some fairly embarrassing content moderation screw ups in recent years. 

In Norway, Zuckerberg and his moderators found themselves during the summer and fall of 2016 on the absolutely wrong end of a publicity war with the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten over Facebook’s decision to censor an article from Aftenposten which contained a photograph depicting Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the Vietnamese girl who had been napalmed and was running, terrified, naked, down a Country Rd. In South Vietnam. Facebook, which seems to have all of the hangups of a schoolmarm holding forth in a late Victorian drawing room, deleted the piece. The Prime Minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, weighed in by reproducing the photographs on her own Facebook page, which was also censored. Only after a major flap did Facebook back down, blaming, as always, lower ranking human beings in their so-called Community Standards department for the “misapplication” of their so-called Community Standards.

Facebook experienced similar foolish issues when it attempted to censor a photograph of the famed Venus of Willendörf, a mesolithic statute that is the oldest piece of figural sculpture anywhere in the world, and was actually sued in a Paris Court over its ham-handed blockage of a photograph of Gustave Courbet’s iconic painting L’origine du monde, which offended Zuckerberg’s neo-Victorian sensibilities by depicting a woman’s reproductive organs.  After eight years of back-and-forth wrangling, Facebook had to agree 1) that the French courts have jurisdiction and 2) that the French schoolteacher plaintiff should had his account restored.

Facebook also experienced similar embarrassment when it attempted to censor a photograph of The Little Mermaid, the iconic sculpture in Copenhagen harbor, Denmark. Facebook’s explanation for its prudish approach to the Little Mermaid was the same as its “explanation” for its other hand handed prudishness: “some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content.” In other words, Facebook doesn’t want to expose misogynistic Muslims or hyper Orthodox Jews to content that they might not like to see. In short, Facebook, like many Victorians, prefers to infantalize the vast majority of its users rather than acknowledge that most Facebook users are rational, mature adults.

Unfortunately, Facebook, which loves to talk out of both sides of its mouth, likes to go on at great length about how it believes strongly in “protecting” other forms of speech. 

In other words, you can talk treason on Facebook.

You can disseminate anti-vax disinformation on Facebook.

You can sing the praises of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators on Facebook.

You can engender genocide on Facebook.

And you can push Putin’s propaganda on Facebook, without any fear of censorship or moderation.

But what you cannot do is any of these things if Facebook’s moderators decide to block you, to censor your comments, or to “send you to Facebook jail.” I have been sent to Facebook jail for a variety of posts critical of Donald Trump; of the January 6 insurrection; of the anti-vax movement; of the so-called freedom convoys made up of angry truckers who don’t like being told they have to vaccinate, like everybody else; and most recently, for posts criticizing Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and standing up for the much put-upon people of Ukraine.

Many of my friends and compatriots, in both the Russian and Ukrainian diasporas, and many of my friends in Europe and in the United States, had had the same experience. One of them, in fact, was thrown off Facebook for 30 days for the offense of suggesting that Vladimir Putin should be arrested and hauled before a war crimes tribunal. What treason, what madness, what disloyalty to the West, and to the United States such a block represents. In fact, Vladimir Putin and his Siloviki, the hardline “military solution” fanatics now in charge in Russia all merit prosecution for war crimes in the same way that the Adolf Hitler, his Gauleiters, his executioners, and his exploiters of occupied territories all merited war crimes trials.

If Mark Zuckerberg, himself an Ashkenazi Jew, cannot understand why Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his Siloviki merit war crimes trials, then perhaps Gospodin Zuckerberg merits an extended visit to Buchenwald or to Auschwitz Birkenau for education in what a war crime is. He should follow that up by a visit to Nürnberg, after which he should visit the Ukrainian Holocaust Memorial at Babyn Yar’ (or what is left of it, after it was missiled by the Russians). Perhaps by studying the Holocaust, and the Holodomor, the Soviet-era genocide of Ukrainian people, gospodin Zuckerberg might begin to understand why Facebook’s moderators should be moderating in a Ukrainian direction, not a Russian one.

After all, the democratically elected President of Ukraine is an Ashkenazi Jew, a man who lost relatives in the Holocaust. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is a former KGB officer whose monomaniacal desire to reconstruct the former Soviet Union has now led to tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of almost 2 million refugees. I would think under such circumstances that the preferential option of the civilized world should be for the Ashkenazi Jew who is President of Ukraine, and not for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his gang of thugs.

In this country, we have our own gang of thugs, the Trumpists who, from Donald Trump on down to the meanest, lowest, most contemptible, most deplorable MAGAT, have made common cause with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. They have gone out of their way, like Tucker Carlson, like Ted Cruz, like the Murdochs, and their ilk, to praise gospodin Putin, and to take the Russian side in this war. That pretty definitively moves their cause into the dangerous, malodorous, offensive realms of treason. And under various British and American statutes dealing with treason, treasonable speech is it self treasonable. Because treasonable speech gives aid and comfort to the enemies national. Treasonable speech divides the nation, splitting the population and causing us to become vulnerable to the attacks of our enemies.

The government can, the government should, and indeed, the government has, articulated a compelling interest in squelching treasonable speech, a compelling interest with respect to which no less drastic means will accomplish the goal, even to the extent that narrowly tailored regulations should be used. Those narrowly tailored regulations, intended to advance a compelling interest in inhibiting treason, should include Facebook’s cracking down and clamping down on treasonable speech. Facebook, after all, is a Delaware corporation domiciled in the state of California. California can, and California should, lower the hammer on Facebook if Facebook will not lower the hammer on the treasonable utterances it has thus far permitted on its platform; treasonable utterances designed to aid and comfort Putin, the Russian Armed Forces, and the Russian Siloviki.

I am not suggesting that Facebook should make itself an assistant of the FBI or of the California Department of Justice and California law enforcement agencies. We all see what can happen when agencies in the private sector are deputized to perform law enforcement functions. However, such agencies can be expected and required to ensure that they themselves do not wind up complicit in lawbreaking activities. Mark Zuckerberg needs to understand that the time has come for the corporation he heads to stop hiding behind prudish, Victorian attitudes about nudity such as only obtain among hyper Orthodox Jews or certain Muslims, and that instead, the time has come for the corporation he heads to understand that as long as Facebook (or Meta as it has now rebranded itself in service to Mr. Zuckerberg’s ego) is an American corporation, it has duties to this country, to its state of incorporation, and most importantly, to its state of domicile here in California.

The time is at hand, therefore, for Mark Zuckerberg to stop acting like a prude and start acting like a patriot. That means clamping down upon the pro-Russian, pro-Putin, anti-American claptrap he routinely permits the posted on his platform. He went partway by banning Donald Trump. Now he must go the whole way, and ban Trump’s and Putin’s supporters, too. Not only will Facebook do what is right by the Ukrainian people, but Facebook will also begin to reclaim some degree of reputation for patriotism to the country whose amazing talent for innovation made Facebook possible in the first place.

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Ivan Arkadyevich Lopakhin is a native of the Hero City of Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg). His ancestry is both Russian and Ukrainian. Born in 1956 in Leningrad to a Russian father and an American mother (herself of Ukrainian descent), Ivan spent the first 11 years of his life as a child of the nomenklatura, the relatively privileged caste of the then-Soviet Union. Ivan was a Young Pioneer and was deep-selected for advancement to Komsomol. However, in 1968, his father Arkady, a Hero of the Soviet Union who had, as a young officer in the Red Army, bought his way into Berlin with the First Ukrainian Front, died of cancer in a Leningrad clinic. Ivan, his mother, and his brother Stepan, took advantage of his mother’s status as an American citizen, and their own status as American citizens as well, and moved from Leningrad back to Huntington Beach.
    Ivan and Stepan (who quickly Anglicized his name to Stephen, with a ph) assimilated fairly quickly to life in a Southern California beach town. Both of them learned to surf, to hang out, and to make themselves understood in clear, unaccented, Californian English, while at the same time holding on to the language of Pushkin, of Tolstoy, of Mandelshtam, of Pasternak, and of Yevtushenko. Ivan still lives in Huntington Beach with his wife Susan and their two children. Stephen (with a ph) lives in the Hollywood Hills with his husband and their three dachshunds. Both were active in the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris presidential campaign.