I am quite active on Facebook commenting on the pages of my elected officials at all levels of government and the pages of groups that engage in watchdog and activist activities. I speak my mind early and often especially when something comes up that really defies common sense. I use forceful, but polite language when engaging with others on the issues at hand and have been lucky that such language has not been construed in any way as a personal attack or vulgar.
Thanks to the new Facebook message structure, I hadn't noticed a few private messages from people I am not "friends" with. I thought the messages were application notifications or some such nonsense that I needn't worry over. One message was from earlier today from a woman that posts to my congressman's page wishing me good luck since she had been banned for using the word "damn". Now, this isn't the first time I've heard of this happening. A good friend of mine got banned from the same page in February of this year for calling something a "pissing contest" and has been fighting to get his posting rights restored since. Then for giggles I look down the list of messages to see if I missed anything else interesting and lo and behold there is one from last week from another frequently outspoken poster on our congressman's page saying she has been banned too!
A little about my congressional representative for background: He is an ultra-conservative member of the GOP. He's been in office a little over 10 years. Updates on his blog, Facebook page, and Twitter at worst have been race baiting, classist, and outright lies. Usually, it's only moderately misleading headlines and diatribes with selected facts conveniently left out of his reports to the constituents. He's more interested in culture wars than improving the lot of his district unless you happen to be a military member or contractor. His current position is that we need to cut spending, not raise taxes, but increase the military budget even though the audits he requested (being on the House Armed Services Committee) have not been delivered. He's just taking the word of the Joint Chiefs that they are underfunded without seeing the hard numbers.
The banning of three people, to my knowledge, outspoken against him is not the first action taken against constituent driven discussion on Facebook. Sometime this Spring the ability for constituents to post directly to the representative's wall was disabled. This kept constituents from using Facebook to bring issues in the district to the representative's attention as well as the community at large. However, it did allow the representative and his staff to control the direction and pace of discussion through this media by dictating what was discussed and in what context by being able to warn people about keeping on topic; the topic chosen by the representative and his staff. While I can appreciate wanting to direct the topics for discussion, I cannot comprehend how someone that claims to love the constitution and the first amendment can ban people whose biggest crime is to disagree with him in a clear and convincing manner. Now, before anyone says, "Well, they used words that violated the terms of use," there are other constituents that post regularly that have also used crude language and harassed and attacked other constituents repeatedly that still maintain posting privileges. What is the difference, you ask? These repeat offenders are cheerleaders for our representative where those banned were outspoken against him. How do these actions square for someone who has sworn repeatedly to support and defend the Constitution of the United States?
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