We are currently experiencing the largest world education programme in the entire history of mankind. Millions of people are being muzzled, their thinking forced into a morally questionable corset and their opinions publicly damned and banned. Billions of accounts have been deleted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The inquisition is celebrating its comeback.
A plea to critical reason.
In the name of justice and humanity: Shut the fuck up! This is currently echoing through all the canyons of online Hades. The moral metre seems to be standardised, but it is not the same length for everyone, and the compass of political correctness flips from north to south, depending on which political coordinate you happen to be on. The inquisition of morality is full of contradictions and injustice. The measures against hate speech do not fight the fire, they are accelerants and drive deep, almost insurmountable fissures into the structure of society.
The community standards, which sound fair at first glance, are formulated so vaguely that any foundation of reason sinks into the quicksand of ideological self-righteousness. Especially since these very standards betray and sabotage any discussion about interpersonal coexistence.
A look at the Facebook community standards and the policy details concerning hate speech quickly make it clear that Meta can sanction and block anything and anyone completely arbitrarily. There is, however, a trick to avoiding a possible ban – simply refrain from any criticism and instantly choke off in one’s mind any sprout of critical reasoning, no matter how shy.
In its guidelines on hateful conduct, Twitter refers to Article 2 of human rights, but deliberately excludes the right to political or other convictions and thus freedom of expression, only to point out one paragraph further on that freedom of expression is a human right. Nevertheless, millions of accounts are blocked, many without any justification.
Whether on Facebook or Twitter, these guidelines are implemented inconsistently and extremely one-sidedly. For example, calls for violence against critics of measures are rarely sanctioned and Facebook allows calls for violence against Russia in the Ukraine war. They don’t want to abolish hate speech, they just want the hate speech monopoly. It’s not about justice, it’s about a world power agenda. Morality and ethics are only a means to an end.
How many accounts have been blocked is not transparent and is only published in portions appropriate to tolerance. In 2018, for example, Twitter blocked 70 million accounts in just two months and Facebook blocked 1.3 billion accounts from October to December 2020.
The inquisitors in the dark Middle Ages cut off the tongues of heretics and those accused of blasphemy with red-hot knives and scissors in the cruellest way or marked them with a branding iron. Today’s procedure is much more civilised and subtle, but no less cruel and effective.
Today, not only are millions of people muzzled, denied the right to their own opinion and their accounts blocked, they are also always robbed of their intellectual property. Because posts and tweets are more than words jumbled together into sentences. They are statements, memories, insights, distillations and expressions of their thinking, feeling, experiencing, believing and being. It is our ability to speak and communicate that makes us human.
Our language makes our thinking possible in the first place. If you forbid someone to speak, you suppress their individual way of expression. Anyone who uses violence has run out of perspectives, options and arguments. Blocking accounts is a pathetically infantile way of using violence to enforce missing arguments. Leading through fear. Uncomfortable opinions are not burning pans that can simply be extinguished with a lid. When in human history has social oppression ever led to justice and peace?
Is this the way we want to live together? Does this correspond to our understanding of justice, of communication, of argumentation and of reaching out to each other and building bridges? Self-righteousness all too easily deceives us about the fact that it is we who might one day be on the other side.
Thank you very much for your attention
Jack Kabey
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