Above: the banned dialogue that Andy McClure changed into a cartoon.
I didn't know this until I read about Andy McClure, but if you post something on Facebook and a couple of people flag it as "inappropriate," then that post is taken down. And, sometimes, the person who wrote that post, gets banned from Facebook. Oh, and this also goes for Twitter and YouTube and I'm sure all the others.
Notice how there's no part of the process where Facebook actually reads and then judges the post (with a serious glance at the First Amendment). Facebook just responds to a couple of people hitting an "inappropriate button" and then, knee-jerkedly, kills that post.
So, if someone is saying something you don't like on social media, you and some like-minded friends can just gang up, flag it as "offensive" and "violating Facebook's Term of Service" and then the post is killed. There is no freedom of speech in the electronic frontier.
As David Badish of New Civil Rights Movement in his piece Post Perfectly Mocking Right Wing Christians Taken Down By Facebook, So Author Turns It Into Cartoon writes:
"By now, many people know if they can convince enough of their friends to falsely claim a post on social media – say, Facebook or Twitter – or a video on YouTube is "offensive" or violates their terms of service, the post will automatically get taken down, leaving the person who posted it to try to fight to have it reinstated. Many times, that person gives up and the haters get their way.
"Not Minnesota's Andy McClure, who posted to Facebook a simple yet extraordinarily effective and on-point dialogue he wrote showing a conversation between a reasonable, rational person and what we can assume is a far right Christian conservative."
He made his dialogue into a nine-panel stick-man cartoon. And it went viral, circulating thru many people who copied it onto their timelines and onto other social media platforms. Andy McClure made it unstoppable.
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