They help people in distress. The ministry gives people emergency crisis support and financial assistance, food or clothing, through their 24-hour crisis outreach hotline. They council people feeling suicidal. Yet Facebook repeatedly censors Warriors for Christ.

Most recently, Facebook told Warriors for Christ that a prayer for the protection of children violated the site’s rules on hate speech. Site admin Adam Guidry posted this prayer: “I command the demons of perversion and witchcraft to leave the minds of those precious children right now in the mighty name of Jesus.”

That’s just one example of what seems to be social media’s increasing effort to suppress conservative sites.

Against Their Standards

The prayer “goes against our standards on hate speech so no one else can see it,” Facebook said. The site banned Guidry. Pastor Richard Penkoski, who runs the site, contacted Facebook about the ban. Facebook promptly overturned it.

It will happen again. Penkoski claims Facebook banned him for 30 days over posting a picture of a warrior angel in armor. He told The Stream they also banned him for referring to a transmission as a tranny. The site banned him or sharing a screenshot of someone telling him to kill himself, he says, as well as for sharing Fox News articles and his own trademarked logo.

The tech giant took down the entire Warriors for Christ page in December. Facebook put it back up only after Penkoski complained.

Penkowski received numerous death threats through the Facebook page. Facebook did nothing about it.

Warriors for Christ is fighting back. How? By beating Facebook at its own game. The ministry is starting its own Christian social media site. Social Cross has 20,000 members already. And it’s not even finished.

‘Illegal Aliens’ Ad Banned

Other conservative groups face the same thing. It’s not just Facebook. Twitter acts just as aggressively.

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that Twitter won’t let it promote ads that contain the phrase “illegal aliens.” Twitter considers the phrase “hateful content.” However, it is a phrase officially used by the US government. Twitter rejected four ads from CIS.

1/ Twitter is not allowing us to promote any tweets including the phrase "illegal alien(s)", citing it as Hateful Content. However, the phrase "illegal aliens" has been used in both federal law and by the Supreme Court.

— Center for Immigration Studies (@CIS_org) September 11, 2018

One of the ads merely repeated facts put out by ICE.

ICE recently completed a massive multi-state enforcement operation targeting criminal aliens that resulted in the arrests of 364 individuals. Of those, 187 (51%) had prior criminal convictions and 97 had been previously removed from the United States.https://t.co/PSWsBNlmCU

— Center for Immigration Studies (@CIS_org) September 6, 2018

Facebook suspended Jaimie Glazov for 30 days for posting an article titled “9 Steps to Best Counter Jihad.” A few years ago, it took down a site the Canadian columnist helped run, the Counter Jihad Coalition. The tech giant gave him no reason.

The site protects the wrong people. It suspended Glazov in April for posting screenshots of abuse he’d received on Facebook. In one exchange, Facebook user Muhammad Irfan Ayoub said, “I will break your mouth.” Only after a massive online protest did Facebook remove the ban.

Twitter suspended him for 30 days after he tweeted Islamic texts. He violated their rules against “hateful content.” In his tweets, he referenced Sahih Bukhari’s texts discussing Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha when she was six years old. Another tweet referred to the Qur’anic Suras that sanction sexual slavery.

Amazon, Instagram and Reddit Bans

The Second Amendment is still under attack by the big tech companies. The latest is a ban on instructions to make 3D guns. CodeIsFreeSpeech.com, has been blocked by Facebook and removed from Amazon’s web-hosting servers. Facebook also blocked it from Messenger and Instagram.

The social bulletin board site Reddit recently banned the subreddit Great Awakening. With over 70,000 members, it was a key place to discuss the anonymous author QAnon. QAnon claims to be an insider reporting on the Deep State. A spokesperson for Reddit told the Daily Dot that they banned the subreddit for regularly “posting content that incites violence, disseminates personal information, or harasses.” Many of its members got around the ban by moving to the subreddit Conspiracy.

Bias

The leadership of big tech leans to the left. A video caught Google co-founder Sergey Brin comparing Trump supporters to fascists during a meeting. He said like other extremists, Trump voters were motivated by “boredom.” He said in the past that led to fascism and communism. It also came out that Google tried to help Hillary Clinton win the election by pushing Latinos to get out and vote.

President Trump denounced the big tech companies.

Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

…..Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

Big tech now acts like the town square. People used to go there to engage in free speech. they are private companies, not government entities subject to the First Amendment. But they have a near monopoly on online speech. Facebook asserts it’s not a content provider. But it is behaving like a content provider by censoring content under the guise of “hate speech.”

People on both sides increasingly call for a social media or internet bill of rights. Congress could provide the same kind of consumer oversight the government provides with food products. It could keep Twitter from shadowbanning conservative users. The tech giants would treat political speech fairly. But would this constitute unwanted regulation of the free market?

 

Follow Rachel on Twitter at Rach_IC.