Facebook Hires Former Neocon Senator as Company Censor
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
Former GOP senator Jon Kyl is a right-wing extremist. He never met a sovereign independent country he didn’t want to rape and destroy.
In 2007, he and fellow Islamophobe Joe Lieberman introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, pushing for war on Iran, Hezbollah and their “Iraqi proxies.”
In 2006, the Senate passed by a measure introduced by Kyl and likeminded right-wing extremist John Cornyn to deny citizenship to immigrants convicted of offenses too minor to matter.
They endorsed building a 370-mile fence along the US-Mexico border, along with a separate measure to increase numbers of border control agents, still another declaring English the “common, unifying” language of the country, demeaning Spanish and others.
During over 25 years as a House and Senate member, Kyl supported all US wars of aggression. The National Journal ranked him as the fourth most conservative US senator.
He opposed New Start nuclear arms control with Russia, and various social justice measures. He’s notoriously Islamophobic and Russophobic.
He was accused of “kowtowing to…the radical right.” Facebook hired him to perform gatekeeper services, discussed in a previous article, a censorship scheme to rank what FB considers “trustworthy” news sources.
He’ll lead efforts to expunge truth-telling on issues diverging from the official narrative – so-called left-wing bias right-wing extremists like Kyl consider hate speech.
He’s associated with anti-Muslim/anti-civil rights groups. He’ll audit FB for so-called “liberal bias.”
He’s connected to the notoriously Islamophobic, hard-right/Frank Gaffney-led Center for Security Policy. The Southern Poverty Law Center called CSP a hate group, a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement.”
Kyl earlier was involved with the showing of Fitna, a hate-mongering film, comparing the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, interspersed with clips of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks for emphasis.
Right-wing extremists welcome his involvement in censoring “liberal bias” posts on FB.
My previous article explained that company is increasing its gatekeeper/thought control activities, using so-called “fact-checkers,” perhaps intending to eliminate independent content falsely designated “fake news.”
Post-9/11, First Amendment freedoms have been increasingly threatened at a time of endless wars of aggression; secretive, intrusive, repressive governance; rolling back human and civil rights; contempt for the rule of law; the right of free expression and dissent perhaps on the chopping block for elimination.
Earlier the Committee to Protect Journalist cited three key threats to media freedom – digital surveillance, killing journalists, and pressuring them to suppress what governments don’t want revealed, in Western countries as well as in despotic ones.
Social media like FB are part of the problem, ill-serving their users, allying with governments against them, in America and elsewhere – wanting the message controlled, content diverging from the official narrative suppressed.
FB apparently hired Kyl for this purpose. He’s no friend of free and open expression or other core democratic values.
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My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
