[ugkqpqxk] Facebook censorship

The user-created Facebook poll "Should Obama be assassinated?" was censored by Facebook.

The poll was, on the face of it, probably legal: it was not actually plotting to assassinate the president; it was merely a poll to gauge public opinion, and it is unfortunate that Facebook chose not to fight the Secret Service in court. However, Facebook is a private entity, and it is free to censor whatever content it wishes on a whim, and its users are subject to those whims.

The insidiousness of the poll, as the Secret Service probably recognized, is not the poll question or results, but its forum or even more abstractly, its very existence. By merely existing, it provides a focal point or, in its forum, a virtual meeting place for like-minded people who want Obama assassinated to initially meet, after which point they can take it "elsewhere" to actually plot to assassinate the president.

I've heard, "The key to fascism is to not let people talk." This is an ironic phrase, since you'd think that the key to fascism is to beat people down (or threaten to beat people down) with fasces if they don't do what the government says, but instead, the key is to prevent people from talking to each other, preventing them from organizing against the government. 

In this case, by censoring the poll, the Secret Service has thwarted like-minded people from organizing together, "two minds are better than one", to conspire to commit a crime (historical precedent notwithstanding: most presidential assassinations have been lone gunmen).

Censorship to prevent people from organizing to action sits especially uneasy with me. It is against the principle of the First Amendment's right to assembly. It stinks of preventing 1984's "thoughtcrime" or Minority Report's "precrime" or, in the real world, the Putin's preventing Kasparov from running for President by prohibiting any venue from hosting his party's convention.