After threatening to shut down the conservative " Chicks on the Right " fan page over a post critical of the Obama administration, Facebook backed off and apologized to the page administrators, Todd Starnes reported at Fox News Tuesday.
The problems started after one of the page administrators posted a link to an article entitled “You Know What? Liberal Hypocrisy is Starting to Cause Me Actual Physical Pain.”
"'Jay Carney can kiss my a**ular area,” wrote Mockarena, who runs the website with Daisy, a medical writer and adjunct professor of communications," Todd Starnes reported earlier Tuesday.
But when Mockarena attempted to log in to her account Tuesday, she found herself blocked.
After working her way through the security checks, she was presented with another message telling her that Facebook removed her post for allegedly violating Facebook's statement of rights and responsibilities.
Facebook, Starnes said, did not respond to inquiries about the messages, but Mockarena said the site could close down their page.
According to Mockarena, the warning was the second one they had received. One more warning, she wrote, and the page could be shut down.
“Apparently we are on very thin ice and are about to be shut down if there’s something else that’s identified as a violation,” she told Starnes.
After Fox News reported the incident, Facebook responded, citing human error.
“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience,” said Facebook spokesman Fred Wolens. “Unfortunately, the users were incorrectly warned by our User Operation’s Team and we have already removed all associated blocks from the accounts.”
"This team looks at hundreds of thousands of reports every week, and as you might expect, occasionally, we make a mistake and block a piece of content we shouldn’t have,” he added.
But conservatives say that Facebook, which is not known for being friendly to their point of view, has been engaging in what can only be described as viewpoint discrimination. Since the beginning of the year, many have bitterly complained that the social media giant has treated them the same way they treated Mockarena and Daisy. Those conservatives, however, did not get the media attention Mockarena and Daisy received.
“I think people are starting to realize Facebook is not necessarily a safe place for conservatives,” Mockarena said.
“They are targeting conservatives,” she added. In addition, she told Starnes that liberals who go to conservative pages "are hell-bent" on silencing any point of view they do not like.
“All those reports get funneled into Facebook and with enough complaints the pages are then shut down,” she said.
Starnes noted that a number of vulgar pages attacking the Tea Party and conservatives in general continue to exist on Facebook. In August, we reported that Facebook had no problem with a page that advocated murdering Mitt Romney . The page was eventually pulled, but Facebook told many that it did not violate their terms of service.
Another page, called " I hate it when I wake up and Sarah Palin is still alive " is still live and now has over 3,000 likes, despite numerous complaints .
"So," Starnes wrote, "why haven’t those sites been taken down?"
Many conservatives believe they already know the answer to that question.
As a result of their experience, the two ladies have set up a fan page at Tea Party Community , a conservative alternative that looks and functions much like Facebook.
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