{"id":47532,"date":"2013-07-03T17:45:21","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T16:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/facebook-bans-fox-commentator-over-conservative-christian-content\/47532\/"},"modified":"2013-07-03T17:45:21","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T16:45:21","slug":"facebook-bans-fox-commentator-over-conservative-christian-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/facebook-bans-fox-commentator-over-conservative-christian-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Bans Fox Commentator Over Conservative, Christian Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

Popular conservative Fox News commentator Todd Starnes<\/a> (shown) was banned for a short while by Facebook June 28 and 29 after he posted content the social media site’s administrators said violated its community standards. The posting on his Facebook fan page <\/a>that supposedly earned Starnes a 12-hour sit in the website’s penalty box read: \u201cI\u2019m about as politically incorrect as you can get. I\u2019m wearing an NRA ball cap, eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich, reading a Paula Deen cookbook and sipping a 20-ounce sweet tea while sitting in my Cracker Barrel rocking chair with the Gaither Vocal Band singing \u2018Jesus Saves\u2019 on the stereo and a Gideon\u2019s Bible in my pocket. Yes sir, I\u2019m politically incorrect and happy as a June bug.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Facebook police responded by removing the post and temporarily locking up important features on Starnes’ fan page, explaining to him: \u201cWe removed this from Facebook because it violates our Community Standards. So you\u2019re temporarily blocked from using this feature.\u201d Starnes noted that he was even banned from posting a daily Bible verse he offers on his Facebook page, a popular feature accessed by thousands of fans.<\/p>\n

On his daily Fox commentary site<\/a>, Starnes wrote, \u201cFor the record, I really do have a Cracker Barrel rocking chair, I\u2019m quite fond of sweet tea, I love Chick-fil-A, I\u2019m a huge fan of Southern Gospel music, I own several Paula Deen cookbooks, and I\u2019m a proud member of the National Rifle Association.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starnes said that Facebook’s perplexing decision to freeze his account prompted him to check out the site’s actual \u201cCommunity Standards<\/a>,\u201d where he discovered that \u201camong the ‘Thou Shalt Nots’ were bans on nudity, bullying, harassment, graphic content, pornography, and spam.\u201d Starnes said that to his knowledge he was not guilty of any of the offenses. \u201cI do admit my Facebook page had some spam, though,\u201d he noted. \u201cIn my defense, it was a great recipe for a fried spam sandwich (quite tasty I might add).\u201d<\/p>\n

What was even more puzzling, noted Starnes, were some of the \u201cvulgar, violent, and pornographic\u201d sites Facebook allowed. Among the Facebook pages Starnes ran across, were \u201cF*** Conservatives,\u201d \u201cTea Party Can Kiss My A**,\u201d and \u201cRush Limbaugh is an Abject A******.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wrote Starnes: \u201cI suspect had I been reading Saul Alinsky\u2019s Rules for Radicals<\/em>, wearing a Planned Parenthood ball cap, smoking a joint, and sporting butt-less leather chaps, Facebook would\u2019ve left me alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following a public outcry from Starnes’ fans, however, Facebook did and about-face, un-freezing his Facebook page with the claim that the attack was all an accident. \u201cA member of our team accidentally removed something you posted on Facebook,\u201d read a statement from Facebook. \u201cThis was a mistake, and we sincerely apologize for this error.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starnes recalled that last year Amazon suspended the online sale of his best-selling book Dispatches From Bitter America<\/a><\/em>, subtitled, A Gun Toting, Chicken Eating Son of a Baptist’s Culture War Stories<\/em>. \u201cAmazon refused to say why they temporarily banned the book,\u201d wrote Starnes, \u201cbut it had come under attack by liberal activists who flooded the site with bad reviews.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Fox journalist said that he is not the first conservative targeted by Facebook. Last year, the popular \u201cChicks on the Right<\/a>\u201d fan page was unceremoniously blocked after its owners posted a comment critical of the White House. It took an outcry from some of that page’s 168,000 fans before Facebook reversed its arbitrary decision.<\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: The New American<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Popular conservative Fox News commentator Todd Starnes (shown) was banned for a short while by Facebook June 28 and 29 after he posted content the social media site’s administrators said violated its community standards. The posting on his Facebook fan page that supposedly earned Starnes a 12-hour sit in the website’s penalty box read: \u201cI\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}