Facebook takes cue from Twitter, suspends Republican congresswoman
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Facebook and Twitter of censoring her, after the social media giants suspended her accounts.
The congresswoman took to conservative social media platform Gettr, saying that Facebook’s suspension of her account for 24 hours “is beyond censorship of speech.”
It comes just one day after Twitter permanently banned Greene from using one of her accounts over what the company described as “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
In her post on Gettr, the firebrand Republican asked, “Who appointed Twitter and Facebook to be the authorities of information and misinformation?” She went on to say: “When Big Tech decides what political speech of elected Members is accepted and what’s not then they are working against our government and against the interest of our people.”
Greene also shared a screenshot that read: “You can’t post or comment for 24 hours. This is because you previously posted something that didn’t follow our Community Standards.”
When asked for comment by the media regarding the temporary account suspension, Facebook said that one of her posts “violated our policies and we have removed it; but removing her account for this violation is beyond the scope of our policies.”
Judging by the screenshot Greene uploaded on Gettr, the post that caught the attention of Facebook’s moderators read: “It’s 2022. After 2020, we crossed into a new time dating method. BC and AC. Before Covid. After Covid. We are moving into the third year AC.” It appears to be another rendition of the string of tweets she had posted in the immediate run-up to her permanent suspension from Twitter.
She also made reference to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming the social media companies “think the CDC managed #VAERS system on our own government websites are misinformation.” In her response to the Twitter suspension, which her communications director posted on Telegram on Sunday, Greene also insisted she had been barred from the social media platform for merely “tweeting VAERS statistics.”
A Trump supporter, diehard conservative, and longtime critic of mask and vaccine mandates, Greene has been at the center of numerous controversies since she was elected to Congress in 2020. In February, fellow Democrats kicked her off all of the committees she had been on over her social media posts, which were seen as endorsing political violence and promoting conspiracy theories.
The congresswoman is also known to have violated the House’s mask rules on multiple occasions, with media reports claiming that she and another Republican representative had to shell out a total of more than $100,000 for refusing to comply.
