At the behest of the Israeli government, Facebook removed a page about the Palestinian intifada, which, according to a post quoted by AP, included a call for Muslims to rise up and kill all the Jews.
Well.
I suppose there's a legal response: U.S. law recognizes only a narrow category of "fighting words" as those "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action." (Brandenburg v Ohio, 1969) But, while Facebook is an American company, it has an international presence and reach and, more to the point, this is one of those instances where a court can resolve the legal issue, but not the human or moral one.
I like to think that most people shrink from advocating mass murder, at least in theory, but most people also rise to advocating war, at least under some circumstances. Consistent pacifists are thin on the ground everywhere. And though I haven't researched it, I'm pretty sure that Facebook, along with every other communication media, contains depictions, descriptions, and language of violence, some of which probably isn't very different from this "Third Palestinian Intifada" page. (The link I found is in Arabic.) So an obvious objection to Facebook's action is that it's selective and bows to pressure from one political position, while probably tolerating something equivalent from another.
Which ties me in my typical knot, an uncomfortable position to maintain for long: While I can tell the difference between words and actions (I can also tell the difference between "expressive actions" by the likes of the jerk in Florida who threatened to burn a Koran and then finally did it and the Afghans who responded by killing a bunch of people who had nothing to do with that action.), I want a lot less violence and bellicosity and calls to war, not more. Still, I'm always leery of calls to ban whole categories of speech or writing or information... I almost wrote, "no matter how odious," and there's the rub. Odium is one thing, murder quite another.
