Rabbi Complains About Harassment from Leftist, Facebook Censors It
When Rabbi Avram Mlotek of Base MNHTN was harassed for his faith, allegedly by a supporter of anti-Semitic Nation of Islam supporter Louis Farrakhan and black power movements, he thought that the ideal platform to shine a light on that sort of hate would be Facebook.
Someone — or something — at Facebook disagreed. Now, the social media giant is apologizing after yet another public relations debacle.
According to Fox News, Rabbi Mlotek’s story was taken down by Facebook because they said it violated community standards. The company now says that the removal of the post was a mistake.
The original post detailed Rabbi Mlotek’s run-in with a Farrakhan supporter on the B train in New York City, after he said one of the men asked him if he was a Jew.
When he responded in the affirmative, the man allegedly asked, “You a real Jew, man?”
“I try,” he responded. However, the man went on a rant insisting that blacks are the real Jews and that actual Jews are really fakes.
“I stopped engaging at this point while this man told me repeatedly that Israel was not mine, that I was a fraud, and that Jews are responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today in the city of New York and all over the world,” Mlotek wrote.
“He then lifted up a picture of Louis Farrakhan and asked, ‘You know who this is?’ I didn’t answer. He kept asking and asked louder. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s an anti-Semite.’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s a real Jew. You’re a f—ing fake.'”
Mlotek said that other passengers on the train raised their fists in black power salutes and said of Jews that “a bunch of them are gays. F—ing f—–s.”
“On a crowded subway home, no one besides a second man who seemingly held similar ideologies said anything,” Mlotek noted in closing.
That was horrifying enough. And then Facebook stepped in and somehow made it worse.
“Friends, Facebook has removed my post about my encounter on the subway yesterday claiming it violates community standards,” Mlotek said in a Friday post.
“I’ve asked for their decision to be reviewed but for the time being the post does not appear when you search for it on my wall. Hopefully this will be sorted and it will be returned shortly but let’s just say there’s something wrong with the algorithm, Mark Zuckerberg, if Facebook can’t differentiate between hate speech and reporting hate speech.”
Facebook has since claimed that the post was removed “mistakenly.”
Given that Facebook’s algorithms seem to work via a mechanism of unseen and unseeable prestidigitation, all with human hands occasionally tipping the scales, it’s totally impossible to speculate on whether or not this was really an accident.
That seems to be the whole point, unfortunately — when stuff like this happens, there’s always plausible deniability. Conservative websites experiencing dramatically lower traffic? Algorithm! Innocuous political post removed? It’s the algorithm! Someone bringing up the fact that social media sites seem to allow anti-Semitism galore while cracking down on almost anything else that might offend the hypersensitive? Algorithm algorithm la la la can’t hear you as long as I keep saying algorithm!
So, no, I can’t tell you why Rabbi Mlotek’s post was taken down. I can tell you whose post is still up there as of Monday morning, however:
Maybe that wacky algorithm will finally figure out, like the balance of humanity has, that Farrakhan is a loathsome anti-Semitic hate preacher. Perhaps it’ll even do it sometime before he finishes that 58-week lecture series. Don’t hold your breath, though.
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