Remember C.J. Pearson, the bright young lad who eloquently YouTubed his hearty concurrence with former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani's public declaration of the self-evidently obvious fact that Barack Obama doesn't love America? Well, he made the unwitting "mistake" of sharing it on his Facebook page, and now the FB Obamastapo has landed on him with both feet:
On Friday, C.J. Pearson, a 12-year-old conservative from Georgia who posted a viral video supporting Rudy Giuliani, discovered that his personal Facebook page was locked. In an exclusive interview with Examiner.com on Saturday, Pearson said he received a message from someone about 6 a.m. Friday. That’s when he learned his account and page had been locked for “suspicious activity.” As is so often the case in these situations, Facebook did not respond to his requests for help. Nor would they tell him what the alleged suspicious activity was. We reached out to Facebook, but the social media giant has so far refused to respond to our request for comments.
If FB poobahs could be pumped full of sodium pentathol, "sedition" or "blasphemy" would be the terms they would probably mumble forth.
Now, contra Mr. Pearson, this isn't a First Amendment issue, which, please recall, forbids the federal government from abridging, among other things, freedom of speech and of the press. State constitutions address the same issues individually, and there is nothing that forbids private communications platforms like Facebook from censoring content they don't like. If they want to voluntarily halve (or more) their market share to only cater to Obamunists, and cost themselves a buttload of revenue, and crater their bottom line, that's their prerogative. But that is precisely where they're headed in piecemeal fashion with this kind of sneaky, obnoxious exclusionary conduct, and it would behoove them to just come right out and be honest about it, and terminate conservative customers' FB accounts summarily and en masse rather than endlessly dancing around this burning bush. That way, the conservative version of Facebook could be launched and relegate the original to the social media equivalent of MSNBCCCP-ville.
I'm not sold on the direction of Mr. Pearson's civic activism, but the fact that a sixth-grader is doing the following is, to quote Darth Vader, "most impressive":
Pearson said he is working on legislation to lower the age of those serving in the State House and Senate. The legislation, which is set to be the subject of a hearing on Monday, would lower the age of House members from 21 to 18, and lower the age of state Senators from 25 to 21. Pearson said he was using Facebook to line up witnesses for the hearing, but Facebook’s actions have made that more difficult. He can’t read any messages sent to his old profile and the old page doesn't show up.
That legislation has the Uhura Corollary ("Be careful what you wish for, you may get it") written all over it. But if the day ever arrives where the vast majority of American youth is like C.J. Pearson, why not? It isn't like their antecedents haven't more or less completely screwed things up anyway.
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