Raheem Kassam, former senior advisor to Nigel Farage and former editor-in-chief of both Breitbart London and Human Events, has been temporarily banned from Facebook as the Brexit deadline rapidly approaches, with no reason given.
Kassam, one of the original ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’, has helped disseminate pro Brexit messages with to his large fan following on social media over the past few years.
With big tech’s constant onslaught against conservatives, the idea Kassam was banned simply for being a conservative with a large following, as he receives ten million page views per month, is not far fetched.
However Facebook banned him for thirty days over what they claim to be a post that violates the community standards.
Facebook failed to provide a post which violates the community standards. Actually, they failed to provide any post at all.
https://twitter.com/raheemkassam/status/1166364599584788487?s=21
This is not the first time Facebook has censored Kassam – it’s the fourth time this year.
The first incident occurred at the end of February. Kassam was banned with no explanation whatsoever a few days prior to when he was set to take the main stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C..
After the ban went viral on Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. joined in in tweeting about it. Facebook then seemingly reversed the ban – again with no explanation, comment, or notification to Kassam.
The second temporary suspension came at the end of April, two days before Kassam was launching Human Events as the editor-in-chief. He was suspended for three days on his personal account and locked him out of both his fan page and the Human Events page.
Facebook did provide a reason for this ban: an 11 year old post that read, “men can’t be women”.
Once his account was functional again, an individual at Facebook emailed Kassam personally and explained he had engaged in “hate speech” and subsequently violated the terms of service.
The third ban lasted for seven days and occurred on election day in the UK for the European Union Parliament.
“I was trying to post an update about how people still had time left to vote, but apparently, that would have been too much democracy for Facebook. Or probably too much democracy on the side of which they know my followers would vote: Brexit.”
They banned him over the same 11 year old post.
And that brings us to today, with another ban ahead of the Brexit deadline.
The timing of the bans and lack of reasoning provided by Facebook raises questions over the validity of the supposed ‘violations’.
Raheem Kassam’s only violation of the Facebook community standards is being conservative.
Sofia Carbone is a reporter at RaheemKassam.com and tweets at @SiCarbone_
