Facebook Group Highlighting Michael Savage/Rockstar Connection Censored

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet. Posted June 11, 2009.

Since then, the hijacked site appears to have been taken down.

In the meantime, another Facebook user reposted  "Don't Drink Hate: Boycott Rockstar." The page features the following:

REPOST BY ANOTHER USER BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL WAS HIJACKED: I AM NOT THE ORIGINAL ADMIN/CREATOR OF THIS GROUP, BUT I FEEL IT DESERVES TO BE PUT BACK.

NOTE: INVITE ALL THE ORIGINAL MEMBERS YOU CAN! WE NEED TO GET THIS BACK TO THE NUMBERS THE ORIGINAL HAD.

IF THIS ONE GETS HACKED/REMOVED, THEN SOMEONE PLEASE CREATE ANOTHER, AND SO ON."

The page also adds:

I AM NOT CLAIMING MICHAEL WEINER IS INVOLVED WITH ROCKSTAR PERSONALLY. I DON'T CARE IF HE IS/WAS INVOLVED WITH ROCKSTAR OR NOT. HIS WIFE AND SON ARE, AND THAT IS ENOUGH FOR ME TO WANT TO BOYCOTT THE PRODUCT.

YEAH, GUILT BY ASSOCIATION. MY CHOICE, MY OPINION.

Hideki Tojo, who started the site, says that this is Tsai's cause and doesn't want to speak for him, but that he nevertheless felt compelled to fight Facebook censorship by starting the new group: "I only picked up his banner and ran with it (call it a knee-jerk reaction)," says Tojo.

Tojo thinks that Facebook was cowed by the legal threat. "I thought Facebook was in the wrong, obviously, but I understood the process behind it happening. It was the Rockstar legal threat, and Charles' brilliant 'apology,' which got me rooting him."

He says, " 'When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl -- when you can't do that ...You find someone to carry you.' That's all I'm doing for Charles. You can't stop the signal."

Jackie Sheeler, who joined the group upon finding about the the Rockstar/Michael Savage connection and subsequent efforts to censor information about their relationship, says: "This kind of bullying makes me furious. And I am very disappointed in Facebook, which I really like as a social online neighborhood."

Sheeler points out that blocking content can have a chilling effect: "If people have to start being afraid of what groups they join or start or promote, it's going to change the whole atmosphere of the place."

Controversy has flared up before over Facebook's blocking practices. In 2007, Michael Carrington wrote about how a search of then-presidential candidate Ron Paul yielded zero results. Facebook claimed the problem stemmed from a technical bug.

Later in the year, MoveOn.org started a campaign protesting a new Facebook policy that allegedly shared user information with advertisers, without users' explicit consent. At the time, MoveOn contended that the group, which had 12,000 members, could not be located via search on Facebook.

Facebook also caught flak for flagging and deleting photos of women breastfeeding.

Facebook could not be reached for comment.

See more stories tagged with: michael savage, facebook, hate speech, right-wing media, rockstar

Tana Ganeva is an associate editor at AlterNet.

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