Controversial remarks made by Boris Johnson and other senior politicians were removed by Facebook after a privacy campaigning organisation posted them on the site using dummy accounts.
Big Brother Watch (BBW) devised the experiment to test Facebook’s content policies ahead of the publication of the revised Online Safety Bill, expected to be published next week.
The prime minister’s famed “letterboxes” comment, as well as quotes from culture secretary Nadine Dorries and Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner were among those removed by Facebook, the organisation said.
Mr Johnson’s 2018 remark that Muslim women wearing burkas look “like letter boxes” was removed by Facebook for breaching its policies on “harassment and bullying”, when posted by a dummy account.
It also posted comments made by Nadine Dorries, who is heading up the hotly anticipated Online Safety Bill, which were later removed by Facebook for breaching its “community standards on violence and incitement.”
“Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor,” was the remark chosen by BBW.
The campaign group said that, while Dorries’ language could be construed as a threat of violence in some contexts, the comment “was posted from a dummy account to Facebook without context and without being directed towards any particular individual.”
The Cabinet minister recently defended her comment, telling the DCMS Committee she “would expect any mother” to say the same in those circumstances. They responded by saying that it was “totally appropriate.”
A remark made by Angela Rayner in February this year - “shoot your terrorists and ask questions second” - was also scrapped by the platform for breaching the same violence and incitement policy.
When BBW disputed the decision from the dummy account, Facebook upheld its decision to remove the post.
Mark Johnson, legal and policy officer at BBW, said:“These comments by high profile politicians are unpleasant and have been rightly criticised, including by ourselves. However, unpleasantness alone is not a legitimate basis for censorship.
“This experiment clearly demonstrates that such controversial yet lawful speech is destined for unprecedented censorship under the Online Safety Bill.
“The government should be adopting a rule of law approach to online speech and reining in, not empowering, Big Tech speech police. But by compelling platforms to target lawful speech which is deemed to be ‘harmful’, the government will make social media censorship state-backed.
He added that social media companies are already doing “serious damage to free speech in the UK”, warning that the government’s new bill “would make this situation worse and threaten to cause a free speech crisis in this country.”
He added: “The Online Safety Bill would replace Britain’s carefully balanced right to free speech with the changing, censorious terms and conditions of foreign companies.
“The prime minister and the culture secretary should take stock of Facebook removing their own statements and drop powers to target so-called ‘legal but harmful’ speech from the Bill.”
