I remember when Facebook censored a famous painting because it showed a naked woman’s breasts. That was so dumb.
Not being very knowledgeable about firearms, it’d help to better understand what sort of stuff in particular Facebook was censoring. May I ask?
Facebook has a policy banning private individuals from selling guns to each other on their platform - https://www.facebook.com/help/179037502478035 and "Armslist" appears to be a platform for doing just that: "Gun Classifieds, Guns for Sale, No Fees, 45000 guns for sale. The largest free gun classifieds on the web. Buy guns, sell guns, trade guns."
One could argue that the transaction isn't happening "on Facebook" since it's going through Armslist, but I don't find that convincing. If take payment via Venmo does that mean it's "not on Facebook" if everything else about the sale was?
Anyway, I fault Facebook for plenty and generally avoid it now, but I don't fault them for this policy. Private sales can get into sketchy territory really quick and I wouldn't want to mess with that on a public platform I created unless I was willing to invest in the nuance there which has basically no value proposition for Facebook.
Technically, Armslist is legal. They don't even facilitate transactions on Armslist, and it's local laws that apply. Basically, it's a Craiglist for firearms. Armslist has also won numerous lawsuits[1] by claiming Section 230 protection. Facebook doesn't know this, and they have no reason to know this. Acquiring this information about Armslist would require someone up high enough at the company to impact US policy to understand this. That would cost money. It makes more sense to avoid it altogether, just like it makes sense to avoid pornography altogether, rather than watching every video that gets posted, in case a "model" is underage.
Matrix gives me the perfect opportunity to continue this conversation on my own terms, using my own knowledge to moderate it.
However, there's also another reason that inspired me to ditch Facebook, which is the fact that they are censoring my private messages at all, without any action by a human being to report them or anything like that. I just dislike that policy, and so I chose to stop using Facebook over it.
[1] https://www.armslist.com/blog/get-involved/armslist-defeats-...
Or, did I misunderstand something? : )