I suspect and hope this will be reverted very quickly.
To be clear: I'm not saying this is what happened. Only that we know targeted mass-reporting to get people banned happens and is successful, so it's one of possibilities.
Well, Facebook did jump to conclusions and even moved to action and banned people.
So "jumping to conclusions" is the least people can do in return...
>I suspect and hope this will be reverted very quickly.
That would still be at the mercy of FB, a bad precedent, and perhaps "testing the waters" to see how far they can take it atm.
This is precisely the jumping to conclusions. We don't know if it's related to the recent bans. FB was pretty open about the reasons for banning Trump and it got an announcement from Zuckerberg. There's lots of people banned every day for wrong reasons and lots not banned for wrong reasons. Of course they're all at the mercy of FB - that's not new.
And they do it while enjoying strong protections (Section 230) that most other private businesses don't receive - have this in mind when making the "private web property" argument.
But they are nowhere close! The competition is just so very, very fierce. Koch industries. Cargill. Archer Daniels Midland. The unit of Bayer formerly called Dupont. The outfit once called Blackwater, Xe, now Academi. Halliburton. Alphabet. Microsoft, even still. Companies more evil even than them, that we don't even know the names of.
Alphabet by itself is far more evil than FB could ever hope for, and they have just started. Other companies directly cause cancer by the millions, or have single-handedly eliminated whole species.
If it takes more than 24h - and we are approaching that - but the US is sleeping so let's allow for that, their inaction starts to look malicious.
When Facebook or Comcast or Google start censoring opinions they don't like, I want to hear about it on other places like hackernews so that I and my friends can use them less.