A surge of attempts to silence legitimate and thoughtful foreign policy criticism has reached new depths, impugning the loyalty of those who happen to have policy differences with those doing the impugning. The resulting damage is not just to individual reputations, but also to freedom of speech and to the care and wisdom that should be applied to the formulation of policy.
The Trump administration has set the tone, as it did when briefing members of Congress about the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. Many members had problems with what they described as a vague and unconvincing briefing, but what especially angered Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah was that the administration briefers told members they should not debate such matters in public at all.
Also following the Soleimani assassination, Facebook began deleting posts on its Instagram network that questioned the operation (while running paid pro-Trump ads that supported the killing).
Facebook justified its actions with an erroneous interpretation of the 1996 law that criminalizes material support to terrorist groups, contending that any posts arguing that it was unwise to assassinate Soleimani could be construed as material support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (which the Trump administration, in a gross misuse of a law that never was intended to apply to government entities, had designated as a foreign terrorist organization). Thus silenced were voices who would never dream of materially supporting anything connected with the Iranian regime, but who had good reasons to say that the assassination operation was a bad move from the standpoint of US interests.
Facebook’s move is best interpreted as a pusillanimous effort to stay in good graces with the Trump administration while the company is under fire over antitrust, privacy, and other issues. Principles certainly have nothing to do with the move. This is the same Facebook whose boss declared to Congress that he will not delete from his online service many blatant political lies because people in a democracy should be able to “judge for themselves.”
