By: José Niño
Big Tech is no friend of the Second Amendment, and gun owners should be well aware of this fact now that we’re in the home stretch of the 2020 election cycle.
According to a report by Corinne Weaver at NewsBusters, Facebook and Instagram have pulled a Big Brother against the Hunting Consortium, an international hunting agency.
Facebook is currently not allowing users to share specific links to the hunting website on its platform or via Facebook Messenger.
“The Hunting Consortium, (@huntingconsortium) has recently fallen victim to the censorship issue that has been plaguing the hunting community for some time now,” said Vice President of the Hunting Consortium, Rob Kern. “In July, we experienced a censorship issue greater than anything we, or any of the experts we have talked to, have encountered.”
Kern alleges that somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 photos were taken down from the hunting agency’s Facebook page. But this only scratches the surface as far as the level of censorship directed towards Hunting Consortium is concerned.
The links to the hunting agency’s website are also being banned.
“Our URL www.huntcon.com has been banned on both Instagram and Facebook, to include Instagram messenger and Facebook messenger,” Kern said.
Weaver notes that Facebook users can’t “share a link to the Hunting Consortium’s website in a post made to their own page, a group page, or even on a public page.”
In addition, Facebook users can’t share content that is posted on the Hunting Consortium’s Facebook page. Kern says that the Hunting Consortium is not allowed to like, share, or comment on other posts on Instagram. On top of that, the agency is not allowed to write text in an Instagram post. Any messages on Instagram that contain the website hunt.com are also blocked.
Kern was of the opinion that the Instagram ban was more stringent than the Facebook ban.
“We have suffered a devastating blow with this censorship and have been in touch daily with some of the biggest hunting organizations and advocacy groups in the world,” said Kern. “We will not take this lying down and will fight to have Facebook and Instagram remove the censorship of our page.
“Although we do see posts within the hunting community that could be considered sensitive, it is not fair, ethical, or moral that a social media user can witness a human being violently assaulted or even murdered, yet hunting related content is removed,” Kern continued. “Hunting has become one of the most important tools in the saving of endangered species and the habitat these species require. It is recognized as such by the IUCN, CITES, and other conservation groups throughout the world. This can be substantiated with facts on the increase of wild populations of endangered species all over the world due to hunting.”
None of this behavior from Big Tech should come as a surprise. Last year, Facebook and Instagram banned influencers from getting paid to promote firearms on their platform. While social media originally offered many innovative services that organizations could use to expand their reach and make money, social media is now completely under the control of the Left and used to suppress anything that doesn’t fit their agenda.
Any pro-gun or firearms-related organization will have to have contingency plans for monetization in this era of social media policing. Sad as it may be, we live in a time when large swathes of the corporate space are pushing the Left’s radical agenda.
José Niño is an American freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook, Twitter, or email him at [email protected]. Get his e-book, The 10 Myths of Gun Control, here.