Facebook Removing Medical Marijuana Pages Should Scare Us All

We’ve long been concerned with Facebook’s supreme, autonomous powers. With power comes the opportunity for corruption. Being that our site focuses on anti-vaccination and being that the head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t approve of anti-vaccinations, this recent development alleging Facebook removing Medical Marijuana pages should have us all concerned. According to an article in NJ.com, the social media giant has begun doing just that. At least three New Jersey dispensaries as well as a few others across the nation have had their pages taken down.

It seems high-handed to simply shut down important resources for sick patients without even saying why or giving organizations a way to ask for reconsideration,” said Peter Rosenfeld, one of the 5,668 registered patients in the state program. “What better use of a social media than having sites where parents of sick children can ask questions about medication and treatments?”

In an email, the Facebook media relations office declined to answer questions, and referred NJ Advance Media to the community standards section on its homepage.

This really brings up all sorts of issues, but namely, a glaring abuse of power. Could this mean a socio-political trend is developing at Facebook? We’d like to hope not, but to think that Facebook would remove the pages of completely legal businesses is a bit scary. It does not matter if you don’t agree with marijuana, the issue is freedom of information sharing. We all benefit from shared information. And we’d like to think Facebook would never go this route regarding vaccines.

While Facebook wouldn’t respond, the messages which page admin’s received gives us enough insight to come to the logical conclusion that a Facebook has deemed the content inappropriate

Your page is currently not visible on Facebook. It looks like content on your page does not follow the Facebook Community Terms and Standards.”

“The site does not allow ads that promote the sale or use of . . .illegal, prescription, or recreational drugs

I really hope this turns out to be a mistake. Clearly, not knowing the cases in-depth, the possibility looms that the dispensary somehow was active in a business we aren’t aware of, however from this perspective, it just seems like Facebook decided and the gavel cracked down. The idea that we could potentially have become enslaved to Facebook for sharing information only to turn around and have it backfire via censorship is very scary. Hopefully, the social media giant takes another look at these cases and revises it’s policy to not censor information.

Photo by Cannabis Culture
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