Trump Jr accuses Facebook of ‘taking their censorship campaign to the next level’

Donald Trump Jr. on Friday said Facebook is “taking their censorship campaign to the next level” after the company banned from its platform an assortment of individuals the company described as “dangerous.”

The president’s eldest son asserted in a tweet that Facebook and other big tech firms have engaged in the “purposeful & calculated silencing of conservatives,” and it should “terrify everyone.”

“Ask yourself, how long before they come to purge you?” Trump Jr. wrote. “We must fight back.”

The purposeful & calculated silencing of conservatives by @facebook & the rest of the Big Tech monopoly men should terrify everyone.

It appears they’re taking their censorship campaign to the next level.

Ask yourself, how long before they come to purge you? We must fight back.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 3, 2019

Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The company on Thursday banned a host of prominent figures, including right-wing commentator and former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

{mosads}The bans, which extend to Facebook’s image-sharing platform Instagram, include neo-Nazi and former political candidate Paul Nehlen and anti-Muslim provocateur Laura Loomer.

Facebook said it decided to ban the figures after an extensive review of their behavior on the platform. The company said all of the individuals had contributed to the spread of hatred, whether by calling for violence against people based on their identity, following a hateful ideology, using hate speech or having slurs in their “About section.”

Nehlen has been kicked off of other social media platforms for spreading anti-Semitic and white supremacist views. Loomer was recently banned from Twitter after using anti-Muslim rhetoric against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

Jones had previously been kicked off Facebook for a brief period for violating the site’s policies.

Most of the users’ accounts were shut down by the end of Thursday, but left-leaning media group Media Matters for America said pages associated with Jones’s InfoWars were still up on Friday afternoon.

Trump Jr. and a growing chorus of Republicans, including the president, have accused the country’s largest tech companies of discriminating against conservatives. The firms have pushed back on those allegations, saying critics have little evidence to back up their claims.

All of the companies say they do not take political ideology into account when they enforce their policies.

The social media companies are facing competing demands as civil rights groups and a growing number of Democrats call for them to remove hate speech and fear-mongering from their platforms, while Republicans call for the firms to exercise less control over what their users say.