Facebook is tampering in a Canadian election by silencing MLA candidate Jenn Smith

Independent MLA candidate Jenn Smith has been arbitrarily censored and silenced by the most powerful communications platform in the world, Facebook. While Smith’s fellow candidates in the riding of Victoria-Swan Lake (the capital city of BC) are allowed to use Facebook to communicate, campaign, and write and place new ads, Smith has been silenced without valid explanation or right of appeal.

Attempts to contact Facebook to get an explanation and launch an appeal were ignored by the mega-corporation who now dominates the online communications market along with Google. Opponents of Smith, on the other hand, have been able to setup a fake campaign page on Facebook that looks like Smith’s actual page but makes outrageous and libellous statements such as alleging Smith promotes “abuse of children” and “child suicide. ” Smith is a child protection advocate who has been calling for provincial and national inquiries into the medical “sex reassignment” and pharmaceutical sterilization of mass numbers of vulnerable children, a call recently sponsored by Conservative Party of Canada candidate Derek Sloan.

Smith’s opponents have also been able to swarm his actual campaign page posting one libellous comment after another with Smith being unable to respond anymore. The fake campaign page was reported to Facebook as a fake and libellous account, but Facebook refused to take the page down and instead censored Smith himself (Smith is a male that identifies as transgender, but opposes child medical transitioning and sterilization) and granted free reign to his opponents.

The action by Facebook was reported to Elections BC who has not commented.

This action by Facebook should be considered criminal election tampering. To provide the platform to other candidates but remove it from another candidate during the most critical period of his campaign should be a criminal offence. Independent candidates entering elections to raise awareness to and debate neglected issues is a tradition in Canadian democracy. Now Facebook has decided they will use their enormous communications reach to decide who gets heard and who doesn’t.

Smith commented:

Facebook has become the most powerful communications platform in the world where most people go to get information. For Facebook to arbitrarily censor and silence a political candidate during an election while platforming and allowing other candidates to use their service is inexcusable. Facebook’s policies also allow for vexatious attacks by opponents deliberately designed to silence candidates. The fact I am not a favourite in this election is absolutely immaterial to the precedent this sets. If this can happen to me it can happen to anybody, I am a canary in the coal mine of freedom and democracy; furthermore, small and independent candidates have been entering elections for over a century in order to stir the electoral pot and get critical issues on the table for debate. Facebook now not only decides what is on their platform for public consideration generally, they are deciding what issues are in the debate for elections.

This should be a wake-up call for everybody regarding the outrageous and unaccountable power of this ever-growing communications Leviathan that is now swallowing democracy and freedom of speech whole. One also must question Facebook’s relationship with the pharmaceutical industry and whether or not my activities raising awareness to the mass child/adolescent pharmaceutical sterilization going on which threaten pharmaceutical profits may have played a role in my arbitrary censorship. Our mainstream media has also showed its hand in this debate completely failing in its duty to cover important issues, and they almost certainly will not cover this story either.