Facebook Censors User for Criticizing Alberta Infrastructure Project

As if censorship on Facebook couldn’t get any pettier some people are being flagged for Facebook, not for their opinions on COVID-19 or election integrity issues in the US, but instead for disagreeing with local infrastructure projects in Alberta.

Ian Kowalski who also runs a personal branding page on Facebook called “The Office Of The Next Prime Minister Of Canada” was recently criticizing the Prairie Link bullet train project between Calgary and Edmonton in the comment section of a Calgary Herald Facebook posting and Facebook decided that this was a punishable offense. 

Kowalski’s comment (shown below) which criticizes the $9 billion Prairie Link project and also plugs his online brand was not removed by a Calgary Herald moderator and rather Facebook itself.

Hilariously enough Kowalski says that Facebook removed the comment for “hate speech, misleading content, and spam”. Kowalski had it removed the first time he posted it so the comment being labeled “spam” doesn’t even make any sense. 

Kowalski sent The National Telegraph a message talking about the situation and how ridiculous Big Tech censorship has gotten when even criticism of the Prairie Link is labeled as hateful.

Kowalski stated that:

I had my comments removed and my account restricted for merely criticizing a railway infrastructure project under a story about the municipalities of Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary promoting the high-speed railway project.

No, I did not talk about the Wuhan Virus or criticize the ongoing Genocide by the CCP or some other topic the Facebook algorithm would flag me for. I just constructively and colorfully criticized a 300 km railway that would take 16.75 times longer to build every 100 km of track laid compared to the Canadian Transcontinental Railway that was built in the 19the century. I’m not advocating for anything radical, unless Facebook now thinks it’s radical to be in favour of fiscal responsibility and efficiency in government…

Kowalski also said that his comment was reported and removed a few times in a row whenever he tried to post it, even with changes made to his original comment. 

Kowalski said that the censoring of his comments was “evidently at the behest of the Calgary Herald” as the few times he tried to post his comment it seemed to get reported and removed very quickly after posting as if there was a coordinated effort to report negative comments about the Prairie Link. 

This is just an example of how bad censorship on social media is becoming. Many on the left accuse conservative Canadians of fear-mongering about censorship from Big Tech, but people being banned for criticizing infrastructure should clearly show how the slippery slope of censorship can get to the point where disagreeing with bloated government infrastructure projects starts being considered “hate speech”.

If you cannot freely talk about spending on a new train without risk of censorship, what can you say but the left-wing pro-establishment talking points?