A German newspaper, “Suddeutsche Zeitung,” has been examining the labyrinthine rules and formulas by which Facebook decides what to delete as “hate speech” and what to let stand ( http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/154543271930/facebooks-secret-rules-of-deletion ).
Please don’t expect a detailed explanation from me! It has to do with hate speech creating “an environment of intimidation and exclusion in which people don’t want to share.” There are, as usual, “protected categories” of people, about whom it is not permitted to say anything not nice–unless it’s combined with an “unprotected category.” Or something like that. The example used in the article is… Forbidden: “Irish women are dumb.” Allowed: “Irish teenagers are dumb.” Because women are a protected category but teens are not. I think. It gets kind of complicated, and more so because of certain “bizarre mathematical formulas” employed.
The problem here is that, in our age of political correctness, nobody’s allowed to say anything that might offend somebody else–which rules out almost anything you might ever say. But at the same time, Facebook needs to make money, which it can’t do if its customers aren’t allowed to express an opinion.
The bigger problem is that in the absence of any immutable standard (a Biblical standard, for instance) of morality, no one can ever be quite sure of what is right and what is wrong. And we cannot look for immutable standards of morality from wordly-wise numbskulls who go around prattling about “your truth” and “my truth.”
Again we see a simple truth: there is no Heaven without God at the center of it.