Facebook banned famous evangelist Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, from Facebook last week over a post back from 2016 surrounding North Carolina’s HB2 bathroom bill, labeling it as hate speech.

The bill surrounded the reversal of the controversy of allowing men to use women’s restrooms and women to use men’s restrooms if they “self identify” as that particular gender.

The original post from April 9, 2016, read as follows,

Bruce Springsteen, a long-time gay rights activist, has cancelled his North Carolina concert. He says the NC law #HB2 to prevent men from being able to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms is going “backwards instead of forwards.” Well, to be honest, we need to go back! Back to God. Back to respecting and honoring His commands. Back to common sense. Mr. Springsteen, a nation embracing sin and bowing at the feet of godless secularism and political correctness is not progress. I’m thankful North Carolina has a governor, Pat McCrory, and a lieutenant governor, Dan Forest, and legislators who put the safety of our women and children first! HB2 protects the safety and privacy of women and children and preserves the human rights of millions of faith-based citizens of this state.” 

According to Fox News,

Facebook, which has to moderate billions of posts per day, defines hate speech as a “direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability. We also provide some protections for immigration status. We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech, statements of inferiority, or calls for exclusion or segregation.”

Facebook has come forward stating that the ban didn’t actually violate their hate speech policies and issued an apology:

“A Page admin for Franklin Graham’s Facebook Page did receive a 24-hour feature block after we removed a post for violating our hate speech policies. Upon re-reviewing this content, we identified that the post does not violate our hate speech policy and has been restored.”

Franklin Graham has accepted Facebook’s apology and issued a great quote, “Facebook’s a private company and they can certainly do what they want. But Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is a platform for all ideas. I encourage Facebook to have a standard that doesn’t move. They ought to just come up with a standard based on God’s word that applies to all people everywhere.”

This comes in conjunction with a massive leak last week where some of Facebook’s employees released over 1,000 pages of guidelines on how content moderators are to censor speech.

With so much controversy surrounding Facebook this past year, is this going to lead to its downfall?

Photo Credit: Anthony Quintano