yesterday, a childhood friend of mine on facebook posted some obviously misleading information. For the record, in case this needs to be clarified, he and I are both united states citizens.

I'm posting this as an example of how left and right politics has nothing to do with internet censorship. You're not being silenced because of your political views. You're not a victim of oppression, especially if you're an able bodied straight white middle to upper class male with a job and no criminal record living as a legal citizen of the united states. Aside from being filthy rich, that's the best status you can possibly have here. I don't know enough about how other country's work.

My friend is a drill sargent for the US military, and has a few thousand facebook friends. His posts have reach. He lives in the upper half of the south. My summary of him based on his facebook profile is that he supports Donald trump, loves guns and loud motor vehicles, and hates people who lack discipline. There's some recent news about joe biden's "american jobs plan" and he posted some commentary on it, as follows:



I distinctly remember this time last year, the covid19 pandemic just got serious and the government started shutting everything down. The salon my wife was working at got shutdown, and a few dozen of my friends/family lost their jobs and were unable to find work. There was a mass scramble to enroll in unemployment benefits and many of them had to wait a very, very long time to receive any aid at all.

To confirm my memory, I searched for the unemployment rate in May 2020. 13% as the average for the entire country is pretty far from the lowest it's ever been. In fact, probably the largest it's ever been for a very long time.



I used this link to bls.gov. I located some data and shared with him in the comment section the below screenshot of my findings, along with a short comment: "This is the actual unemployment rate in May 2020 www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/unemployment-rates-were-higher-in-may-than-a-year-earlier-in-all-389-metropolitan-areas.htm"



One day later, i received this notification and the following dialog.



I did a double take for a moment, I had no idea what I did wrong. I had to double check if I had accidentally linked to some kind of spam website, but I confirmed that bls.gov is a government website that is the primary resource for statistical work-related research for the U.S. Department Of Labor.



This is one of several instances like this that have happened in my personal facebook experience. Only now have I found this one so absurd that I needed to document it. This kind of stuff makes it so irritating for me to read when people claim the left is 'getting away' with anything. In moments like these I'm not even able to get across basic uncontestable non-political facts across massive waves of disinformation that I read on social media on the daily.

If it's happening to you or me, then it's definitely happening to people who need to be heard. When you're someone who has family members who are being shot by police on camera and the police are not facing charges, or you're being ripped off by a landlord and forced to pay for things that are unfair, or you have an employer who fires you for being pregnant, but they lie to you and tell you its because of your performance, or you're paralyzed and stuck in a wheelchair and you're not allowed access to basic amenities that most people have access to, the US government doesn't offer many resources to support you, and you can be justifiably upset, and still treated like a fucking liar with an agenda over social media. Not that I am any one of those things, but I have friends in my life who are and sometimes their voices alone are too quiet to reach anyone who can do something about it.