Your link is full of hateful lies. It tells people that their transgender kid is really just a confused youngster who was somehow convinced by hucksters that he ought to whack his penis off for no reason which encourages parents to fix their kid by deprogramming them before its too late. This is exactly the attitude that leads to the massive suicide rate among transgendered teens. The world view it represents is basically a hallucination.
They are allowed to censor stuff on their networks because you are ultimately using their property and do so under terms set by owners of that property. This is completely trivial to understand. No law protects your ability to use that property as you please and until you get sufficient support from the general populace and the legislature none shall.
The dumb pipe that everyone is allowed to use as they please is the internet. This is more than sufficient. You don't need to have freedom to use facebook as you please in order to have reasonable freedom of expression. You can have your own website and express your opinion therein.
In my opinion, that link expresses a humble opinion of a middle-aged woman. I don't necessarily agree with her opinion, but I'm certain there's nothing hateful there. Also, I'm not certain but inclined to believe the OP is sincere therefore whetever's written is not a lie.
Apparently you have different opinion. That's fine. What is not fine, Facebook suppressing opinions they don't like.
I grew up in a communist country. You don't want a society where you only allowed to express one opinion, the official one, and go to jail or a psychiatric hospital for expressing disagreement with that officially blessed opinion.
> you are ultimately using their property and do so under terms set by owners
Same arguments apply to phone networks.
> until you get sufficient support from the general populace
Given what FB/twitter have been doing lately, that support won't take too long to build.
I disagree with your interpretation. Parents hating their kids don't care what's happening to them, the OP obviously cares, otherwise she wouldn't be writing that article. As for LGBT+, that's unlikely as well, here's a quote: "he isn’t gay: in fact, he has a girlfriend".
I'm not a child psychologist, I don't know these people, and I don't have a strong opinion on that particular topic.
But I do have a strong opinion on the following. I don't want Facebook, or anyone at all for that matter, to globally police content on the internets. With great power comes great responsibility. Social media have been abusing their power for years, yet they bear zero responsibility, lacking transparency, and implemented no ways to appeal.
If you don't understand the language it's easy to see how you miss it, but stuff like this is pure hate. It's based on lies. It's pushing a narrative ("my kid isn't really trans, it's just a fad pushed on him by the trans agenda") when the reality is that kid is too scared to come out to their parents; trans healthcare is a fucking joke; and society hates trans people and spends considerable time and money making their lives harder.
> adults on the internet were grooming vulnerable kids
This combines a decades old trope (LGBT+ people are predatory child abusers) with a more modern attempt to deny access to trans healthcare (trans kids are mentally ill and lack capacity to make decisions). The article develops that mentally ill point here:
> A lot of the young men calling themselves transgender have autism, ADHD, OCD or Asperger syndrome. Parents have sometimes known about these conditions for many years. But gender clinics aren’t interested in pursuing therapies which might actually help these kids understand why they feel the way they do. It’s the only field of medicine where you’re not allowed to talk about comorbidities or other treatments. This is the medical scandal of the century.
...and it combines it with a lie about treatment. Care for transgender children very much spends time with psychological assessment to question whether the child actually is trans.
She goes on to lie about affirmation:
> there’s nothing but affirmation
Here she's making the claim that affirmation is a pathway to puberty blockers, then cross sex hormones and surgery. That's untrue. An important part of healthcare is to explore fully the child's ideas around gender, and the way you do that is with affirmation -- they then trust the healthcare team and open up about what they think and why they think it.
> I have spent all of the lockdown researching transgenderism
Here's a handy hint: anyone using the term transgenderism is an anti-trans bigot.
All the anti-trans people posting links to HN can never post something from WHO or CDC or WPATH or American Academy of Pediatrics -- it's always some blog post that's unsourced to anything credible and full of disinfo.
There is a difference between a communist autocracy where the parties with political and military power get to define what the right opinion is and a free market of ideas where people are allowed to express all sorts of ideas including hateful ones but where others are free to disassociate themselves from you and not to promote your ideas.
The difference between phone and internet systems is that they represent a limited number of points of contact between yourself and the entire rest of the world its important that they remain impartial in the same way that we don't want your local and only power company deciding whether your shop can exist.
The broader internet is inherently diverse enough to allow virtually everyone who isn't actually directly violating the same laws as they exist within to exist. We don't need facebook as a common carrier to achieve this.
Lets contextualize this shall we. Conservatives of the former average bent talking about fiscal responsibility, importance of gun rights, support of actual family values have zero problem operating in the prior and evolving social media context.
New school conservatives that flirt with hate and violence about as openly as David Duke or who promote actively harmful and hateful content are seeing their ability to do so curtailed after sharing their hate resulted in a number of people being murdered/harmed.
The thing is that this conservative demographic much as it has become more visible and more energetic because it is shrinking not because it is growing. In 20 years it will be limping. In 40 it will be virtually extinct.
They are allowed to censor stuff on their networks because you are ultimately using their property and do so under terms set by owners of that property. This is completely trivial to understand. No law protects your ability to use that property as you please and until you get sufficient support from the general populace and the legislature none shall.
The dumb pipe that everyone is allowed to use as they please is the internet. This is more than sufficient. You don't need to have freedom to use facebook as you please in order to have reasonable freedom of expression. You can have your own website and express your opinion therein.