Facebook has reportedly censored a quote from American Founding Father Thomas Paine, citing its policy against “false information.”
Reclaim the Net reported this week that a number of Facebook users have had their posts removed or had their accounts blocked for 24 hours after posting a meme of Thomas Paine along with a quote of his from April 1776.
The offending quote, deemed “false information” by Facebook, reads: “He who dares not offend cannot be honest,” a line from Paine’s writings in the Pennsylvania Journal.
In a cruel irony, Facebook has censored one of America’s pioneers of free speech, whose powerful Common Sense is the best-selling American title of all time and is still in print today.
Title page of the R. Bell edition of ‘Common Sense’ by American author and politician Thomas Paine, 1776. (Joe Griffin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Paine biographer Moncure Conway wrote in 1893 that Common Sense was distributed widely around the American colonies and read aloud at taverns and meeting places. In proportion to the population of the colonies at the time, it had the largest sales and circulation of any book published in U.S. history and had sold nearly 100,000 copies in 1776.
As a further irony, the original working title of Common Sense was Plain Truth, the diametric opposite to “false information.”
Joining Facebook in its censorship of the Paine quote, social media giant Instagram has also removed the Paine quotation, telling users that their story “goes against our community guidelines.”