Alberta Premier accuses Facebook of censorship over temporary post restriction

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her Facebook account is back up and running after a temporary restriction that led her to accuse the social media giant of censorship.

“Big tech and government censorship are becoming a threat to free speech around the world,” Smith said in a June 14 post on Twitter, announcing, “My Facebook account has been banned from posting content for a couple of days.”

Her post tagged Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, who said, “As the premier of a province of 4.6 million Albertans – if they can prevent me from communicating with you, imagine what they can do to any of us. Regardless of our political affiliations, we must all resist censorship.”

Smith provided an update on the situation in a follow-up post at 10:32 a.m. local time on June 15. proverb, “Happy to report, my page can post to Facebook again. This was the error that appeared on my page. I hope this is the last time it happens.”

Smith added a screenshot of Facebook with a warning message that read, “Sorry, you cannot post to Facebook from this account. For security reasons, your account will have limited access to the site for a few days. If you have any questions, please get in touch. to our Help Center.”

David Troya-Alvarez, a spokesman for Meta, told The Epoch Times on June 15 that “there were no restrictions placed on the Prime Minister’s Page.”

“One of the Page’s admins was experiencing restrictions, but that didn’t affect the underlying Page’s ability to post content,” said Troya-Alvarez.

Zuckerberg recently spoke on the issue of censorship, to give in on the Lex Fridman Podcast on June 8 that the social media giant was asked to “censor” COVID posts that were ultimately “debatable or true” by members of the scientific “establishment.”

“Just take some of the things around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health impacts but there hadn’t been time to fully explore some of the scientific assumptions and unfortunately I think a lot of the establishment those kinds of wafers on a bunch of facts,” Zuckerberg said.

The Facebook founder said members of the scientific community were “asking to censor a lot of things that in hindsight were more debatable or true.”

“That stuff is really heavy. It really undermines confidence,” he said.

Peter Wilson contributed to this report.