February 9, 2011

The Krasnals War with Facebook Censorship

The Krasnals. Big Dwarf "Facebook – Censorship". 2011. Oil on cardboard. 50 x 70 cm

The act of censorship, removing The Krasnals facebook account is one of the biggest crimes against free culture, democracy, freedom of artistic speech in Poland since the last decade !

For a couple of days, when trying to access th account, we get the message "your account is disabled. It is damaged". After sending a series of e-mails to disabled@facebook.com, we got the reply, that we may make a group, but after registering as a real person. Without any warning, our two-year work of art has been destroyed, the data archive (photos, texts and comments were a very import_ant social voice. Is this a new form of burning inconvenient books?) and a wide amount of friends, gathered contacts, that we cannot get back. If we received some information a few days beforehand, we could have informed our friends and save the most import_ant information.

Facebook proves once again, that democracy and its main element- freedom of speech is fictional. Facebookis a syndrome of our times and a modern way of censoring. The official freedom of speech is controlled from every corner and denied to us undercover of precise terms and regulations of use. To this accusation Facebook always responds negatively. 
So it requires to give out real personal data, which is impossible in the case of an anonymous artist using a pseudonym. This is the first proof allowing to get removed from facebook. But what's more important– your profile gets blocked when a certain number of people reports abuse. What does it mean?
It suffices, when some people are against critical comments, and boom- the profile disappears from public space. The accounts do not disappear according to some rules, but after reporting abuse. So first, someone has to report this and then someone has to verify this, or at least they should. Human malevolence knows no boundaries, in case some group doesn't like someone for some reason, they can easily block the account. This way we have absurdities, like freedom of speech have only those politically correct consumers of goods produced by modern corporations.
We opt for no political party, the only thing we are sensitive to is social deformation, no matter what the political source. We try to provoke discussion about some sick phenomena, especially in culture.
In our case it is a n embarrassing form of censorship, because it is known that our activity is not pleasant to everyone and is mainly executed over the internet.
Our main tool of functioning is being taken away from us.

No comments:

Post a Comment