Facebook has flagged an “error” for taking down conservative social media posts for the second time this month.
Hillsdale College reported that the platform suspended its online courses page for nearly 100 hours last week, even though Facebook typically resolves content moderation disputes within 24 hours.
The suspension came on the same day the Christian school in Michigan launched a class criticizing Marxism, socialism and communism.
“This page was taken down in error and was restored before we received this inquiry,” Facebook parent company Meta said in a statement.
Emily Stack Davis, a Hillsdale spokeswoman, said Facebook never explained why it “mistakenly flagged” advertising for the course.
She said the same ads had been “running unchanged for over a year” on the school’s main Facebook page, raising questions about the timing.
“We have potentially lost thousands of enrollees,” Ms. Davis said in an email. “More importantly, Meta has denied people access to a serious academic course on repressive ideologies.”
The incident was the second time this month that Facebook said it accidentally purged conservative content.
Meta has moved this year to limit political posts to reduce their influence on the presidential contest between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Facebook recently blamed its political content filters for accidentally removing promotional videos of actor Dennis Quaid portraying Ronald Reagan in an upcoming biopic. The movie, “Reagan,” opens Friday in theaters.
“This happened because our automated systems mistakenly determined that content about Ronald Reagan required prior authorization in accordance with our policies for ads about social issues, elections or politics,” a Facebook spokesperson said this month. “This was a mistake, and the restriction on the ads has been lifted.”
Mr. Quaid said Facebook continued to remove posts about “Reagan” last week, even after apologizing for the mistake.
The actor says the platform has targeted conservative content because it might benefit Mr. Trump’s campaign, even though his movie has nothing to do with November’s election.
“My point about Facebook is that them banning or censoring materials from [the movie] is itself an attempt to influence an election,” Mr. Quaid said in a video interview with The Washington Times.
Besides its ad policy, Facebook restricts posts that discourage voting, question election results or declare premature electoral victory.
Over the past week, conservatives have accused that policy of overreaching by going after Hillsdale and “Reagan.”
“Every time Big Tech companies censor, they create a bigger and more ideologically diverse free speech movement,” Jeremy Tedesco, a senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group, said in a Thursday post about “Reagan” on X.
Mark Moyar, a Hillsdale military history professor who served in the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Trump administration, noted that Facebook suspended the college’s page “just as a new course on cultural Marxism appeared.”
“An honest mistake, surely, just like the blocking of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Mr. Moyar wrote sarcastically in a Monday post on X.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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