Facebook apologizes for banning evangelical leader

Social media sites continue to block speech they disagree with. This time, they reversed their decision and apologized.

Evangelical leader Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, was banned from posting on Facebook for 24 hours after a 2016 post of his was flagged for “dehumanizing language.”

Following the ban Graham said in a Facebook post on Friday that the flagged statement, which was from April, was about North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” that focused on which bathrooms transgender individuals were legally allowed to use.

He also shared the content of that flagged post, urging his followers to judge whether it contained hate speech. The post was critical of Bruce Springsteen canceling a North Carolina concert over the bill’s existence….

Facebook said the ban was made in error by Facebook’s content review team, which has upward of 15,000 employees, and said that it was a mistake to take Graham’s original post down.