Our friends at Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, have kindly invited us to leave their party.

The reason? The so-called ‘Community Guidelines’ which, in a truly Orwellian turn of phrase, are established to protect free speech by punishing, you guessed it, free speech.

I know, you know, and we all know, that the real reason is that we, The Shooting Wire in this specific case, post gun-related news and commentary. And it’s guns that Facebook doesn’t like.

And if they don’t like guns, then no one else should like guns, so censoring firearm-related content is their raison d’être.

The problem is that this is the very definition of censorship. The Outdoor Wire Digital Network is a news delivery service. Every morning hunters, shooting enthusiasts, competitors, outdoorsmen and women, and organization and industry leaders open their email to read ‘The Wires.’

What’s more troubling is that the media, which doesn’t care for firearms or firearms makers, doesn’t see it as censorship. They default to the position that Facebook is a private company, and as such can do what they want.

However, every time a small bakery decides that due to religious reasons they won’t offer their services to a particular group of people that they feel goes against their own protected religious beliefs, it makes national news as blatant discrimination. Yet discrimination isn’t even in the conversation when Facebook deletes a gun-related page.

But here’s the rub. A small baker has lots of competition and available alternatives. Facebook has 3.07 billion users. There are 8.16 billion people on the planet earth. That means Facebook users account for 37.6% of the world population. Exclude young children, those without internet access, and anybody unable to use a computer – let alone own one – and their percentage of the world population goes up…considerably.

Bakers are a dime a dozen. There isn’t but one Facebook. Your private status takes on a whole different status when you are the public square for over a third of the world. Add to that the company’s proven willingness to work with governments, particularly our own, to tamp down viewpoints that the Government – and let’s face facts, this has been done primarily by one political party – the ‘private company’ argument fails to hold water.

Of course, there are other platforms that enjoy the same market dominance that Facebook does. The most obvious is YouTube, and the issues there are no different.

Just this week Guns.com announced they were leaving YouTube. Their managing editor, Scott Gara, explained in the announcement that, “YouTube continues to move the goalposts with its restrictions and censorship, which is unsustainable for brands in the firearm industry.”

You can read their full announcement from Monday’s edition of The Outdoor Wire here, but the highlight is this:

After 13 years, more than 2,000 videos, nearly 400,000 subscribers, over 120 million views, and 4.4 million hours watched, Guns.com will stop publishing content on YouTube. Instead, the leading online retailer will publish new video content on channels that support First and Second Amendment freedoms, like Rumble and X.

The guns.com channel will remain in place – until YouTube takes it down – but the company will not be adding any new content.

As for The Outdoor Wire Digital Network, we are and have been a news service. However, we aren’t the kind of news service Facebook approves of. We’ll keep posting to our social media platforms as long as they are available to us. Rich Grassi, Editor of The Tactical Wire, who does much of the posting is already resigned to focusing on X, just like Guns.com is, to share our content.

But who are we kidding? That can only last as long as Elon Musk, owner of X, controls X. After the Brazilian government shut down X in their country on August 31, and fined it $3.2M, it’s quite possible other governments might seek to do the same, to preserve democracy.

There is a well-known scene in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith that many speculated, or perhaps hoped, was a commentary on the Bush Administration’s passage of the Patriot Act in October of 2001.

The line goes, “So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.” The line is spoken by Natalie Portman’s character Padmé Amidala, Senator of Naboo, who recognizes the loss of liberty worlds face as, “in order to insure the security and continuing stability,” the Republic is reorganized into the First Galactic Empire.

Or, as one might call it, a new, updated set of community guidelines…which will be followed by your invitation to leave.

– Paul Erhardt, Managing Editor, the Outdoor Wire Digital Network