The Social Justice Network: Facebook announces sweeping new restrictions on criticism of protected groups.

Until recently, most online platforms largely defined “hate speech” as speech that could lead to imminent physical harm. But Facebook now demands that its users “not post” speech critical of “concepts, institutions, ideas, practices, or beliefs associated with protected characteristics, which are likely to contribute to imminent physical harm, intimidation or discrimination against the people associated with that protected characteristic.”

“Protected characteristics,” according to Facebook, include “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.” On its face, this sounds neutral and universally applicable. Yet anyone following the matter knows that it is inconceivable, for instance, that Facebook would ban critiques of “cisgenderism,” a concept whose purpose is to attack heterosexuality and the legitimacy of the generative family. It is similarly unimaginable that protected groups would be blocked from criticizing American constitutionalism as a construct of “whiteness.” Oppressor groups, after all, do not possess “protected characteristics.”

Discrimination once meant denying housing, access to public accommodations, or employment to people based on immutable characteristics. This, of course, was corrected by civil rights laws. But discrimination now means speech that protected groups find insulting. In other words, the last place where discrimination exists is in the minds of oppressor groups.

This new view of discrimination conflicts with the basic requirements of political liberty. It means, for instance, that speech defending the traditional family harms the self-respect of LGBTQ people; that arguments in favor of secure borders harm the self-respect of illegal immigrants; and that analyses of the different rates of criminality among demographic groups harm the self-respect of some groups, while also lowering their stature in the eyes of the oppressor group. Anti-discrimination comes to mean enforced silence on behalf of protected groups, no matter how central the issue in question is to the nation’s political and social future.

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Forbidding the discussion of “concepts, institutions, ideas, practices, or beliefs associated with protected characteristics” also hobbles the use of speech as a tool for discovering the truth about basic matters. Leading “hate speech” restriction advocates already demand the banning of factual claims, should they harm the self-respect of protected groups. Facebook’s guidelines could preclude the critical discussion of dogmas claiming that all oppressor-group members are unconsciously biased, or that only racism accounts for disparities among groups.