Chris Peterson

On the heels of the J30Strike fiasco, Facebook has turned its auto-censor cannon at…Ebert?

For movie critic Roger Ebert, it took only hours to criticize the late Jackass star Ryan Dunn for drinking and driving. Facebook just as swiftly took the film critic’s page down.

Dunn had died in a car crash that also took his friend’s life. After Ebert’s post about the late Jackass star, Facebook pulled the page and put up a placeholder disclaimer saying that the site doesn’t allow pages with hateful, threatening or obscene content.

Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes told us via email, “The page was was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

My guess is something similar happened to J30Strike here. Lots of people flagged the post as abusive and the page was taken down.

I don’t support speaking ill of the dead. But I don’t think you need to in order to think this is also a dumb and bad decision. And Noyes’ response is exactly the same as yesterday, leading me to believe this happens fairly often.

The problem, of course, is that Ebert has a lot of clout, and J30Strike censorship ended after an investigative reporter called.

What about the folks who don’t have that much power? Are their rights restored as rapidly? I doubt it. And that still troubles me.