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In the Course of Online Events

The Liberty County Vindicator, a Texas newspaper, was posting daily excerpts from the Declaration of Independence to their Facebook page leading up to Independence Day. But Facebook deleted their 10th excerpt, informing the paper that the post “goes against our standards on hate speech.” Vindicator managing editor Casey Stinnett was generous: “The removal of the post was an automated action,” he said. “If any human being working at Facebook were to review it, no doubt the post would be allowed.” Sure enough, Facebook later restored the post, and a spokesperson said the errant removal was because the passage wasn’t recognized as being from the historical document. “While The Vindicator cannot be certain exactly what triggered Facebook’s filtering program,” Stinnett said, “the editor suspects it was most likely the phrase ‘Indian savages’. Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as ‘Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development,’ that would have been better.” (MS/CNN) ...The real reason Jefferson went to France: he wasn’t getting enough Likes in the colonial Book of Face.