Author Sarah Palin made headlines this week for opposing (via a Facebook post) the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. The post drew thousands of responses, and was temporarily removed by Facebook on Thursday.
The post was quickly restored, and Facebook publicly apologized to the memorist and public figure. According to Politico, the controversial post was “removed by an automated system and had nothing to do with the content of the post.” The issue has already sparked a Twitter fight with the mayor of New York City. What do you think?
Here is an excerpt from Palin’s Facebook post: “Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg responded to my comments about the planned mosque at Ground Zero by suggesting that a decision not to allow the building of a mosque at that sacred place would somehow violate American principles of tolerance and openness. No one is disputing that America stands for — and should stand for — religious tolerance. It is a foundation of our republic. This is not an issue of religious tolerance but of common moral sense. To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks.”
UPDATE: At The Daily Beast, editor Brian Ries outlines a grassroots campaign he started that may have shut down Palin’s post: “I snapped a screenshot and posted it to Tumblr with a call to arms: ‘Tumblr: Help Report Sarah Palin’s Ground Zero mosque note to Facebook for being ‘Racist/Hate Speech.’ Click-through to do it’ … Less than 24 hours after I published the first post, it had pretty much ‘popped.’ In a grassroots campaign that’s part-4chanian, part-Orwellian, hundreds of users of the community blogging platform Tumblr had shared my post, offered their own commentary, and logged onto Facebook on Wednesday to report Palin’s note as hate speech.”