THE EU AND FACEBOOK

Dear Friend of Gatestone,

On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube.

On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the account of Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestone's Swedish expert.

It's no coincidence.

Ingrid had posted our latest video to her Facebook feed -- called "Sweden's Migrant Rape Epidemic." As you can see, Ingrid calmly lays out the facts and statistics, all of which are meticulously researched.

It's a video version of this research paper that Gatestone published last year. The video has gone viral -- racking up more than 80,000 views in its first two days.

But the EU is quite candid: it is applying a political lens to their censorship, and it now has teams of political informants -- with the Orwellian title of "trusted reporters" -- to report any cases of "xenophobia" or "hate speech" to Facebook for immediate deletion.

It's political censorship. It's outrageous. And it's contrary to our western values of free speech, political freedom and the separation of mosque and state. But in another way, it's a tremendous compliment -- the world's censors think that Gatestone Institute's work is important enough and persuasive enough that it needs to be silenced.

Well, not if we have anything to say about it. We raised such a ruckus about this attack that the Swedish media started reporting on Facebook's heavy-handed censorship. It backfired, and Facebook went into damage-control mode. They put Ingrid's account back up -- without any explanation or apology. Ironically, their censorship only gave Ingrid's video more attention.

Facebook and the EU have backed down -- for today. But they're deadly serious about stopping ideas they don't like. They'll be back.

So what should we do? I think there is only one thing we can do: continue to produce our well-researched reports, and to expand our online presence with even more videos!

As you know, just last week we started releasing high-quality original videos, hosted by our Gatestone experts. Our first four videos have already been watched by more than 150,000 people!

It's a great way to make our research come alive -- and as Ingrid's viral video shows, to get our ideas noticed.

So I want Gatestone's talented experts to make more videos -- a lot more! We need to win the battle of ideas