Facebook has removed seven people identified as “extremists.”

The New York Times reported it this way:

After years of wavering about how to handle the extreme voices populating its platform, Facebook … evicted seven of its most controversial users, many of whom are conservatives, immediately inflaming the debate about the power and accountability of large technology companies.

Louis Farrakhan of the nation of Islam and Alex Jones of the Infowars website were among those evicted.

But the Times made a point of identifying them as “conservative.”

Are we looking at a more ominous threat?

The question is: Is this the beginning of excising all unwanted speech from Facebook?

We don’t have any assurances that this is not the case.

And we know well the political and cultural climate at Facebook. When you consider the fact that 2.4 billion people on the planet use Facebook, we have every reason to be concerned.