Unstoppable was banned by Facebook claims Kirk Cameron, but would a better explanation involve an atheist conspiracy?
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , Kirk Cameron claimed the Unstoppable Facebook ban was purposeful:
“Facebook has officially “blocked” me and you (and everyone else) from posting any link to my new movie at UnstoppableTheMovieDOTcom, labeling the content as “abusive”, “unsafe”, and “spammy”! I can’t even write the real link here, or Facebook would block this post too!!”
Kirk Cameron even claimed Unstoppable was “officially shut down by Facebook and [they were] unable to get any response from them.” In response, some people have said Kirk Cameron lied about the whole thing. Others decry the supposed Unstoppable Facebook ban as corporate Christian persecution. But let’s apply Occam’s Razor here, which basically says that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Besides Kirk Cameron, other individuals on Facebook confirmed the “spammy” Unstoppable Facebook ban by trying it themselves, although for some people Unstoppable.com links worked at various times. How do we deal with this conflicting testimony?
Both Facebook and YouTube rely on a user-based reporting system for spam. The simplest explanation is that a large enough number of people were reporting Unstoppable.com as spam. In response, a large number of people reported the spam link clicks as being erroneous. Thus, we saw Facebook links to Unstoppable.com go from “spam” to “not spam” as the tide of user opinion swayed back and forth. Finally, Facebook employees stepped in to clear up the Unstoppable spam mess .
But you might ask, “Where does an atheist conspiracy for the Unstoppable Facebook ban come into play? Wouldn’t that violate Occam’s Razor by introducing additional assumptions?” Admittedly, that is correct. I don’t have any hard evidence of an atheist conspiracy for an Unstoppable Facebook ban, but my personal experience leads me to posit this hypothesis.
Books and movies that discuss serious questions pertinent to life’s mysteries tend to be extremely controversial. The entire goal of the Unstoppable move is to try to answer the question: “Where is God in the midst of tragedy and suffering?” For many atheists, the problem of evil was the beginnings of doubt and thus Unstoppable is a project that, well, they’d want to stop.
In my past, I’ve worked with various Christians by helping them with website development and programming (my background is in computer science). Along the way, I came to find out there is a background war being waged on the internet between Christians and atheists. Books on Amazon would find themselves targeted by negative review campaigns organized by atheist blogs and organizations. Often times, it was evident from the contents of the review that the reviewer had never read the book. Despite this fact, these negative reviews would have a serious impact on sales.
In response, Christian groups would attempt to even the balance by urging others to post positive reviews or down vote the negative reviews. Unfortunately, some of these well-intentioned positive reviews were also from people who never the books, although many admitted the reason for why they were posting in the first place was to balance out the problem. Richard Dawkins books also tended to be the target of Christians who never actually bothered to read them. From what I understand, these internet religious battles led Amazon to modify its review policies over time.
So, in my opinion, it’s not inconceivable that such organized efforts by atheist groups could occur again, although, obviously, it’s not the simplest explanation for the Unstoppable Facebook ban. It’s possible the whole thing was an emergent property of social media. But if this is indeed happening, I urge such atheist groups to abandon such tactics and instead focus on the evidence or arguments raised by Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable movie.
Do you think an atheist conspiracy better explains the Unstoppable Facebook ban claimed by Kirk Cameron?