Meta’s Facebook stifles college course on the dangers of Marxism

Meta shut down a page on Facebook run by a prominent conservative college after the school posted a course teaching about the “economic failure, ghastly atrocities, and untold human misery” of Marxism.

“You may have noticed we’ve been gone for a while as Facebook restricted our page for unknown reasons,” wrote the page administrators from Hillsdale College. “The timing was especially unfortunate as the page went down the day we launched our newest documentary course, ‘Marxism, Socialism, and Communism.

The social media page, which offers free online classes in counter-culture conservatism, boasts over 300,000 followers.

In one of its Facebook posts, Hillsdale warns that “cultural Marxism is destroying American society.”

The course blames cultural Marxism for “the rise of racial tensions, radical feminism, transgender ideology, open borders, fiscal irresponsibility, the unequal protection of the laws, and the loss of our basic rights” in America.

Hillsdale College is a small, Christian college in rural Michigan, well-known for its teaching in the classical liberal arts tradition.

In a statement to Fox News, Meta claimed the restriction on the college’s Facebook page was made by mistake.

“This page was taken down in error and was restored before we received this inquiry,” Meta told Fox News Digital.  

But on Friday, Hillsdale College said in a post on X that its course page had been down since Monday night when the course began to be advertised. 

“Meta claims that Hillsdale’s entire online course page was taken down for almost 100 hours because of ads they mistakenly flagged on Facebook,” said Emily Stack Davis, Hillsdale’s executive director of media relations and communications. “But those same ads had been running unchanged for over a year. And we don’t even run them on the page they took down! They are on our main Hillsdale College page.” 

Stack Davis said that the timing of this censorship (right as Hillsdale launched their new course on Marxism) was “particularly inopportune.” 

She noted that typically such restrictions, when made in error, are lifted within 24 hours by Meta.  

Hillsdale said the course is designed to ask why Marxism still appeals to certain people in the U.S. political and cultural system.  

“In ‘Marxism, Socialism, and Communism,’ professors of history, politics, and economics look at Marx’s life and writings, the misery and brutality in the Soviet Union, the atrocities of communist China, and the proliferation of Cultural Marxism in America,” says a course description at the Hillsdale College site. “They explore how many ideas animating American politics today are rooted in Marxism, and yet how they differ from Marx’s thought.” 

The course seeks to expose students to critiques of Marxism by prominent anti-communist thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  

Some believe that the Facebook restrictions were really an attempt at Marxist-style censorship. 

Censorship is just one of the outgrowths of a Marxist system that becomes concerned with the free competition of ideas. 

“Meta’s failure to provide an adequate explanation is especially distressing given the grave consequences: A third of our online course enrollments come via Facebook, the majority of them in the first days after we launch a course,” said Stack Davis. “We have potentially lost thousands of enrollees. More importantly, Meta has denied people access to a serious academic course on repressive ideologies.”