WV pastor: Let's have debate, Facebook, over 'hate'

The pastor of a West Virginia-based ministry that uses Facebook as a preaching platform says the Internet giant is censoring his so-called "hate speech" while personal threats go ignored.

"I get banned all the time," Rich Penkoski (pictured below) complains to OneNewsNow. "If I post anything with the acronym LGBT in it, regardless of what it's about, it gets reported and I get banned for 30 days."

The ministry's ongoing feud with Facebook, and the threats and antics it has endured from the Left, can be read here.

Penkoski's complaints got picked up by CBN News, which reports in a Jan. 9 story that the "Warriors for Christ" ministry has more than 225,000 followers on its Facebook page.

The news story recalled that Penkoski's ongoing dispute with homosexual activists grew so dangerous to his safety over the summer that law enforcement authorities advised him to move his family.

Penkoski says he personally knows what constitutes "hate speech," because he receives it constantly. "Telling somebody that they should go kill themselves, that they don't deserve to live," he complains.

Yet such comments somehow don't violate Facebook's community standards policy.  

Facebook, meanwhile, pulled a live "Warriors for Christ" feed earlier this week.

"We don't call them any names. We don't use any derogatory terms to describe people," Penkoski insists, referring to his preaching against homosexuality. "We don't wish harm on anyone, ever."

The pastor's feud with Facebook mirrors the lawsuit filed in California by radio host Dennis Prager and his company, PragerU. The complaint claims Youtube and Google have restricted or demonetized more than 50 online videos due to their conservative content. 

Regarding yet another social media platform, James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas published undercover videos this week in which Twitter employees openly admit that "shadow banning" is used to hide content from a person's own Twitter followers. Twitter engineers are also trying to create software to "down rank" users the company considers controversial.

Attorneys for Lila Rose's pro-life group Live Action complained in October that Twitter had banned ads from the group.

In order to advertise, Twitter said, Live Action must drop "sensitive content" from its own website, referring to undercover investigations and images of abortion procedures.