JACKSON TOWNSHIP, NJ – If you live in Jackson Township, New Jersey, and are wondering why you no longer get updates from the Jackson Township Police Department on Facebook, it’s because the social media site’s parent company, Meta, shut it down and de-listed it.
Jackson Township Police Chief Matt Kunz doesn’t know why and he says nobody at Facebook will give his department any answers on the matter.
Kunz said the department received ‘policy violations’ from Facebook’s automated censorship AI, but he has been unable to speak to a human being at the company regarding the ban.
The department, for years, has used the page for notifying residents of emergency notifications, traffic delays, road closures, lost and found pets, department news, community events, and police blotter-style reports.
We reached out to top executives at Facebook to get an answer, and like Kunz, no human responses were to be found.
Chief Kunz said attempts to rectify the situation and re-instate the page, which tens of thousands of residents followed for local public safety and community information, have gone unanswered.
Repbulican Mayor Michael Reina said what Facebook did crossed the standard decency line.
“Here we have a public Facebook page that is a vital form of communication between our town, the police department, and 60,000 residents, many of them senior citizens who rely on the information on that page,” Reina said. “When you start banning police departments on social media and refuse to tell them why or let them rectify the situation, that’s not America. That’s what they do in Communist China. This isn’t social media; it’s socialist media and Facebook’s censorship of our police department because their A.I. algorithm says so is nothing short of a disgrace.”
Reina said he hopes the social media giant will reconsider its decision and remove the gag order on his police department.
“The men and women of the Jackson Police Department are out there every day for the safety of our residents,” he added. “Facebook has cut one of the biggest lines of communication between those officers and the community they serve and I would like to see the company do the right thing here.”
Reina added that by Facebook, not even willing to discuss what the ban is about is just par for the course from the social media company that has been on a censorship crusade that has gone on for far too long.