You know what’s awesome about Facebook? They take initiative. Even when it’s not really warranted:

Facebook chose to block American pro-life groups from advertising in the Irish abortion referendum, says Mark Zuckerberg at the Aspen Ideas Festival – FB wanted the Irish government to make a decision, but they declined, so FB acted unilaterally. Not sure he's said that before! pic.twitter.com/UBZfgueg6c — Laurence Dodds (@LFDodds) June 26, 2019

Isn’t that interesting?

Uhhhh … Zuckerberg said just now that he offered to block U.S. pro-life ads in Ireland during the Irish abortion referendum, the Irish gov’t declined to say whether it wanted FB to do that, so FB went ahead and did it anyway. https://t.co/CS165WsNxL — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 26, 2019

huh. Hadn’t heard about this before. — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 26, 2019

Zuckerberg: "We had an issue in Ireland. In the last year, there was a referendum on abortion. And during that election … a bunch of pro-life American groups advertised in this Irish – leading up to this Irish election – to try to influence public opinion there." — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 26, 2019

Zuckerberg (cont): "And we went to the Irish and asked folks there, ‘How do you want us to handle this? You have no laws on the books that are relevant for whether we should be allowing this kind of speech in your election.’" — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 26, 2019

Cont: “And really, this doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that a private company should be making a decision on. Their response at the time was, you know, ‘We don’t currently have a law. So you need, you know, make whatever decision you want to make.’" — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 26, 2019

Zuckerberg: "We ended up not allowing the ads.”https://t.co/lTmQy8aYuc — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) June 26, 2019

How proactive of them!

So far this is all Zuck talking points that we've seen before…

? "If we were writing the rules of the net from scratch"

? "It shouldn't be up to Facebook to make these decisions"

? "We've hired 30,000 people"

? "We spend more on security than our entire valuation in 2012" — Laurence Dodds (@LFDodds) June 26, 2019

Who asked Facebook to “make these decisions”? Clearly in this case, no one did.