Censorship in Croton: Part Three.

Another false report to Facebook could limit distribution of a Guest Editorial in The Chronicle. Please counter this censorship move by forwarding it widely.

Readers will recall that earlier this week, someone falsely reported to Facebook that a post of a Chronicle editorial about the events of last Monday evening (an altercation between Mayor Brian Pugh and resident Ed Riely) violated the platform’s rules. This led to its deletion from at least three village Facebook groups—including, ironically, one that was created in an effort to get around censorship on other village social media platforms.

Fortunately, the effort to censor that post backfired, and it has now received nearly 2000 views. Last night, the censors were at work again. Facebook posts of a Guest Editorial about the incident by Paul Steinberg, entitled “Pughilistics,” were again reported to the platform and again removed pending an appeal (we still have not heard back about our appeal of the actions Facebook took early in the week.)

The Chronicle has over 900 subscribers, and most posts receive at least that many views if not two or three times that number. Nevertheless, using social media to get the word out about what we publish—especially to villagers who might not be subscribers—is a basic part of modern journalism and communication, and protected under the First Amendment.

We were particularly eager to publish Paul Steinberg’s piece, which first appeared in The Gazette, because we thought it deserved the widest possible readership. Steinberg, in what we consider one of his most brilliant letters, patiently and methodically went through the events of Monday evening and demonstrated how at each step of the way Mayor Pugh made a choice to do the anti-democratic thing, rather than the democratic thing.

As Steinberg put it:

“…to Mr. Pugh: You are in politics. Constituents who disagree (and disagreeable constituents) come with the territory. You are not on the grade school playground. You don’t go up and stick your chest out and put your arm across someone’s face. You are the chief elected executive of a municipality and chief of staff to a state senator, for god’s sake.”

The latest attempt to censor dissident views, in this case those of Paul Steinberg, is unworthy of our village and its residents. We can only hope that the overwhelming majority of Crotonites, no matter what their views on housing or any other issue in the village, support the principle of freedom of expression.

For now, however, we want to ask all subscribers to the Chronicle, and anyone else reading this, to counter this censorship effort by distributing Paul Steinberg’s Guest Editorial as widely as possible.

There are two main ways to do this. If you are a subscriber, you can simply forward the email you received last night with “Pughilistics” in the subject line to your friends and neighbors who may not have seen it. Or you can copy this link and post that on your own social media pages, or include it in an email as well.

There are many reasons we launched the Chronicle nearly a year ago, but the main ones were to provide the village with a platform that could not be censored (Substack does not allow this) and could thus be a home for the widest possible diversity of voices.

Censorship is an evil that must be fought, no matter who does it. Please help defeat it.

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