The annoyance of inappropriate things being posted to our Facebook page got us thinking. What is freedom, and what is taking away freedom?

Again, we’re going to use our pie analogy to tie this all together. Imagine freedom as a nice, steaming apple pie. You have different slices of all the wonderful freedoms that we enjoy as Americans.

Freedom of speech is, clearly, a very important freedom or slice of the pie. On our Facebook page, we allow commenting. Ugh, sometimes it is a headache. If we introduced a rule for posting to social media, rule number one would be: put yourself in the shoes of the families affected on both sides of a news event. Even those whose family members commit a crime will have to deal with that family member’s actions in committing that crime for the rest of their lives.

We don’t make the rules, so we just have to deal with keyboard warriors being less than nice on Facebook, or worse, trolls, bots and the inappropriate. One of the many posts we dealt with this weekend was “nothing like censorship,” because we did not want commenters posting something very specific and very graphic to a post.

This “nothing like censorship” troll was trying to make a point. They’re wrong, but they were trying. We’re not taking away their ability to post. They can post whatever they want on their own Facebook page. See, your Facebook page is your slice of apple pie, and ours is ours.

For us to censor someone, we would have to take their piece of apple pie. We did not do that. But we also do not have to allow anyone access to our piece of apple pie. So, as long as you can post whatever you want on your piece of apple pie, you’re not being censored.