During a recent call-in appearance to a local radio talk show, U.S. Senate candidate Austin Petersen said that having a presence on social media is vital to campaigns, hence, being banned from social media even for a month can be devastating.

And yet, that’s what happened to the Missouri Republican earlier in recent days — again.

In September, Petersen — who is running for incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s seat, which is considered to be one of the five most vulnerable Democrat-held Senate seats in the 2018 midterm elections — was banned by Facebook for giving away an AR-15 rifle (which was also pictured along with a red cap that said “Make Taxation Theft Again”).

“The purchase, sale or trade of firearms, ammunition and explosives between private individuals isn’t allowed on Facebook,” according to the social media behemoth’s “Community Standards.”

Well, again, it was a raffle — Petersen wasn’t trafficking in weapons or anything of the sort. But no matter. He got banned.

As Fox News reported, lots of candidates use raffles in order to collect names of potential supporters so they can reach out to them during the campaign (to register for the raffle, you have to sign a petition of some sort). So Petersen decided to have another AR-15 giveaway, but instead of putting an actual picture of a rifle on his page, he drew one that sort of, kind of, looks like an AR-15 (but honestly, you wouldn’t know it if he hadn’t written “AR-15” above the drawing).

Nope. Banned again, for another 30 days. (Related: THOUGHT POLICE: YouTube to start “correcting” controversial videos with “facts” from discredited Wikipedia pages run by disinfo trolls.)

The most recent ban, which came this month, triggered Peterson to fire off an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “on his campaign website…and argued his situation was part of a larger trend of unfairness towards conservatives,” Fox News reported.

“It’s difficult to ignore that this action comes during a period of heightened tension regarding Facebook’s role in our elections, and its perceived bias against conservative voices,” he wrote, adding this bombshell: “Moreover, the fact that your Chief Operating Officer — Sheryl Sandberg — has ‘leaned into’ my election by donating the maximum allowable amount to my opponent does not inspire confidence in Facebook’s neutrality.”

That’s right, Facebook’s COO has donated $5,400 to McCaskill’s campaign, according to federal election records cited by Fox News.

“I’m confident that such giveaways are consistent with Facebook’s policies…so it’s unclear to me why such content would warrant an immediate takedown and thirty-day ban,” he wrote.

The fact is, this incident further demonstrates that in an age where far-Left Democrats have been essentially squeezed out of the American political process with the exception of some major cities and a dozen or so states, Facebook and the other social media giants have teamed up with the American Pravda media to shut down conservative, pro-Trump speech and expression.

What these sites are doing is nothing short of a modern-day electronic version of Nazi, Maoist, and Leninist book-burnings. The Alt-Left authoritarians running these platforms have decided to shunt information sought by a majority of the country in pursuit of naked, raw, political power.

The worst part is, it’s working. Small-to-midsized publishers of alternative views who depended primarily on traffic from Facebook and the other social media sites are having to shut down entirely or dramatically cut back on paid staff. It won’t be long before the larger indie publishers without a diverse income model will feel similar pain.

And of course, Marxist-leaning Americans are cheering this censorship of the Right as justified and even “necessary” because conservative language and speech should not be guaranteed since, you know, it’s ‘hateful’ and ‘divisive.’

But here’s a word of caution to the liberal social media platforms and to the Americans who agree with their censorship: Political and economic fortunes change. The winds are blowing to the Left in the tech-media world today, but they may not always.

And what goes around, very often comes around.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

FoxNews.com

WesternJournal.com

TheGatewayPundit.com

TheNationalSentinel.com