"Many of the political cartoonists whose commentary was taken down by Facebook were left-leaning... [Facebook] said it made room for satirical content..."

"... but only up to a point. Posts about hate groups and extremist content, it said, are allowed only if the posts clearly condemn or neutrally discuss them, because the risk for real-world harm is otherwise too great.... In 2019 and 2020, Facebook often dealt with far-right misinformation sites that used 'satire' claims to protect their presence on the platform.... For example, The Babylon Bee, a right-leaning site, frequently trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire. 'At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture'....  'Removing someone from social media can end their career these days, so you need a process that distinguishes incitement of violence from a satire of these very groups doing the incitement'.... 'You just wake up and find you’re in danger of being shut down because white nationalists were triggered by your comic'...." 

From "For Political Cartoonists, the Irony Was That Facebook Didn’t Recognize Irony/As Facebook has become more active at moderating political speech, it has had trouble dealing with satire" (NYT). 

The headline is misleading as you should be able to tell if you read my excerpt carefully. It won't work for Facebook that has a rule against right-wing satire but allows left-wing satire.

The quote "At a point, I suspect Facebook got tired of this dance and adopted a more aggressive posture" is from Emerson T. Brooking, "a resident fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms." He's guessing that Facebook stopped accepting satire as a cover for disinformation and incitement. That worked against The Babylon Bee, as intended. Then, it had to apply the same rule to left-wing satirists. It's not that Facebook "didn't recognize irony." The "trouble dealing with satire" wasn't that it was humor-deaf and couldn't distinguish satire from serious things. It was that satire worked too well as an excuse to justify publishing things Facebook wanted to exclude. 

What kind of left-wing material got swept up in Facebook's censorship? The NYT describes a cartoon by "left-leaning cartoonist" Matt Bors. Titled “Boys Will Be Boys,” it "depicted a recruitment where new Proud Boys were trained to be 'stabby guys' and to 'yell slurs at teenagers' while playing video games." I don't think the Times has a link to it, but I found it easily: here. And you can read more of Bors's cartoons here. I read his newest cartoon, and it begins with a false statement: "Minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for 45 years." But the minimum wage has only been $7.25 since 2009. In 1976, the minimum wage was  $2.30. Yes, but the cartoon is set in the future. Get it?!