Mass PURGE Of Alternative Media On Facebook and Twitter
Facebook Just PURGED Over 800 Political Accounts for what they call spamming and inauthentic behavior. Many of those banned are crying foul saying they didn't break any rules. Some believe this is Facebook purging political content just before the mid terms to prevent "meddling."Is this a case of censorship or is Facebook actually doing the right thing?Many of the pages removed were left and some were far left but they did happen to remove many right wing pages as well. Unfortunately as many people were calling out this behavior in the past social justice activists and feminists cheered when major social media banned people, now that it is affecting pages they like they are upset. But this is exactly what we said would happen.
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A massive purge of Facebook pages, mostly left-wing anti-establishment outlets, some with millions of followers, were all unpublished by Facebook.
Basically, this means they were banned.
We've got the midterm elections coming up.
So naturally, Twitter, Facebook, and all these other social media platforms are trying to prevent election meddling.
From this, we have seen some people on Twitter get suspended for posting misleading information about the elections, most notably James Woods, who eventually did get his account back.
Now we're seeing that a bunch of political, mostly left-wing Facebook pages are getting banned.
And it's kind of interesting to me, because there are a lot of people who are far-lefty activist types who laughed when Alex Jones got banned.
And when I posted in defense of the right to post, not in defense of the content Jones created, they said, you're defending Alex Jones.
No, I was defending the principle.
And what happens?
Some of these very same people are now complaining That the content they like has just been banned for basically the same reason.
Posting misleading information.
But this is actually a really interesting story that a lot of people don't seem to understand.
People are looking at this and thinking it's just a case of Facebook censoring political discourse.
But it actually might be that Facebook's not wrong in this matter, because I actually have some insider knowledge of what was going on with some of these pages.
So first, let's take a look at the Los Angeles Times to see just who got banned by Facebook.
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Facebook purged over 800 accounts and pages pushing political messages for profit.
Facebook said Thursday that it purged more than 800 US publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented content that violated the company's spam policies, a move that could reignite accusations of political censorship.
The accounts and pages with names like Reasonable People Unite and Reverb Press were likely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads, the company said.
Some had hundreds of thousands of followers and expressed a range of political viewpoints, including a page which billed itself as the first publication to endorse President Trump.
They did not appear to have ties to Russia, company officials said.
Facebook said it was removing the publishers and accounts not because of the type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content and using fake profiles.
Today, we're removing 559 pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.
The company said in a blog post, people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.
But the move to target American politically-oriented sites just weeks before the congressional midterm elections is sure to be a flashpoint for political groups and their allies, which are already attacking the tech giant for political bias and for arbitrary censorship of political content.
LA Times highlights a couple of the pages that were removed.
One, Nation in Distress.
It pitched itself as the first online publication to endorse President Donald Trump.
Founded in 2012, it had amassed more than 3.2 million likes and over 3 million followers, according to a Washington Post review on Thursday.
In recent posts and photos, it had criticized journalists for failing to report on Trump's approach to China, and shared a link to a story that had called rep Maxine Waters demented.
The page affiliated itself with a website called America's Freedom Fighters, which appeared to post its own content and duplicate press releases written by others about violent crimes and gun rights, all alongside a sidebar of ads.
Naturally, there are a lot of people claiming it's not true, they weren't spamming, and they were caught up in this ban wave.
And I think it's fair to say that there are probably a lot of innocent people who were caught up in this.
Over 800 different pages or accounts were banned, essentially.
So, naturally, you can assume there would be a few innocent people.
But the story is actually rather interesting, and it's actually a lot bigger than just some political censorship.
Ford Fisher, who is a journalist, tweeted, And we can see that one of the pages was blocked out.
I'm not sure why that was redacted.
However, you can see police the police, police the police NY, cop block, cop logic.
You've got filming cops.
And we can see that one of the pages was blocked out.
I'm not sure why that was redacted.
However, you can see police the police, police the police, NY, cop block, cop logic.
You've got filming, filming cops.
You've got policing the police again.
You've got police the police and policing the police.
Then you can see Rachel Blevins, who is an individual, another person who was removed.
Gun laws don't work, liberty principle, legalizing cannabis.
The interesting thing about this is that Ford says one person had all of these pages unpublished.
Why was one person an admin to all of these different pages, many of them extremely similar, like Police the Police and Policing the Police?
And why was this person an admin to the private page of Rachel Blevins?
When it comes to the Facebook story, I think there actually might be something here, and Facebook might be right.
A few years ago, I was told about how these pages operate.
That one person will become an admin to all of these other pages, and then share their articles on a bunch of different but similar pages, in an effort to make it seem like the article was trending.
When you see pages like Copblock, Copwatch, Police the Police, Policing the Police, Police the Police NY, they're all extremely similar.
Then they start posting basically the same content, and the Facebook algorithm says, wow, look at all these accounts sharing this content, it must be good, when in reality, it was one person with a bunch of identical pages sharing the same article.
So you could argue that there's nothing wrong with it, and that's fine if you think so.
But Facebook said it was against their rules.
To me, I don't think that Facebook is targeting people for political reasons.
I think they identified a network, and they just swept up the entire network.
And when looking at the screenshot published by Ford, I noticed that Rachel Blevins was listed.
My assumption was all of these pages belonged to Rachel Blevins, because why would someone else be an admin to Rachel Blevins and all of these other networks?
And I can't say for sure why that is.
But I can say that's likely why Rachel Blevins got banned.
Not because of anything she did, but because someone who was using her page, or had access to it, was doing something in violation of Facebook.
And when they do, that admin, when they post to Rachel Blevins' page, that page is in violation of the rules too, and will also get banned.
Now look, I think the Facebook thing might actually have some merit.
Facebook may have actually removed some people for being bad actors.
But this is where things actually get strange.
Ford Fisher also tweeted, Carrie Wendler of Antimedia was suspended from Twitter
during today's Indy Media anarchist social media purge. The email says specifically for and
that part is blank.
Specifically for nothing.
Specifically for lacking the approval of the mainstream media and the state.
And we can't see other people actually got banned on Twitter with the same email.
GlobalRevolutionLive is clobbered along with Vlad Teichberg and his wife Nikki, who are getting harassed endlessly by US federal authorities as well.
And there is a screenshot that says, GlobalRevLive has been suspended for violating the Twitter rules specifically for blank.
Now I don't know for sure why these people were suspended from Twitter, but many of the people who had their pages unpublished on Facebook also saw their Twitter accounts get unpublished as well.
The Free Thought Project had their page removed, and then on Twitter they tweeted about it, and shortly after, they were banned as well.
Which says to me that Facebook must have shared their list with Twitter, and Twitter then removed them from their platform.
Now keep in mind, Twitter says they can remove you for off-platform behavior.
If Facebook did share this information with Twitter and then Twitter banned them, it's all a part of the same rules.
Now, in discussing this with some sources and some of the people involved, I've been told that these people didn't do anything wrong.
Nowhere does it say that you can't be an admin to someone else's Facebook page and share this article.
But, just because you don't know what the rules are doesn't mean you get to break them, and it is troublesome.
A lot of people want to know what the rules are, and they will follow them if they're told what they should or shouldn't do.
And if that's the case, then many of these pages should have gotten a warning and been told, you can't do this anymore.
If they have, well then it's their own fault.
But it seems like nobody was given any warning, and a lot of people didn't realize they may be breaking the rules, and this is one of the biggest problems with censorship in social media.
The arbitrary enforcement of rules.
And this is why people will scream it's political censorship.
In my opinion, I don't think this is a case of political censorship.
I think some people just allowed a bad actor to use their pages and didn't realize they were using it to break the rules.
The example that I can give is Rachel Blevins.
That's a really good point.
Why would someone who isn't Rachel Blevins be adminning her page and posting things to it?
Back in the LA Times story, there's a quote from Alex Stamos.
It is totally reasonable for companies to say, if you abuse our mechanisms, we will punish you, even if the individual content is okay.
Facebook first reduced the ability to use ads to punish extreme content, now they're attacking organic recommendation systems, such as the likes and shares used to artificially inflate posts.
And that quote explains exactly why I take issue with a lot of the censorship and banning that we see.
The rules are arbitrary.
There are probably other people breaking the rules who don't get banned.
They can't evenly enforce this.
It would be literally impossible.
Facebook has hundreds of millions of pages, billions of users.
So they do what they can, but that means there is disproportionate enforcement, and unfortunately, it's unfair.
But what this means is that these pages have legitimate ideas they want to share.
Maybe it's hyperbolic, maybe they were spamming it too much, but they are political opinions and it is the right of these people to share them.
Facebook has determined the way they were sharing them was wrong and removed these people.
That means they are no longer participating in public.
And Twitter said, for whatever reason, giving no reason, removed all of them as well.
And this means they will no longer participate in public.
In my opinion, I think there's going to be a push to get rid of the fringe extremists on both sides because we're becoming too divided and it is really dangerous.
Jack Dorsey says that he's got to make a healthy platform for discussion.
It's his worldview.
It's his opinion that's going to be guiding that.
I think it's very dangerous.
I think it's very, very dangerous.
Too few people have too much power in how we communicate and what ideas that get shared.
And it's frustrating for me when I see this happen to Alex Jones and I say, hey everybody, this is bad.
You shouldn't let massive multinational corporations determine who is and is not allowed to participate in public.
Yet many people cheered for the demise of Alex Jones' social media platforms, only to now be upset that their platforms are the ones getting purged.
But this is exactly what we were warning about.
I am equally as upset with many of these people getting removed as I am with Alex Jones.
I don't like their content.
Not at all.
But they have a right to publish it.
If they're breaking the rules, it is what it is.
But they could always point to some flimsy and obscure rule to remove you.
Alex Jones was removed for breaking the rules, but did he really?
Was it selective enforcement?
That's the trouble.
In fact, some of the people who got removed used to post lies and smears about me, and now they've been banned.
And even though they lie and smear me, Unfortunately, there's free speech in this country, and we have mechanisms for dealing with defamation.
Defamation is not free speech, but I still think it was wrong to ban them, and I don't know why they were banned in the first place.
I will always stand up for an individual's right to participate in public, because homogenizing our ideas is a bad idea.
And allowing massive, multinational, billion-dollar corporations the ability to control who or who is not participating in public will lead us down a very dark and dangerous path.
I hope everybody listening understands this, but I think you do.
If you watch me, you understand the need for free speech, even on these private social media platforms.
So let me know what you think in the comments below.
Do you think this is political censorship, or do you think they really broke the rules?
I'll tell you straight up, I do think they were breaking the rules, but I also think they should have been warned before being purged.
A lot of people probably granted access to someone who they shouldn't have and didn't realize it would get them banned.
But again, you let me know what you think.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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