Facebook under attack after massive purge of political pages, users
Facebook announced it had removed more than 800 political pages and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and spamming. Now the people behind the pages are speaking out, claiming they have been unfairly targeted for practices they say are common across the entire social network.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, and product manager, Oscar Rodriguez, these pages were removed not due to their political content, but because they had violated the social network’s terms of service.
“Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites,” the post said. “Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”
Some examples of the pages include Nation in Distress, Reverb Press, Reasonable People Unite, The Resistance, Right Wing News and Snowflakes.
Tim Pool covered this on his TimCast broadcast – see it below.
Public domain image/Piotr VaGla Waglowski, http://www.vagla.pl
“I contributed to Facebook’s success and growth!” Jason Bassler said to Reason after the social media giant unpublished the page for a media site he founded, The Free Thought Project. “I decided to create content day after day. Now they piss on us.”
Edward Lynn, editor-in-chief at Reverb Press, found out his page had been removed when he read a news story about it this morning. He hotly disputes Facebook’s claims that his site is “inauthentic.”
“We are a legitimate news publisher,” he said. “We are not fake news. We are not misinformation. We are not foreign. We are simply a small independent news publication trying to grow.”
Lynn said that, prior to his becoming editor-in-chief this year, some people affiliated with Reverb shared its content on Facebook using “backup accounts” to avoid being targeted by conservative opponents and “being sent to Facebook jail.”
Another admin quoted by The Guardian stated that it’s common to operate multiple pages, share content between them, stating that “99% of the people I worked with have backup accounts” adding later that “Lock Him Up was for people who liked funny stuff…Proud Snowflake was for people interested in social justice issues. Angry Americans was full of economic stuff. When a post did really well on one page, and it fit the theme of one of the other pages, I’d share it across them.”
Some Alt-left sites and outlets are really disgusted.
From the World Socialist Web Site:
There is no longer a question as to whether US technology companies are consciously engaged in political censorship. Their half-hearted denials have been exposed as lies by an internal Google research document published last week. The documents states that the technology monopolies have moved away from “free speech and towards censorship,” rejecting the “American tradition that prioritizes free speech for democracy.”
