ZeroHedge reports:
Just in time for midterms, Facebook has removed 559 pages and 251 accounts they claim have been spreading misinformation and spam. Several of the pages however - some with millions of followers, were pro-Trump conservatives who had spent years cultivating their followings.
Caitlin Johnstone explains a bit more:
Facebook has purged more dissident political media pages today, this time under the pretense of protecting its users from “inauthentic activity”. In a statement co-authored by Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher (who also happens to be the former White House National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity Policy), the massive social media platform explained that it has removed “559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
This “inauthentic behavior”, according to Facebook, consists of using “sensational political content — regardless of its political slant — to build an audience and drive traffic to their websites,” which is the same as saying they write about controversial things, and posting those political articles “in dozens of Facebook Groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites.”
In other words, the pages were removed for publishing controversial political content and trying to get people to read it. Not for writing “fake news”, but for doing what they could to get legitimate indie media news stories viewed by people who might want to view it. The practice of sharing your material around in Facebook groups is common practice for most independent media content creators; I did it myself a lot in late 2016 and early 2017, and pretty much all my indie media peers at the time did too.
Among the sites banned are government accountability sites, as explained by Radley Balko:
As part of its purge, Facebook has removed the pages of several police accountability/watchdog/critic groups, including Cop Block, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police. They’ve also apparently severely restricted activity for the Photography Is Not a Crime page.
The purge has clearly been coordinated between both Facebook and Twitter, which have banned many of the same sites at the same time.
Notable this time, however, many of the sites being banned are left-wing sites devoted to anti-war causes, or in calling the government out on abuses of power. In this purge and in previous purges, however, many of the banned sites, whether right or left have one thing in common: they are anti-establishment.
So, media outlets that call for the mass murder or Yemenis or Syrians or Iranians, or which look the other way as domestic agencies violate the civil rights of Americans, will be perfectly find. But if you draw attention to these abuses of power? Then, it’s “propaganda” and must be banned.
It’s impossible to predict who the next purge will target, but now is a good time to remind everyone that the best way to ensure you receive mises.org’s content every day is to sign up for our daily email. Simply click on the “subscribe” button on the main page.
