Legitimate News Organizations Caught in Facebook Purge
Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook
On Thursday, October 11th, Facebook removed 559 Facebook pages and 251 accounts without warning. That’s according to a press release issued by Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager, which asserted the pages and accounts were taken down because they “have consistently broken [Facebook] rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior”. The press release was titled, “Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook”.
But the bulk of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook is spam that’s typically motivated by money, not politics.
-Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager
In the press release, Facebook characterizes the removed pages and accounts as spammers that post “clickbait” to websites that are “ad farms” or “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 website[s].” Facebook further alleged that the “[b]ut the bulk of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook is spam that’s typically motivated by money, not politics.”
Is Facebook removing spam or censoring those who challenge the status quo?
Facebook’s press release provides seemingly legitimate and understandable reasons for removing these pages and accounts. The mainstream press has parroted the press release without question. However, Facebook did not name any of the pages or accounts that were removed. If these were really fake accounts created to spam visitors, would a press release even be necessary?
Isn’t it a given that any social media outlet like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. is going to combat spam as part of the normal course of business, anyway? So why the press release? It could be just good public relations, especially with the Cambridge Analytica revelations earlier this year and the mid-term elections coming up in the United States. No doubt that’s at least part of it.
But if you look into which Facebook pages and accounts were removed, the picture changes from deplatforming spammers to censorship of alternative voices on the Internet. Censorship of alternative media by the current Internet giants has been a growing problem since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The inclusion of some of the more notable alternative news organizations in this Facebook purge speak to the censorship motive.
Most notable in the purge to me are The AntiMedia (www.theantimedia.com) and Press For Truth (www.pressfortruth.ca). As someone who has followed the work of these two news outlets for several years, I can say that Facebook’s assertion that these organizations are spamming people, misleading people or are “inauthentic”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, is a complete and utter fabrication.
However, one thing The AntiMedia and Dan Dicks have in common is they consistently do stories that question the status quo. They also tend to avoid the false left-versus-right dichotomy that dominates the mainstream press today. If you aren’t familiar with their work, then please follow the links above and see for yourself.
Will the free market save free speech on the Internet?
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that the government cannot infringe on the freedom of the press. But it does not prevent private actors, such as Facebook, from limiting speech or the press on their own platforms. The centralization of the flow of Internet information into the hands of a few outlets, specifically Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, and to a lesser degree Amazon and Apple, over the last decade gives these platforms immense influence over public discourse and opinion.
It also provides the perfect end-run around the First Amendment protection of free speech. Government actors needn’t attempt to pass laws that restrict freedom of speech or of the press. They need only have the cooperation of these Internet giants who, as private actors, are not subject to First Amendment scrutiny. But for those of us who have been around the block a couple of times, this is nothing new.
Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…
-U.S. Const. amend. I
The main reason why alternative media found an audience on the Internet was the fact that the legacy media outlets that dominated the flow of information in the last century, mainstream television and newsprint media, were not telling the people the full story. They also intentionally withhold information and provide misinformation to the public. This became glaringly obvious with the uncritical news coverage of the second Iraq War launched under the George W. Bush Administration.
Thanks to the free market, new technologies like personal computing and the Internet have allowed those with limited resources to reach a wide audience and challenge the status quo. It was these kinds of outlets that helped bring legitimacy to subjects historically discounted as “conspiracy theory”.
But just like television and newsprint media in the twentieth century, today’s big players of the Internet have obviously become co-opted by the same prurient interests that co-opted newsprint and television in the last century and are now acting to squelch anyone who may expose the status quo for what it is. As I’ve said many times before on The Political News Report, the status quo is more war, more authoritarianism and less freedom for regular people.
The free market brought about technological advances that have helped to expose this state of affairs to a much wider audience in the past. Will the free market provide a solution to the current, perfectly legal suppression of dissenting voices we are seeing today? I sure hope so.
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Resource Links:
- Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook [Press release], Facebook Newroom, October 11, 2018
- ‘Facebook Purge’: List of Some Deleted Accounts on Left & Right, Heavy.com, October 12, 2018
- Pages purged by Facebook were on blacklist promoted by Washington Post, World Socialist Website, October 13, 2018
- BREAKING: The FACEBOOK PURGE Is On – Independent Media Outlet PRESS FOR TRUTH Memory Holed!, Press For Truth, October 11, 2018
- Anti-Media Shut Down by Facebook and Twitter, The AntiMedia, October 11, 2018
