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We've been censored by Facebook! And you probably have been, too.
Corporate censorship is running rampant on the Internet (again)
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You may remember that we wrote a new post on Saturday about Project 2025 and the dictatorial implications for American democracy:
As soon as we posted it here, we started sharing it to our social media platforms to help get the word out. Within minutes, we got a notification from Facebook saying, “We removed your post. It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way. This goes against our Community Standards on spam.”
Um, excuse me, what? This has never happened to us before, with any link to anything we’ve ever posted since 2008.
There was a button to ask Facebook to review this removal, so I clicked on it, and within a few minutes, it was reinstated. Soon, our comments and inbox were flooded with reports from other people that the same thing was happening to them. I also tried posting it to my personal Facebook page, same results—the post was removed within minutes, and then reinstated after review. Then, another 24 hours later, the posts were gone from Facebook again altogether, sometimes without even being notified! Fascinatingly enough, other platforms—even Elon Musk’s platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter hellhole—had no problem with our post.
Facebook (and their parent company, Meta) are removing posts containing links to left-leaning information about Project 2025.
I started asking colleagues who work in progressive communications and technology if they’d heard about things like this happening. We’ve now found out that this has been a pattern happening to other organizations publicizing the harm that Project 2025 (“P25”) could do to the country. Here’s what we know so far:
Facebook uses a network of media “partners” to fact-check news being shared on their site. Some of those are reasonably reputable, and others… not so much. One Facebook partner that’s been called out in discussions about the removal of P25 posts is The Dispatch, a right-wing media outlet. The Dispatch has an article on its own site outright saying that most social media posts about P25 are false.
We’ve also been told that so-called fact-checkers for Facebook are using very niggling excuses to claim a post has misinformation. For example, the P25 section on banking regulations calls for the elimination of those regulations, which would eliminate the FDIC. But, since the document doesn’t explicitly say “eliminate the FDIC,” any statement about that is being flagged as false.
Other links about Project 2025 that have been removed from Facebook include some from Just Security, an online publication based at the NYU School of Law. A user named dandle on Reddit says: “UPDATE: I tried again to post the same Just Security piece to my personal Facebook page, using different text in my post. The privacy settings were again set to friends only. I weakened the suggestion that my friends read it, but I did include ‘Project 2025’ in the text. Facebook again flagged and blocked the post as spam.” Another website having problems is Democracy Docket.
We’re working with partners and friends who take on Big Tech with their madness regularly to find out what’s going on, and what we can all do. We’re big fans of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and we hope they’ll look more into this. If you’re interested in the freedom of anything technological, they deserve your support!
Facebook quietly implemented a feature this year to show users very little political content unless they choose to see it, and now it seems to be censoring valid information about the consequences of this election. This is not just Orwellian in its conception, but also an extreme escalation of the censorship that corporate media have been engaging in for decades. Their claims of being purely unbiased have long fallen flat, and now we see Meta/Facebook following in their footsteps.
It’s a good reminder that Facebook (and other social media platforms) are not free public squares or even public utilities, but for-profit corporate conglomerates, with key shareholders like, in Meta’s case, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as well as BlackRock and JP Morgan.
We’ll keep you updated as we learn about what’s happening, but for now, perhaps it’s finally time to get off Facebook and find other ways to stay in touch with the friends and family we all have there. Stay tuned.
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