Facebook Purge of Prominent Conservatives and Alternative News Sources

[DavieD55]

Facebook Purges Over 800 Accounts With Millions Of Followers; Prominent Conservatives Vanish

by Tyler Durden Fri, 10/12/2018 - 05:22

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.

Facebook has unpublished our page

After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can't post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo— Free Thought Project (@TFTPROJECT) October 11, 2018

Facebook claims that "domestic actors" have been creating "fake pages and accounts to attract people with shocking political news," reports Bloomberg.
"The people behind the activity also post the same clickbait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites," Facebook said in a Thursday blog post. "And they often use their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares. This artificially inflates engagement for their inauthentic pages and the posts they share, misleading people about their popularity and improving their ranking in news feed.

Some pages Facebook removed had large followings of real and fake accounts. Nation in Distress, a conservative meme page, was followed by more than 3 million people, according to the Internet Archive, which stores historical versions of websites and other online content. -Bloomberg


Full Article

[Mazin]

This is my surprised face. Sucks for people that have a lot invested into their Facebook page.

[GeorgeandSugar]

No surprise here. FB and the entire social media platforms are all leftists in their ideology. Too bad, they are not open to new ideas or political and social debate.

IMHO, it suggests their viewpoints are weak and unsupported. I have found they live in a bubble of their own making devoid of reality and consequences of their thoughts.

In other words, they have no answer to the problems we see in society. They claim to be virtuous, but rather indifferent to the plot of the average American outside their leftists bubble.

Mark Zuckerberg is classic if you have listened to him. Basic income was suggested at a commencement address. However, basic income was tried elsewhere in Finland and was an abject failure.

Typical leftist belief system. Emotional based and without facts. He has no idea that human behavior will seek the path of least resistance and take advantage of anything provided “free of charge” and with no strings attached.

These leftists have no concept of the meaning of freedom and liberty.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[CS1983]

Unrestricted freedom and liberty (read: license, as the words get misused) are/is what led to the state of affairs we see today. The liberals understand this, and use it to push a false narrative. In unshackling the fetters of falsity, out of a misguided, truly classical liberalism, we have opened the box of leftist fascism. The strong will always overcome the weak. The milquetoast conservatism we see wrapped in the fetid decoration of words like "freedom" and "liberty" is exactly the tactic used by infiltrators into the right wing of America.

[68Charger]

This is why I call it 'socialist media'

[Skip]

We've discussed this a fair bit...

The goal was to move all discourse to a environment Libs could 100% control. Once we were fenced in they would start the ratcheting. This kind of control would have been impossible in meatspace.

In the UK, for example, people are being jailed for comments critical to Islam. People have also been charged for "liking" such a comment. This would have been difficult without the documentation socials provide the police state. They've also got algos which have mapped out entire networks of "bad thinkers" and over represent the speech of "good allies."

The people (especially young) getting too wrapped into socials are being harmed in many ways. Lots of info online about that.

Ironically our distrust of corporate media has given the socials more sway; people are more interested in what others think than #FakeNews "journalists."

I'm not sure what the future is but for now socials are the marketplace of ideas. And if they didn't matter you wouldn't see BigTech compromising themselves to censor and control.

[davsel]

I don't understand the outrage - Morons.

Facebook is a known leftest organization. Any conservative organization that invested time and energy into Facebook was just being stupid - and they made Facebook grow in power and influence through their participation.

These conservative organizations most likely have their own website apart from Facebook, and can now invest in something they have control over - and stop bitching about how their investment in liberalism has turned on them - Morons.

[Skip]

I don't understand the outrage - Morons.

Facebook is a known leftest organization. Any conservative organization that invested time and energy into Facebook was just being stupid - and they made Facebook grow in power and influence through their participation.

These conservative organizations most likely have their own website apart from Facebook, and can now invest in something they have control over - and stop bitching about how their investment in liberalism has turned on them - Morons.

An example of how sophisticated the plan is... If the traffic went to individual websites, they would be targeted too. If Conservatives build their own socials, those get targeted.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/6/16...rmer-crackdown


The "white supremacists" were mostly trolls. It's the easiest way the Left can attack and delegitimize. Since political speech must also allow for anonymous speech there is no way to police this.

At any rate, as ugly as it is, Americans do have a 1A right to be racist. So shutting down a site because of racism is hardly Constitutional.

But if ICANN and/or the registrars are in on it, what exactly is the solution again? Do we have to build our own internet where trolls can't be used to take it all down?

Here's where we went over the examples/problems (including example of DNS delisting)...

https://www.ar-15.co/threads/167322-Digital-Censorship


I should have kept that thread updated but had hoped it was obvious.

[davsel]

An example of how sophisticated the plan is... If the traffic went to individual websites, they would be targeted too. If Conservatives build their own socials, those get targeted.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/6/16...rmer-crackdown


The "white supremacists" were mostly trolls. It's the easiest way the Left can attack and delegitimize. Since political speech must also allow for anonymous speech there is no way to police this.

At any rate, as ugly as it is, Americans do have a 1A right to be racist. So shutting down a site because of racism is hardly Constitutional.

But if ICANN and/or the registrars are in on it, what exactly is the solution again? Do we have to build our own internet where trolls can't be used to take it all down?

Here's where we went over the examples/problems (including example of DNS delisting)...

https://www.ar-15.co/threads/167322-Digital-Censorship


I should have kept that thread updated but had hoped it was obvious.

Thanks for the recap - I had not been paying attention to the fact certain websites were being denied across the board.

I'd suggest bankrupting the big guys with accessory to _____________ (assault, murder, child sexual assault, etc.) for providing links and platforms for these various crimes. Just a thought.

[Skip]

Thanks for the recap - I had not been paying attention to the fact certain websites were being denied across the board.

I'd suggest bankrupting the big guys with accessory to _____________ (assault, murder, child sexual assault, etc.) for providing links and platforms for these various crimes. Just a thought.

As shitty as this sounds, the only solution I see is to acknowledge BigTech succeeded in moving the marketplace of ideas to cyberspace and treat these socials like a utility which includes end-to-end access from posting to unrestricted audience.

And that is exactly what is being explored right now hence the Congressional hearings.

If the socials are peer-to-peer communication networks then this makes sense as they are communication facilitators. If the socials are content owners (which is what they claim by ToS) then they have a big problem because (like you said) they have to own the illicit content they allow. They have also acted (together) to maintain a monopoly on social media communication even collaborating their political attacks together.