When Facebook decided to purge pages for what seems to be completely murky reasons leading up to the midterm elections, I had my suspicions... but the evidence so far recovered by Western Journalism seems rather clear.
Of the 220 pages uncovered by The Western Journal,
67 percent are conservative or pro-Trump pages,
22 percent are libertarian or non-aligned,
and 11 percent are liberal or anti-Trump pages.
Everyone knows that Libertarians are for limited government and thus lean right.
This would mean that it would appear that as so far -
89% are conservative/libertarian
with a very small percentage of this being non-aligned
CLEAR FAKE NEWS DECEPTION SEEDED IN THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA by FACEBOOK
It appears that Facebook had strategically briefed The New York Times and The Washington Post ahead of the removals, given that within minutes of Facebook’s announcement, both papers published lengthy pieces describing the purge that included screenshots of the pages, something that could only have been obtained before the pages were removed.
After the purge, Facebook provided media outlets with only the same few examples: The Resistance, Reasonable People Unite, Reverb Press, Nation in Distress and Snowflakes. Four of these pages were liberal, while one was conservative. When asked for a complete list of pages, Facebook has repeatedly refused to release it.
Now while some of these appear non aligned, this means that only 11% were liberal pages. This is so far as we know at this point not only indicating that Facebook has interfered with and in and of itself engaged in election / public opinion censorship interference, but also has engaged in economic terrorism, and interrupting the flow of commerce by destroying years of hard work by many like the following...
Western JournalismEarly on October 11, Matt woke up to find his small business gone. There had been no warning, no smoke, no heat — but his business was now a smoldering heap of ash. Facebook had burnt it to the ground.
Matt has operated his small digital publishing business since 2015. He spends his mornings like most business proprietors: After waking up, he reviews his numbers and checks messages to ensure his livelihood is running smoothly and as expected. It’s undoubtedly a more peaceful existence than Matt’s years in Army intelligence. His time in the military left him disabled, so his ability to work at least part of the time from his computer is a blessing.
It’s a good day for Matt when numbers are up and messages are down. As is usually the case for young entrepreneurs, no news is good news, because that means there are no fires to put out. But on October 11, Matt woke to the fire of his nightmares.
Matt is an online publisher. His business depends on his ability to drive page views to his website. Like many in the mid 2010s, Matt found Facebook to be good place to share articles and keep people coming back day after day. In those early days, growing Facebook pages was much easier. And getting more people to follow his Facebook page meant more people would see his articles.
Matt uses his website to tell stories about the thing that is most important to him — American politics. And his rise in online popularity proved he was not alone in his views. His activism mixed with his tough guy persona — “Do I look like a snowflake?” is his slogan on Twitter where he goes by “Matt Mountain” — resonated with many on Facebook. By last week, Matt had amassed an impressive 1.8 million Facebook followers on his pages.
But in a moment and without warning, Facebook took them all away.
On this fall morning, as Matt began his early-morning check of his site, he was greeted with a notification from his Facebook app that read simply, “account disabled.” He was obviously worried, so he immediately called his wife, who helps run the site, and asked her if she could access her Facebook account. She could not.
Facebook had unpublished all of Matt’s pages. Every page was inaccessible — effectively wiped from existence. The 1.8 million followers Matt had worked to connect with were no longer a click away. The 1.8 million followers who over the last three years had chosen to follow Matt’s site could no longer read the stories they loved or comment on the page with their friends about what mattered to them.
Matt checked his records. He had received nothing from Facebook. No warning. No deadline. No ultimatum. With two simple words, many years and countless hours of Matt’s work were forever wiped from Facebook.While Matt was scrambling to figure out what had happened, Facebook was announcing through a blog post that it had removed over 559 political pages and 251 accounts in a clampdown on what the company calls “inauthentic behavior” in the lead-up to the U.S midterm elections.
“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. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was,” wrote Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, and product manager Oscar Rodriguez.
Facebook’s pre-midterm purge included pages and accounts that Facebook described as “ad farms” that used the platform to earn money and “to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing,” rather than engage in “legitimate political debate.”
It appears that Facebook had strategically briefed The New York Times and The Washington Post ahead of the removals, given that within minutes of Facebook’s announcement, both papers published lengthy pieces describing the purge that included screenshots of the pages, something that could only have been obtained before the pages were removed.
After the purge, Facebook provided media outlets with only the same few examples: The Resistance, Reasonable People Unite, Reverb Press, Nation in Distress and Snowflakes. Four of these pages were liberal, while one was conservative. When asked for a complete list of pages, Facebook has repeatedly refused to release it. Even knowing the names of these five pages, journalists visiting the page are greeted with a message “Sorry, content isn’t available right now,” with no ability to see the page, previously posted content or examples of alleged “spam” actions.
Facebook claims the purged pages fell on both sides of the political spectrum, and originally declined to say if there were more pages on the right or the left, but a Facebook spokesperson later told Axios that “the takedowns may have impacted more right-leaning hyper-partisan Pages.”
Read the full article here - https://www.westernjournal.com/facebook-silences-political-speech/
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