“I contributed to Facebook’s success and growth!” Jason Bassler said with some frustration this morning, a day after the social media giant unpublished the page for a media site he founded, The Free Thought Project. “I decided to create content day after day. Now they piss on us.”
Facebook announced Thursday that it was deleting 559 pages and 251 accounts that it claims were breaking Facebook’s rules against spam and “inauthentic” behavior. The Free Thought Project was one of the demolished pages, along with another of Bassler’s efforts, Police the Police. Both pages that produced content—stories, memes, and videos—that focused on government behavior and were shared widely among fans, particularly libertarians.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, and Oscar Rodriguez, a Facebook product manager, have explained the purge by writing that they don’t think these sites were really trying to engage in political debate but were in fact spam factories trying to make money:
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. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.
Bassler says that’s not what was happening. Bassler has editing privileges on a bunch of pages that were affected by the ban, and he shared a picture on Facebook on what it looked like to see all these pages depublished:
Screenshot courtesy of Jason Bassler
Bassler explains though that this was the result of networking between pages of similar interest, not a handful of people trying to artificially inflate their own popularity. He has made five pages himself, and he was assisting with these others.
“When we first started these pages in 2012, we started networking with different page owners realized we could do more to benefit each other by helping each other,” he says. “What we did and what we’ve done for the past six years is help each other out by giving each other information.”
Bassler isn’t the only one confused. Over at the Washington Post, James Reader, who runs a progressive site and page called Reverb Reader, complains about Facebook “changing the rules as they went.” Many of them, like Bassler, used networking to build a community to reach a larger audience—a normal sort of organizing that Facebook now deems “inauthentic.”
The Free Thought Project had 3 million followers and Police the Police nearly 2 million. Some of the stories highlighted and shared on their website will be familiar to Reason readers, like the recent case of the Kansas man handcuffed on his own property by police who had confused him with a burglar. Bassler says he also got stories from people reaching out to them, upset when the general media reported only the police’s side of the story. Bassler describes himself as a libertarian anarchist, but he says he’s tried hard not to push an ideological agenda onto his pages, focusing instead on government accountability.
But The Free Thought Project also ran afoul of fact-checkers, particularly Snopes, which has accused them of misrepresenting stories on several occasions and which frequently describes them as a conspiracy site. The Free Thought Project provided coverage of veterans group in Arizona that claimed to have found a “bunker” being used for child trafficking. It was actually an abandoned homeless camp, and there’s no evidence that there was any sort of human trafficking happening there.
After Snopes and the Associated Press reported that the claims were fake, The Free Thought Project defended itself by saying it never actually said the child trafficking claims were true in the first place. And it has struck back at Snopes for “debunking” claims from The Free Thought Project that it didn’t actually make.
Bassler says he’s had four stories pulled from Facebook after fact-checkers deemed them inaccurate. He has had two of those decisions reversed. He claims that Snopes has a grudge against them after The Free Thought Project delved into the site’s finances. Snopes, meanwhile, has put up a page debunking claims from the Free Thought Project that Snopes is trying to “shut down conversation” about child sex trafficking.
It’s all very messy, but even though Facebook is turning to Snopes to assist with fact-checking what gets shared on the platform, Facebook’s latest round of page deletions makes no mention of fact-checking problems as a justification. Reason has reached out to both Facebook and Snopes to see if this fact-checking fight played any role the decision to shut down The Free Thought Project’s page or any others affected by the purge. We have not yet gotten a response.
In the meantime, Bassler says he’s going to “fight tooth and nail” to try to get his Facebook pages restored. The Free Thought Project has officially responded to having its Facebook page deleted here.
Hmmmm….,am assuming none have a fecesbook account here,perhaps a fake one checked on @ say a library computer to see what is happening behind enemy lines online would be the only reason,at least that I could see.
What’s really shocking and scary is they don’t even seem to care that their draconian policies against free speech confirm they’re an arm of the deep state. Their mandate is clear: shut down anyone who criticizes the deep state and ensure the Democrats regain the House and Senate so they can continue their crime spree unimpeded. They know the government won’t do anything about it because they’re just implementing shadow government policy.
#cancelfacebook
Parallel systems.
Dutch,
we need a team of coders to create parallel systems. I’m betting it would be easy and quick. What say you?
Really you all pissed over that?
Look at the truth here and no one can change it…
We civil society organizations who work for public welfare in Canada, depending heavily on dedicated volunteers, are constantly frustrated in our efforts to obtain government funding to meet urgent human and environmental needs. We are repeatedly informed that there is never enough money available, and that we must endure austerity in order that growing public debts can be overcome. We are told that public funds—essential for infrastructure repair, for health and medical care, for education, for poverty reduction, for social justice, and for environmental protection—not only cannot be increased despite urgent unmet needs, but must be cut, and public assets for providing public services, must be privatized.
We are deeply concerned about government deficits and debt, and also about the heavy personal debts borne by Canadian citizens. Indeed we believe that governmental and personal debt should be taken far more seriously, and dealt with by far more radical means than the usual austerity programs involving cuts to social programs and privatization. Such measures have already been experienced as profoundly unjust. They shift debt burdens to individual Canadian citizens, especially to the most needy, bankrupting and impoverishing many.
Meanwhile, we see that wealthy individuals and corporations receive tax cuts they do not need, and that they often use tax havens to escape such taxes as they do owe. Lowering taxes for the rich is regularly justified by the argument that they invest their savings to create employment, but we see little evidence to support this claim. We see further that our federal government makes billions available for controversial warfare, for expensive, inappropriate new weapon systems, and for unnecessary new prisons, while poverty and environmental damage continue to increase. A just tax system, wisely spent, could go a long way toward promoting the human and environmental welfare to which we are committed. But changes in our tax system are not enough to deal adequately with our needs, including our debt problems.
Crucial to our governmental debt problems is the fact that our governments at all levels borrow from private banks and from other private money-lenders, and pay interest on these debts. Each year governments across Canada presently pay some $60 billion in interest on their debts, and as these debts increase, with interest rates probably rising, this enormous annual burden for taxpayers will increase. But this interest expense is not necessary.
Through our Bank of Canada, which has been publicly owned since 1938, the federal government has the power to borrow money in huge quantities essentially interest-free, and to make such funds available not only for its own use, but also for provincial and municipal expenditures. Such borrowing helped Canada to get out of the Great Depression, and to finance its participation in World War II. Continuance of this practice until 1974 played a key role in creating Canada’s post-war prosperity and in making possible its cherished social programs.
As federal governments, which control the Bank of Canada, increasingly catered to the private commercial banks, this practice greatly declined. Governments at all levels throughout Canada increasingly had to resort to borrowing from the private banks and other private money-lenders, including foreign sources. Moreover, the Bank of Canada in the late 1970s began raising interest rates as its primary tool for fighting inflation, driving the economy into recession in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s. These changes from the original mandate of the Bank of Canada, combined with tax reductions for the wealthy, rapidly increased the debts of governments at all levels, justifying major cuts to social programs. Following some recent federal government economic stimulus following the 2008 global financial meltdown, the austerity agenda is bringing ever more devastating cuts to our valued public services.
In line with policies pursued through the Bank of Canada between 1938 and 1974, our federal government could revive the powers of the Bank of Canada to replace gradually interest-bearing debt carried by governments at all levels with interest-free debt, and could make available interest-free loans for new projects. This change in monetary policy, combined with changes in tax policy, would make available each year tens of billions of dollars urgently needed for actions, which can only be taken by governments, to protect our environment from such dire threats as climate change, to rebuild and to improve our public infrastructure, and to strengthen social programs meeting human needs—notably medical care. Through such interest-free loans for infrastructure, for example, our governments, instead of paying for interest that could double or triple their investment expenses, could be paying only for the principal, thus freeing tax income for other programs. Moreover, government-funded construction would create jobs, stimulate additional economic activity, and significantly increase tax receipts.
Those who oppose the revival of this monetary policy invariably charge that it would be inflationary, even though it was managed in the past without significant inflation. As the government through the Bank of Canada creates growing quantities of our money supply, the power of private banks to create money needs to be restrained, as was possible until 1991, when the reserve requirement for the private banks was surreptitiously removed from the Bank Act. This provision to the Bank Act needs to be restored to prevent inflation, as can readily be done.
Therefore, we Canadian civil society organizations, who work for public welfare, call on our federal government to revive the powers of the Bank of Canada to provide funding to all levels of government in Canada, largely with interest-free loans, as was done between 1938 and 1974 with very low inflation, enabling our nation to break out of the Great Depression, to shoulder extraordinary responsibilities during World War II, and to prosper while building our infrastructure and highly valued social programs during some thirty post-war years. We Canadians now urgently need a renaissance of these powers of our Bank of Canada.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dcSCLYBQqRw
http://www.comer.org/index.htm
Just make sure you have enuf money available to house your migrant africans in nice hotels. Otherwise they might migrate elsewhere, and you dont want that.
So you cant deny a gay couple acake, even if there are other bakeries, but you can deny someones right tto free speech even if there is no other platform. Got it.
Time to start a libertarian alternative to Fuckbook.
Anyone who still has an active Facebook account is a complete moron.
Why would anyone voluntarily submit to an organization committed to government spying and suppression of your rights as a Citizen? Anyone who subscribes to Facebook deserves to be under the repression of tyranny.