Facebook Speech Suppression Reaches a New Low

“A coordinated and well-funded assault on the First Amendment is well underway. So egregious are these attacks that even the leftist ACLU’s legislative counsel notes, ‘It should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.’”

Fortunately, things for Twitter have changed since our own Mark Alexander mentioned the above ACLU quote. But the social media monster Facebook (Meta) continues down the path of conservative speech suppression.

The Patriot Post joined Facebook in 2009, seeing the opportunity to reach millions of people with the message of Liberty. Our efforts have resulted in a substantial following of over three-quarters of a million people, with the ability to reach millions on the platform. Compared to our peers, we have some of the most engaged followers on the platform — and thus leftist types at the Big Tech behemoth took notice.

We had a good run for over a decade building our Facebook presence (and, subsequently, building Facebook itself). That all changed in January 2020, when we received a Hate Speech strike for telling the truth. This unleashed an unending parade of strikes in the run-up to the presidential election, leaving our page in perpetual peril of deletion and severely limiting our reach. We have received at least 21 fact-checks and at least six Community Guidelines violations since, mostly for utterly absurd reasons — none for legitimate ones. In most cases, we have been given little to no recourse to resolve these. Indeed, what we have experienced has been unending capriciousness, lack of recourse, and civil rights violations.

Today, we stand on the other side of a newly kindled offensive, having now four “violations” that existentially threaten our page. Over 750K people have intentionally followed us for the purpose of seeing our content, but only a tiny fraction of them see anything we post. To shed light on the sheer absurdity of these most recent strikes, a brief recounting is in order.

Here are the causes for lost traction on Facebook:

Fact-checks. Facebook uses (read: pays) “independent” third-party fact-checkers to supposedly combat the spread of false information on the platform without bias. If original content is directly cited by a fact-checker, the author may contest it with them and might have a chance to reverse it. If it has been reposted, even just as similar content that is not expressly cited by the fact-checker, there is no recourse — just punishment. Due to the third-party nature, Facebook does not help in these instances, based on our experience. One of the most famous labels fact-checkers use is the “missing context” category. This makes it easy to fact-check just about anything that differs from their opinion.

Community Standards/Guidelines violations. We can understand a platform wishing to limit things such as adult content or spam, but in our experience nearly every Community Standards violation levied against us has been a “gotcha” situation based on a technicality. For example, in a recent violation we received a strike for promoting “Dangerous Organizations or Individuals” because in 2021 we posted an editorial column summarizing the rise of political Islam (more on that later). There are countless examples where Facebook flat-out gets what we’re saying wrong (willfully or otherwise) — but when we contest the ruling, 99% of the time it upholds its decision, or there is a convenient “technical error” that does not allow us to submit a claim.

Facebook limiting political content. After using political content to drive massive growth and engagement on its platform (and collect huge sums of money for itself), Facebook decided in late 2021 to limit political content on the platform. This directly impacts our ability to spread the message of Liberty, and it comes, again, after we expended significant effort to build the platform over many years.

Here are the ways we have lost traction on Facebook:

Page no longer recommended.

Distribution in news feed reduced.

Ability to advertise was taken away for two years

Page at risk of being unpublished.

Our message of Liberty intentionally hidden from people who want to see it.

Traffic from Facebook to our website reduced by over 85%.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/98678-facebook-speech-suppression-reaches-a-new-low-2023-07-10

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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