Facebook purged more than 800 accounts last week, continuing its scorched-earth campaign of eradicating dissent as Americans prepare to go to the polls. The social media platform is nicely settling into its role as official censor, working hand in glove with the imperialist Atlantic Council to silence all popular voices to the left and right of neoliberal orthodoxy. As the boundaries of acceptable political discourse narrow online, Big Tech has been drafted to do Big Brother’s dirty work – the methodical dismantling of First Amendment protections behind the smokescreen of private enterprise.
On Thursday, the social media platform issued a press release explaining that the offending pages were engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – self-promoting with fake accounts and circular links, a practice common to many news pages on Facebook – and even admitted that such behavior was “often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate.” There was no explanation of how they distinguished the behavior of, say, a progressive antiwar blog from a Washington Post columnist, or why they would censor the former and not the latter.
Establishment media outlets like the New York Times eagerly parroted the press release, dismissing the purge victims as dishonest spammers preying on impressionable users, even opining that there was something awfully Russian about the whole business, as if the Kremlin had invented clickbait.
But many of the deleted pages were genuine alt-media sites with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers – from AntiMedia and Free Thought Project on the Left to Nation in Distress and RightWingNews on the Right. Popular pages dedicated to exposing the horrors of the American police state like Cop Block and Police the Police also got the boot. When they took to Twitter to protest, many were removed from there as well – AntiMedia and Free Thought Project had their Twitter accounts suspended within hours of the Facebook purge, as did AntiMedia publisher Carey Weidler.
One Twitter user received a followup message thanking them for a report against AntiMedia they did not make, indicating there might be more going on here than meets the eye. The message is especially intriguing given recent admissions from Facebook that at least 90 million accounts may have been hacked. If certain entities are spoofing abuse reports in order to have pages deplatformed whose politics they disagree with – or actually hacking third parties in order to use their accounts to report those pages – users need to know (I have personally heard from a few others who received these messages – if this has happened to you please send me your story, with screenshots if possible).
I just got a notification that my “report” of @antimedia was successful, however, not only do I not recall reporting it, I don’t know of it at all – they aren’t on my block list, where anyone I’ve reported ends up – should I be CONcerned? pic.twitter.com/HDhOUyGDmD
— Which Hunt-New (@jlcphotother) October 12, 2018
Facebook’s press release states that “people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.” Facebook has proven since the very early days that they are anything but trustworthy – from Mark Zuckerberg’s eager collaboration with the NSA’s PRISM program to the partnership with the pro-NATO Atlantic Council to the platform’s ultimate admission that basically everyone’s data has been compromised at this point. Anyone who “shares” on Facebook at this point is deliberately ignoring reams of proof that the platform is not “a place for friends.”
While Facebook has always been in the pocket of the security state, its alliance with the Atlantic Council earlier this year ushered in an Orwellian new era. A press release gushed that the think tank, which boasts such esteemed warmongers as Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Condoleezza Rice on its Board, would serve as the “eyes and ears” of Facebook so the platform could play a “positive role” in ensuring democracy was practiced correctly in the future. Since then, its news feed has been cleansed of actual news and political writers have seen their audience numbers plummet as their posts are hidden for running afoul of proprietary algorithms.
In August, hundreds more accounts got the axe after cybersecurity firm FireEye linked them (very tenuously, in some cases) to Iran and Russia. The smoking gun? “Coordinated inauthentic behavior” geared toward “shaping a message favorable to Iran’s national interests.” Anti-war activists were put on notice. One need only post “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes” to have one’s Facebook account – which Zuckerberg wants to see become an internet drivers’ license – yanked for failure to toe the line.
As Americans, denial is our national pastime, and plenty of Facebook users will remain on the platform until they themselves are caught in the wrongthink dragnet. The use of “spam” as the rationale for removing these pages is no accident – like “hate speech,” the term inspires a visceral negative reaction while lacking a definite meaning.
Spammers are less than human – often automated bots that seem to exist just to irritate us. We do not care what happens to spammers, any more than we care what happens to the “haters” we hear about in the news but have never met. The mainstream media encourages this mentality by smearing the deplatformed users as the equivalent of 2016’s Russian trolls – worse, because they’re essentially betraying their government by promoting wrongthink in their fellow Americans.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand why the media establishment might be cheering on and enabling Big Tech’s censorship of alternative voices. As the election approaches, the establishment is panicking because they have been unable to fully regain control of the discourse.
Having long since jettisoned fact-checking and journalistic integrity in order to more effectively fearmonger, mainstream media lacks any concrete advantage over the competition, and more people than ever are turning to independent media for their news. As a result, the establishment has lost every single pitched information battle since the election. Kavanaugh’s confirmation? The media wanted to see him strung up by the balls without so much as an indictment, let alone a trial, even though as a Bush minion he was effectively one of theirs, but he’s now ensconced in the Supreme Court. The Helsinki summit? The media shrieked for a solid week that Trump had sold the nation out to Putin for a football and a pat on the head; missing evolutionary link John Brennan all but called for a military coup, but nothing happened. Both media events revealed just how impotent they have become regarding their ability to change the facts on the ground.
This is not to say they have no influence, however. The nation remains crippled by the military-industrial leeches sucking it dry through multiple wars, many undeclared. The media marches in lockstep cheering on every increase in military spending, every missile dropped on a Yemeni wedding party or Syrian child. Americans have become hyper-partisan even in our personal lives, a self-perpetuating feedback loop the media set off in 2016 with a dozen “Boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse like Trump? Dump that scumbag!” articles, no doubt due for a revival with thoughtful meditations on how we should avoid family at Thanksgiving if they voted the wrong way a few weeks before. The establishment media and Big Tech are collaborating to foster this ugly with-us-or-against-us climate, forcing us to choose between a “blue wave” or “red wave” when both are repulsive tides of sewage, reassuring us all will be well if we just hold our noses and vote the party line.
Only independent media permits sanity and reality to intrude on the delusional fantasy fed us by the ruling class. Dismissing the victims of the latest Facebook purge as “spammers” is the cowardly act of a dying species. The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the hagiographers of hegemony must join the rest of the dinosaurs in history’s tarpits.
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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
