Facebook and Twitter purge well over 800 accounts and pages for not meeting the narrative

[Hands]

https://heavy.com/news/2018/10/facebook-purge-list-deleted-accounts/

https://www.rt.com/usa/441040-facebook-deplatforms-political-pages/

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=59193

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-tempts-political-backlash-with-massive-purge-o-1829690016

Gizmodo, whilst towing the FB party line, helpfully tells us that FB had told NYT and the WP ahead of time. It's unclear if Twitter also informed any MSM outlets.

This initially looked like an attack on the left (again, some of you may remember FB abruptly banning TeleSUR english in July) but as more accounts are revealed it seems like partisan news outlets, accountability pages for the police and govt, pro Socialist and Right-Libertarian pages and anti war groups were targeted en masse. Unlike with Alex Jones and Infowars, a lot of these pages havent actually lied or presented anything fictitious or intended to incite violence. Most havent broken any of FB's ToS

Facebook and Twitter are private entities, they ultimately can do what they want, but does this massive affront to both the First Amendment and to open media worry anyone else? As much as I hated some of the pages that went, they didn't outright fabricate things. They weren't really any worse than FOX or CNN for twisting and omitting information.

 

[Alexander Nicholi]

It's very unfortunate for the time being. In the long haul though, I think we're going to see mass-scale brain drain on these platforms, as the bannings are dogmatic in motivation. They'll continue to be popular as long as they sustain, but you won't hear intelligent thought much at all anymore as folks capable of muttering that are liable to say things that are "problematic" (translation: heretical).

The brains will drain away from there and probably into federated platforms like Mastodon. It's already proven capable as we've seen the reaction a lot of servers have had to pawoo.net run by Pixiv for hosting NSFW erotica there - if you have cultural/legal protection elsewhere in the world, this makes it feasible to sidestep the megacorps.