Accusations of unfair censoring and bias leveled against Facebook by conservative figures, including publishers, persist – and will soon take the form of a protest.
The protest is set to take place on May 30,2019, during the social media behemoth’s annual shareholder meeting, and will come amid growing concerns that the company may be going after conservative voices in a systematic fashion, with a clear political purpose in mind.
https://twitter.com/KernUnited/status/1128802711590227969
And that’s regardless of whether or not these users had actually violated Facebook’ terms of service.
Cited as one example of this practice is the banning of Paul Joseph Watson – a British host and YouTube personality. Watson has apparently kicked off the platform without breaking its rules, but merely by association – to Alex Jones and his InfoWars.
It’s no secret that Facebook is well aware of the power of its reach, and can and does fine-tune the way content is surfaced and promoted – but that’s normally for commercial purposes. However, the Gateway Pundit provides numbers that suggest some of the most influential conservative sources have been removed in order to diminish their influence.
The article includes a Columbia Journalism Review media “influence map” from October 2016, and then marks those conservative outlets that have since faced Facebook’s clampdown – and it’s a very large number.
Thus Floyd Brown’s Western Journal and Jared Vallorani’s Klicked Media, and associated websites lost a total of more than 1.5 billion page-views on Facebook from early 2017 until a year later.
These dates suggest that the push against conservative publishers started happened after the US presidential election of 2016, won by Donald Trump – as a direct response to the result, and a deliberate attempt to reverse what had been an organic trend of conservative influence on Facebook before the election.
In fact, Trump himself seems to be in agreement as he recently retweeted a story about this very topic and Facebook’s behavior, the article mentions.
The Gateway Pundit supports the claims about Facebook’s censorship and bias by quoting a Project Veritas report from February, that cites a whistleblower from the company itself.
