US conservative non-profit PragerU has a long history of fighting to maintain its presence on some of the biggest centralized social media platforms, and after a recent suspension on Twitter, the educational group is facing more pressure on Facebook.
The charge, as always, is nebulous: a violation of community standards. But this could lead to PragerU’s Facebook page getting unpublished, i.e., making it invisible to anybody except its admins. That’s according to reports citing the group.
But the cause is specific: the concerted effort of the biggest and most influential US tech media to remove any trace of footage reporting about medical staff speaking at the recent America’s Frontline Doctors’ event in Washington DC, that promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine as a drug that can be effective either to prevent, or alleviate the effects of the disease behind the now almost half a year long, crippling coronavirus epidemic ravaging Europe, the US, and the rest of the world.
However, any mention of hydroxychloroquine is treated like a terrorist alert emergency on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook (despite the fact many countries administer the drug officially, as we speak) – while the “low” response time to remove this content is referenced basically as a cardinal sin.
What the Facebook “unpublishing” would actually mean is that the PragerU page will eventually be deleted, Breitbart reported, citing its sources in the organization as saying that Facebook was now going after old post retroactively to flag or delete them – in this way building up the case to eventually accuse the conservative outfit of multiple violations and getting rid of it altogether. Right now, the page is labeled as “at risk” of getting unpublished.
PragerU is no stranger to troubles on giant social networks – previously, YouTube has gone aggressively against its videos by placing them in restricted mode. This led to the 2019 federal lawsuit against YouTube owner Google for unfair flagging and demonetization of the channel, accusing the company of violations of US Constitution’s First Amendment free speech protections. (The lawsuit went nowhere, as US courts dismissed it.)
But PragerU also had skirmishes with Facebook before, most notably in 2018 when several videos were first removed, to then be restored.
