Only four weeks before the midterm elections, without any warning, Facebook shut down 559 Pages and 251 accounts that violated their “spam” and coordinated “inauthentic behavior” policies.
According to The Gateway Pundit, Facebook said most of those affected were political pages.
This year, we’ve enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate, including in the US, the Middle East, Russia and the UK. But the bulk of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook is spam that’s typically motivated by money, not politics. And the people behind it are adapting their behavior as our enforcement improves.
Facebook says the enforcement was based on violations of Facebook’s existing spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior policies, the type of content posted by all accounts impacted was not a factor.
Several hours later, it was discovered that most of the purged political pages were pages with right-leaning views.
“What big tech has done to conservative and other undesirable publishers is nothing short of a digital Kristallnacht.”
— Andrew Marcus, filmmaker
The Gateway Pundit spoke with two of the top conservative publishers in America.
Floyd Brown is a conservative author, speaker and media commentator. In 2008 Floyd launched Western Journal which quickly became one of the top conservative websites in America. By 2016 Floyd’s organization of Western Journal and other conservative websites under his umbrella had more than a billion page views. Since 2016 Floyd’s organization lost 75% of its Facebook traffic.
Likewise, we spoke with Jared Vallorani from Klicked Media. Jared traveled to Washington DC with The Gateway Pundit and website owners at 100%FedUp in June to discuss Facebook targeting against conservative publishers with Republican lawmakers. Jared told The Gateway Pundit his organization Klicked Media, which hosts over 60 conservative websites, lost 400 million page views from Facebook in the last six months if you compare the traffic to a year ago. Jared said, “We lost 70% to 80% of our traffic if you compare January to May 2017 vs Jan to May 2018.”
If you combine the total number of page-views lost by just these two conservative online publishers you are looking at a loss of over 1.5 billion page-views from Facebook in one year.
These are numbers from just two of the top conservative publishers in America. This does not include the thousands of other conservative publishers across the country who lost all of their traffic coming from Facebook. Here at The Gateway Pundit, our Facebook traffic has been effectively eliminated after we were ranked as the 4th most influential conservative publisher in the 2016 election.
The Gateway Pundit has been reporting on this for several months now. In July, they released a study where they looked at several top conservative websites and discovered that the publishers had lost an average of 93% of their Facebook traffic.
This is a bloodbath. Facebook has wiped out conservative content to American subscribers.
Now, only two weeks after the election, Facebook is facing another controversy, but this time it involves a post made by a father auctioning off his 16-yr-old daughter to the highest bidder, that took Facebook 15 days to remove.
According to CNN – Facebook has come under fire for a “barbaric use of technology” that allowed the sale of a child bride to be held on its site.
An auction was held on the social media platform for a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan which sought dowry for her hand in marriage.
Facebook said the post was taken down as soon as the company learned of it, but that wasn’t until after the girl was married.
According to children’s rights organization Plan International, the girl was bid on by five men, some of whom were reportedly high-ranking South Sudanese government officials.
Activists are concerned that this auction — for which the father reportedly received 500 cows, three cars and $10,000 in exchange for his daughter — could inspire other families to use social media sites to receive larger dowries.
Plan International’s country director in South Sudan, George Otim, said: “That a girl could be sold for marriage on the world’s biggest social networking site in this day and age is beyond belief.”
He added: “This barbaric use of technology is reminiscent of latter-day slave markets.”
Facebook told CNN that its platform was used for the bidding, which started on October 25, and that it removed the post on November 9 — 15 days later.
“Any form of human trafficking — whether posts, pages, ads or groups is not allowed on Facebook. We removed the post and permanently disabled the account belonging to the person who posted this to Facebook,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
