Facebook accused of censorship after hundreds of US political pages purged
Facebook accused of censorship after hundreds of US
political pages purged
The removal of 800 pages and accounts came as a shock to
many on the left and right
Dan Tynan Tue 16 Oct 2018 20.44 EDT First published on
Tue 16 Oct 2018 04.00 EDT
On Thursday, Facebook announced it had removed more than
800 political pages and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and
spamming.
This week, the people behind the pages Facebook purged
for being inauthentic are angry. They feel they have been unfairly targeted for
practices they say are common across the entire social network.
And those who have built their livelihoods around the
power of Facebook to drive traffic to their websites are wondering what to do
next.
The controversy highlights the challenges Facebook and
other social media sites face when attempting to police the content their
members freely provide.
In a related move, on Tuesday, the company announced a
way for members to report inaccurate information designed to suppress voter
turnout, such as providing the wrong dates or methods for voting. Facebook has
been removing this form of misinformation since 2016.
As a private entity, Facebook can enforce its terms
however it sees fit, says the ACLU attorney Vera Eidelman. But this can have
serious free speech consequences, especially if the social network is
selectively enforcing its terms based on the content of the pages.
“Drawing the line between ‘real’ and ‘inauthentic’ views
is a difficult enterprise that could put everything from important political
parody to genuine but outlandish views on the chopping block,” says Eidelman.
“It could also chill individuals who only feel safe speaking out anonymously or
pseudonymously.”
Standard operating
procedures
In a statement posted to its online newsroom, Facebook
says it purged these pages because their owners were using fake accounts,
sharing the same content between multiple pages, and linking to ad-supported
websites it calls “ad farms”.
But what the social network calls spam, the owners of
these pages call standard procedures for operating on Facebook.
Nearly all the page owners contacted by the Guardian say
they use “backup” or fake accounts along with their real ones. They do it in
part to protect themselves from being targeted by political opponents and
having their real accounts end up in “Facebook jail”, says Edward Lynn, the
editor-in-chief of Reverb Press, a left-leaning news site whose Facebook page
disappeared yesterday.
I’m not a bad actor. I’m a legitimate
political activist
Chris Metcalf
Lynn says he discontinued the practice of allowing
writers to post under pseudonyms when he became editor-in-chief earlier this
year.
Matt Mountain, who operated six leftwing pages and shared
content between them, says “99% of the people I worked with have backup
accounts”. (“Matt Mountain” is a pseudonym; he declined to provide his legal
name.) Each page had its own particular liberal niche, he explains.
“Lock Him Up was for people who liked funny stuff,” he
says. “Proud Snowflake was for people interested in social justice issues.
Angry Americans was full of economic stuff. When a post did really well on one
page, and it fit the theme of one of the other pages, I’d share it across
them.”
Facebook removed his pages a month ago. Until yesterday’s
news, he thought his banishment was an isolated case.
“The problem with language like ‘inauthentic coordinated
behavior’ is that everyone in this space coordinates,” says Chris Metcalf, who
operated nine pages that were purged, including Reasonable People Unite, the
Resistance, and Snowflakes. “We swap each other’s best-performing content. I
shared content from many of the biggest, most reputable political pages, and
they shared mine. But I’m not a bad actor. I’m a legitimate political
activist.”
Emma Llansó, the director of the Free Expression Project
for the Center for Democracy and Technology, says Facebook is playing a
dangerous game trying to differentiate between legitimate political dialog and
spam.
“I absolutely believe savvy spammers realize that
polarizing political views drive a lot of traffic,” says Llansó. “But there are
also a lot of people who fervently believe their political views and are trying
to drive traffic to their posts and ideas. They’re probably also running ads on
their sites to make money off doing so. The line between spammer activity with
a financial motive and spammy-looking political advocacy is incredibly hard to
draw.”
‘A complete shock’
For many, the most frustrating aspect of the purge has
been their inability to reach someone at Facebook to make their complaints heard.
Mountain, a disabled veteran, says he stood outside the
company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters for a day last month holding up
a protest sign, trying to get someone to talk to him about why his pages were
taken down. No one did.
Brian Kolfage, another disabled veteran who administered
the Right Wing News page as well as three other conservative pages that were
removed, says his organization worked closely with Facebook. He shared copies
of emails with a Facebook executive, in which he tried to set up a meeting to
talk about how his pages could adhere to the network’s evolving policies
regarding political content.
I don’t think Facebook wants to fix this. They
just want politics out, unless it’s coming from the mainstream media
Matt Mountain
The meeting was abruptly cancelled. A week later his
pages were gone.
“I’ve talked with Facebook maybe 50 times in the last few
months,” he says. “Not once did they ever say we broke any rules or did
something wrong. If they had an issue, they could have brought it up. We had a
really close working relationship. That’s why this whole thing is a complete
shock.”
Lynn found out Reverb’s page was gone after reading about
it in the Washington Post.
“They know who I am, I have a profile on their services,
it’s my real name,” he says. “All they needed to do was reach out. I would have
taken Mark Zuckerberg’s phone call. But I guess they’ve decided that they just
don’t want to.”
Metcalf says he has no problem with Facebook taking down
pages peddling disinformation and conspiracy theories, but that his don’t fit
that description.
“I was happy to see Alex Jones go,” he says. “But this
isn’t about enforcing violations of Facebook’s terms. This is about Facebook
repeatedly moving the goalposts with vaguely worded standards and then
arbitrarily enforcing the rules because they’re fearful of congressional
oversight.”
Under intense scrutiny from regulators, and with the midterms
coming up, Facebook may have simply wanted to rid itself of another potential
headache. Instead, it’s created a new one.
“I don’t think Facebook wants to fix this,” says
Mountain. “I think they just want politics out, unless it’s coming from the
mainstream media.”
Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
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