In mid October, Facebook and Twitter jointly purged their sites of hundreds of independent news and opinion pages, claiming they were engaged in "inauthentic activity"
The affected pages include Nation in Distress, Reverb Press, Reasonable People Unite, The Resistance, Right Wing News and Snowflakes.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the pages were among those removed, but said it would not release a complete list. Edward Lynn, editor-in-chief at Reverb Press, found out his page had been removed when he read a news story about it this morning. He hotly disputes Facebook’s claims that his site is “inauthentic”.
“We are a legitimate news publisher,” he said. “We are not fake news. We are not misinformation. We are not foreign. We are simply a small independent news publication trying to grow.”
Independent journalists Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague, from the website Gray Zone, argue Facebook's claims to be removing spam and other inauthentic content are just plain lies. Instead, they say it's part of a much larger US / NATO government project to politically censor social media sites by proxy through corporate partnerships.
This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion.
John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”
And in their research, they got one of the architects of this policy, Jamie Fly, to admit as much on the record. Fly is a well connected political operative, having worked for the George W. Bush Administration in various mid-level positions on the National Security Council, having worked for the Republican Senator Marco Rubio, and written for the NeoCon publication The Weekly Standard.
Now it seems his primary objective is to censor independent media.
Jamie Fly was interviewed on C-SPAN's Washington Journal last September 5th. His statements are instructive. (Steemit wouldn't let me embed the video)
In conjunction with the Gray Zone article, Blumenthal and Sprague were interviewed by the independent site The Real News. Here are the two segments, of just under 40 minutes combined.
If you care about access to alternative voices and not being force-spoon fed news and opinion by government approved sources, do pay close attention to this story. It's not getting enough coverage.