Facebook has removed – in what some are calling the “Facebook purge”- more than 800 pages and accounts. Although the social media giant says those deleted were rule breakers engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” some of their defenders have claimed the sweeping action amounts to an attack on independent media, both representing left and right-wing political views. Some of the sites – like “Right Wing News” and “The Anti Media” – were well-known and had millions of likes. The founders of some of the sites have taken to other platforms to deny Facebook’s claims. You can read some of their responses later in this article. “Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action,” read a blog post from Facebook. “Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate,” Facebook claimed. The platform added that “a lot of the spam we see today is different. The people behind it create networks of Pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names. They post clickbait posts on these Pages to drive people to websites that are entirely separate from Facebook and seem legitimate, but are actually ad farms.” However, reaction was strong on Twitter, where people accused Facebook of targeting independent voices and others noted that some pages were suspended on Twitter too. Pages removed both supported and opposed President Donald Trump. Some were sites that monitored police corruption. Facebook takes down Reverb Press, and Reasonable People Unite, shutting down pages left and right. Only the corporatist "mainstream" is safe. — Antisocial Butterfly (@BartoGeo) October 12, 2018 NEW: “I would gladly abide by Facebook’s terms if I understood what they were,” said Chris Metcalf, the publisher of the left-leaning “Reasonable People Unite” which was shut down along with eight additional Facebook pages. w/ @lizzadwoskin https://t.co/W01C3AvI4N — Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) October 11, 2018 Who was purged? Facebook has not released a full list, but some of those affected had millions of followers and have taken to Twitter and other methods to explain their side of the story. Facebook gave Gizmodo a few of the sites: “The Resistance, Reasonable People Unite, Reverb Press, Nation in Distress, Snowflakes.” According to Gizmodo, the October 11, 2018 purge was of sites likely run by Americans and is thus different than the earlier purge of Russian sites trying to influence the presidential election. Facebook has been under growing pressure in Congress for perceived political bias, which the company denies. The New York Times reported that sites purged included “Right Wing News, which had more than 3.1 million followers, and left-wing pages that included the Resistance and Reverb Press, which had 240,000 and 816,000 followers.” The Washington Post reported that some purged accounts “had been in existence for years,” and “amassed millions of followers,” supporting both “conservative or liberal ideas.” The Post reported that Facebook only named five of the purged sites. I just confirmed online with a lot of Facebook friends. CopBlock and Police the Police, as well as anti-drug war pages taken down. @AntiMedia’s FB as well. It seems cop and government accountability pages were major targets. — Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) October 11, 2018 Some other journalists have reported lists of some of those deleted: As part of its purge, Facebook has removed the pages of several police accountability/watchdog/critic groups, including Cop Block, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police. They've also apparently severely restricted activity for the Photography Is Not a Crime page. — Radley Balko (@radleybalko) October 12, 2018 Facebook has removed "559 Pages and 251 accounts" in the US "that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior." They include: -Nation in Distress -Reasonable People Unite -The Resistance -Reverb Press -Right Wing News -Snowflakes — Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) October 11, 2018 Here is information on some of the sites that say they were purged by Facebook. Free Thought Project Fb took down the free thought project's page. Just tried to access it here on Twitter, and it seems to also be down. Here's their web page: https://t.co/IB0kejSVUh — Zap Radon (@zapradon) October 12, 2018 The Free Thought Project wrote on Twitter, “Facebook has unpublished our page After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back.” However, shortly thereafter, its Twitter page was suspended too. The Facebook page is indeed gone. When you go to the site’s website, a message appears that reads, “Thanks to a coordinated attack on independent media by the establishment, this website is at risk of shutting down due to our ads being pulled and organic reach throttled. We need your help to survive, click below to see how you can make sure we stay around.” The page’s about me section calls it, “a hub for Free Thinking conversations about the promotion of liberty and the daunting task of government accountability.” Jason Bassler, of the Free Thought Project, wrote on Facebook, “So it appears that Facebook has unpublished our page along with at least 28 more pages that we currently know of including personal profiles. Yes, you read that correct. After 5 years of hard work, literally working 7 days a week to share information and build fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page The Free Thought Project (3.1 million fans) as well as Police the Police (1.9 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. It is still live on their site, but we can no longer control it or post on it. This is truly an outrage. I’ve put up with a lot of sh*t over the years with facebook, but this crosses the f*cking line. We will do everything we can to recover our pages and fight back against this.” One man wrote on his comment thread, “Im sorry about your page man. I shared The Free Thought Project more than most pages. Its so fkn angering. Tyranny. Disguised so well for all the sheep too!” You can look up ratings for the some of the deleted sites on MediaBiasFactCheck.com. For the Free Thought Project, it says, “The Free Thought Project reports some credible news as well as conspiracies such as Chemtrails, Geoengineering by the government and anti-vaccination propaganda. The Free Thought Project also uses sensational headlines that favor the left such as this: WATCH: Trump Melts Down as Man Holds Up Photo of Him and Billionaire Pedophile Epstein at Rally.” Some sites have criticized that fact-checking site’s methods, though. Right Wing News Most of the pages FB has removed in the past for rules violations were small and niche. But this batch has a few very big ones. Here are Right Wing News and Reverb Press compared to, say, Newsweek. pic.twitter.com/n21iRXz5eu — Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) October 11, 2018 Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin spoke out in defense of John Hawkins, the founder of Right Wing News. Hawkins recently stopped running the Right Wing News page, though. Hawkins wrote on Twitter, “So, the NYT did a hit piece on me today regarding the Facebook page I used to run. After that, Twitter suspended one of my accounts with no reason why given. Since Twitter & FB may be about to zero me out, can’t hurt to go on.” When I shut down Right Wing News, I wrote a column talking about it at Townhall. Facebook claims it killed a lot of conservative pages because of "spam farms" & "false stories."<doc-sep>In its post, Facebook described the pages, with names like “Nation in Distress” and “Reverb Press,” as largely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spam tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads. The company said it was not taking issue with the nature of the content posted by the pages, but with the behaviors of the accounts, which used inappropriate tactics to artificially inflate their influence. Some of the pages and accounts had millions of followers.<doc-sep>Photo : Getty Facebook has been fending off accusations of censorship and bias against conservatives over the last year or so and just ahead of the mid-term elections it has made a risky decision. On Thursday, the company announced that it had removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts for rule violations. It said many of the accounts were engaged in spreading political content. Advertisement Since the 2016 president election, Facebook has been under pressure to address the issue of “fake news” being spread on its platform. Fake news means different things to different people—for some it’s factual information they disagree with, for others it means completely inaccurate information that’s passed off as journalism. Facebook has focused on disrupting foreign influence campaigns that are designed to sway political opinion in the U.S. from outside its borders. In recent months, we’ve seen Facebook take down networks of pages that it claimed were conducting disinformation campaigns from Russia and Iran. What makes today’s removals different is that Facebook claims the pages and accounts were likely built and run by Americans. In a blog post, Facebook cybersecurity policy head Nathaniel Gleicher and product manager Oscar Rodriguez explained that the 800 removals were prompted by violations of its rules against spam and “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The post spends a lot of time explaining that most of the spam Facebook sees is financially motivated but it makes it clear that the pages it’s speaking about today were at least using political content to drive traffic to their ad-supported websites. It explains that these bad actors were using multiple accounts with the same name, or fraudulent accounts under fake names, and cross-promoting between groups to amplify its spread. This passage is all you really need to read: Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate. No accounts were named in the post, and it doesn’t even give any examples of the type of content they were pushing. We reached out to Facebook to ask for a complete list of the removals and a spokesperson told us that information will not be released. Facebook provided the following examples: The Resistance, Reasonable People Unite, Reverb Press, Nation in Distress, Snowflakes. It’s likely Facebook wants to keep this information to itself in order to avoid giving any political factions ammunition to cry foul. It appears Facebook briefed the New York Times and the Washington Post ahead of the removals and each outlet named the same pages that were supplied to Gizmodo. The selections were characterized as being variously dedicated to right and left-wing views. Another question is how many followers these pages had. The New York Times says that Right Wing News, a conservative outlet, had 3.1 million followers. Reverb Press, a left-wing outlet, had 816,000 followers. Facebook told us that it would not be releasing the follower counts. Facebook ’s spokesperson said page admins and users were notified. The social network has no good options in this political environment. Whatever it does will cause outrage and suspicion among some sector of the public. But even though Facebook is a private company with the right to set its own rules, targeting American-run accounts and pages will inevitably spark a new wave of controversy about freedom of speech. In one of the previous purges, political organizers in Washington, DC found their page organizing an anti-racist rally was deleted because of an inadvertent link to a foreign group posing as Americans. They were understandably upset. Advertisement The fact that Facebook is keeping almost all of the details about this action under wraps may save it some short-term pain, but it just gives everyone’s imagination the chance to run wild. In its Thursday announcement, Facebook wrote it was taking this action because “people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.” It’s a good point that applies to the connection between Facebook and its users as well. Update: A spokesperson for Facebook informed us that “Both Page admins and users were notified of the action.” Advertisement [Facebook, New York Times, Washington Post]<doc-sep>
Facebook said Thursday that it has purged more than 800 U.S publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented content that violated the company’s spam policies, a move that could reignite accusations of political censorship. The accounts and pages, with names like Reasonable People Unite and Reverb Press, were likely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads, the company said. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers and expressed a range of political viewpoints, including a page which billed itself as the first publication to endorse President Trump. They did not appear to have ties to Russia, company officials said. Facebook said it was removing the publishers and accounts not because of the type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content and using fake profiles. “Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company said in a blog post. “People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.” But the move to target American politically oriented sites, just weeks before the congressional midterm elections, is sure to be a flashpoint for political groups and their allies, which are already attacking the tech giant for political bias and for arbitrary censorship of political content. Ever since Russian operatives used Facebook to target American voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been under immense pressure to crack down on content that could disrupt the democratic process in the United States. But the challenge of policing domestic content is even thornier than going after foreign interference because it is harder to define what constitutes legitimate political expression. By removing the groups entirely, Facebook is effectively saying that they will not have an opportunity to redeem themselves. One of the pages — “Nation In Distress” — pitched itself as the “first online publication to endorse President Donald J Trump.” Founded in 2012, it had amassed more than 3.2 million likes and over 3 million followers, according to a Washington Post review on Thursday. In recent posts and photos, it had criticized journalists for failing to report on Trump’s approach to China and shared a link to a story that had called Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) “demented.” The page affiliated itself with a website called “America’s Freedom Fighters,” which appeared to post its own content and duplicate press releases written by others about violent crimes and gun rights — all alongside a sidebar of ads. Another page, Reverb Press, had more than 700,000 followers. Posts attacked Trump and referred to Republicans as “cheating scumbags.” Reasonable People Unite, another left-leaning page that Facebook purged, had posted a screenshot from a Twitter user who said, “Somewhere in America, a teenage girl is listening to her parents defend Brett Kavanaugh and she is thinking to herself, if something like that happens to me, I have nowhere to go.” Facebook has long struggled with where to draw lines around domestic content. After the 2016 election, company executives declined to purge thousands of misleading pages for fear that doing so would alienate conservatives, according to two people familiar with the discussions. “It is totally reasonable for companies to say, ‘If you abuse our mechanisms, we will punish you, even if the individual content is OK,’ ” said Alex Stamos, who resigned as Facebook’s chief security officer this summer and is now a Stanford University professor. “Facebook first reduced the ability to use ads to punish extreme content. Now they are attacking organic recommendation systems, such as the likes and shares used to artificially inflate posts.” Even though Facebook removed accounts and pages, many of the sites that appear to be behind that content remained alive and active elsewhere on the web — a reflection that the challenge of stamping out potentially misleading content online far transcends Facebook. In the “about” section of the now-suspended Nation in Distress page, for example, was a link to the America’s Freedom Fighters website. That site pointed to another suspended Facebook page and a still-active Twitter profile, which continued posting even minutes after Facebook had taken action against its accounts. The left-leaning Reverb Press, meanwhile, maintains an active website which links to the disabled Facebook page, a still-available Twitter profile and smartphone apps available for iPhone and Android.