Facebook has conducted yet another targeted attack on wrong-thinkers and while some of the victims are befuddled as to why the axe fell on them, the leftist media establishment is clamoring for more heads to roll.
Over 800 accounts, some of them with millions of followers, were blasted into oblivion by the social media behemoth in its latest purge. “Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” a Facebook blog post read. Facebook accused the banned sites and accounts of using “sensational political content” to drive traffic. Among those users banned were Right Wing News, which had some 3.1 million followers, and Nation in Distress, which also had over three million followers.
Matt Bergman of Punk Rock Libertarians, a site that had 190,000 followers before being obliterated, told RT.com that Facebook is able to apply its “standards” any way it sees fit to purge users:
“Their terms of service agreement is probably a million words long. Nobody has ever read it all the way through and I would think that if they wanted to they can ban CNN, they can ban you guys, if they wanted to, they can ban anybody.”
Big Media Complicity
If Bergman is right, there should be a lot more cyber-executions coming. And that’s just fine with The New York Times. In an absurdly authoritarian October 11 article, Times reporter Sheera Frenkel ominously notes the rise of “domestic disinformation” on social media. See, it’s not just Russian bots anymore. It’s American citizens who are the new threat to democracy.
“There are now well-developed networks of Americans targeting other Americans with purposefully designed manipulations,” Molly McKew, an “information warfare researcher” at the New Media Frontier organization, told Frenkel.
What is the New Media Frontier? Basically, it is Molly McKew declaring herself an information warfare expert and The New York Times quoting her as such. Fake news, much? McKew is, in fact, a longtime professional lobbyist who previously worked for the Podesta Group. Exactly what qualifies her to be an expert on information warfare is anybody’s guess, but that didn’t stop the NYT from deceitfully quoting her as such in an article about the dire threat of deceitful news.
The hilarity continues with the Times quoting another “expert.” Ryan Fox of an organization called New Knowledge, “a firm that tracks disinformation,” told Frenkel, “[t]hese networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus – that’s crossing the line over free speech.”
Manipulating consensus is a bad thing? You mean, like an NYT newsletter claiming that Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance to win on the very eve of the 2016 presidential election? We’ll patiently wait for the intrepid Mr. Fox to start tracking that breathtaking display of disinformation.
Enter Soros
Frenkel’s thoroughly ridiculous article also unsurprisingly quotes the George Soros-funded Media Matters For America. This group can be currently found openly calling for Facebook to take its purge to the next level.
“Facebook’s takedown removed a plethora of bad actors who have used networks of pages and groups to coordinate and amplify the spread of anti-immigrant and racist content. However, other similar far-right disinformation pages on the platform are still up,” Media Matters’ Natalie Martinez writes on the organization’s website.
Her article goes on to list several more “right-wing” sites that need to be scrubbed from history by Facebook, without offering any substantial information as to just what these outlets’ alleged crimes may be. Martinez was most saddened, however, that Facebook had yet to take action against what Media Matters considers the most effective practitioner of wrongthink:
“And although this takedown has impacted a number of pages that push false political news and hate speech, it likely won’t affect currently active high-performing right-wing meme pages and networks.”
Thus the door is opened to target political satire in the U.S. fake news spider web. Many believe the European Union is using supposed copyright concerns to suppress politically incorrect satire at this very moment. There are many ways to tackle a target you are trying to destroy.
The Facebook purge is another step down a terrible road. An unregulated social media giant is attempting to play arbiter of what is and what is not news. Major news organizations and political sabotage groups are working in perfect synchronicity to bolster these actions. The implications should be crystal clear: They are trying to construct a thoroughly controlled media.
