The Facebook and Twitter purge: you can violate policies by doing nothing

I’m not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week.
   The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2·17 million Facebook followers. ‘Supposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to our page just to receive all the spam content that we put out there (sounds realistic),’ he wrote in RT.
   After Facebook removed the page, Twitter followed suit and suspended their account.
   Not only that, Shahtahmasebi notes that Anti-Media team members had their Twitter accounts purged as well. Its editor in chief received this message: ‘CareyWedler has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for:’. That was it. She’s none the wiser on what violation had been committed.
   But here are the real kickers: their social manager had access to 30 accounts, and Twitter was able to coordinate the suspension of 29 of them, while their chief creative officer had his removed, including accounts he had never used. The Anti-Media Radio account suffered a similar fate, Twitter claiming it was due to ‘multiple or repeat violations of the Twitter rules’—and it had no Tweets.
   Shahtahmasebi has his theories on what was behind all of this. It does give my theories over the years a lot of weight: namely that Facebook targets individuals and its “rules” are applied with no reference to actual stated policies. Essentially, the company lies. Twitter has been digging itself more deeply into a hole of late, and it’s very evident now, even if you didn’t want to admit it earlier, that it operates on the same lines. Google I have covered before, some might think ad nauseam.
   One of his conclusions: ‘There is nothing much that can be done unless enough people take a principled stand against such a severe level of censorship.’ In some cases, including one Tweeter I followed, it has been to vote with one’s feet, and leave these spaces to continue their descent without us.


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