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Facebook Conducts 'Mass Censorship' of Climate Activists

https://earther.gizmodo.com/facebook-follows-up-vow-to-fight-climate-change-with-ma-1845139884

Immediately following its newly announced (and typically self-serving and cynical) initiative to uplift climate science on its site, Facebook showed its dedication to the cause by removing hundreds of climate change activist, indigenous, and social justice groups (and their posts) from the site.

Sigh.

Facebook claimed it was a 'random accident' when challenged. Oops. Silly them.

It is good that, however misguided and deliberately quiet it may be on problems in which it plays a significant role, Facebook is at least paying some attention to righting wrongs it has helped to create, however meagre and paltry their lip service might be. However, as the article states, "If Facebook actually want to address the climate crisis, not censoring environmental activism, being stooges for gas companies, and allowing conspiracies to spread seems like a good place to start. Which is maybe why it hasn’t take[n] those steps in the first place."

Comments

  • Jenny Chun Chi Lien September 26, 2020 - 9:34pm

    Suspicious...

    There is a worldwide Covid19 self support FB group for Taiwanese overseas (which I am in) that has been operating since March with over 84k members of Taiwanese from all over the world.

    It apparently also happened (posted just 12 hours ago) that 70% of admin's accounts got blocked by Facebook for no reason.  They emailed to Facebook but haven't gotten any replied yet. Some suspected that this is operated internally by certain employee(s) of Facebook but no one really knows what is happening and still waiting for this to be resolved. Whichever cause it is, the fact that this would even happen is pretty bad. 

    screenshot of account

    From Google Translate: 

    "

    Administrator of Taiwan Overseas Covid-19 Self-Help Association

    Admin
    · 12h ·
    Everyone, there is a very serious and heavy question to ask. There are many administrator accounts, which seem to be blocked by FB because of malicious reports. I don’t know if anyone has "experience in retrieving accounts". Please provide Let us have a little information so that we can help these people get it back. Thank you for your help

  • Jon Dron September 28, 2020 - 12:05pm

    Really interesting - it is particularly disturbing that all of this occurs without transparency!