Facebook, Twitter purge alternative pages, users

Facebook and Twitter have once again banned numerous alternative political and anti-establishment pages and users on the pretext of platform policy misuse regulations.

The mass banning of many prominent anti-war and anti-establishment pages on Thursday was accompanied by an official statement from Facebook explaining that the ban targeted pages using “political content” to engage in spam related behavior.

“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” read part of the statement.

Twitter followed suit, banning a number of known politically active users and pages albeit without giving any formal explanation.

Prominent alternative pages such as The Free Thought Project, The Anti-Media, Police the Police and Filming Cops were banned on both platforms even though having followers varying from between 3 million to 1.5 million on Facebook.

The move by Facebook and Twitter was decried by many observers as one more blatant example of corporate media trying to dominate news and information circulate in public venues.

“Instead of allowing more people to have a voice, these platforms are creating an atmosphere where only powerful media organizations are welcome, just as we had on cable news.” said The Free Thought contributor John Vibes speaking to Sputnik.

Some commentators pointed out the coordinated nature of the bans, describing the move as a form of state censorship.

The Free Thought Project co-founder Jasson Bassler vehemently condemned the move, adding that “you can't just steal years of hard work from someone and not expect there to be consequences. I will do everything I can to make their lives miserable. That's a promise.”

Big technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are known to have cracked down on many politically active accounts on numerous occasions before. The targeted users have belonged to figures and pages that presented various conservative, anti-establishment, anti-war, pro-Russian or pro-Iranian perspectives.

PressTV-Facebook kills 650+ accounts ‘linked to Iran, Russia’

Facebook says it has removed more than 650 accounts linked to separate Iran- and Russia-engineered “misinformation campaigns.”

The increasing censorship of alternative social media accounts come as big tech companies are openly complying with actors such as the neo-conservative Atlantic Council think tank, the CIA-backed FireEye firm, the Israel lobby group Anti-Defamation League and numerous US government departments in a bid to counter “foreign influence” and "hate speech".

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