{"id":39209,"date":"2018-10-16T06:49:13","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T11:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39209"},"modified":"2018-10-16T06:49:13","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T11:49:13","slug":"facebook-meddles-in-the-2018-midterm-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39209","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Meddles in the 2018 Midterm Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook Meddles in the 2018 Midterm Elections<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo Source Mike Mozart | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251 accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of \u201cspam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

The purged users stand accused of posting \u201cmassive amounts of content \u2026 to drive traffic to their websites\u201d with suspicious \u201ctiming ahead of US midterm elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook admits to \u201clegitimate reasons\u201d for such behavior \u2014 \u201cit\u2019s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations.\u201d Not to mention the operations of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and a bunch of other users\/pages which weren\u2019t purged.<\/p>\n

Facebook also admits that it has previously \u201cenforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Facebook\u2019s administrators are meddling in politics \u2014 including the 2018 US midterm elections \u2014 in the name of preventing meddling in politics.<\/p>\n

Who benefits from the meddling? It doesn\u2019t seem to fall along \u201cleft\/right\u201d lines in particular. The victims come from across the political spectrum \u2014 from Reverb Press on the left, to Right Wing News on the right, to the libertarian Free Thought Project \u2014 some with millions of Facebook followers.<\/p>\n

The primary thread connecting victims of the purge seems to be that they are critics and\/or opponents of the American political \u201cmainstream\u201d or \u201cestablishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a sense, this is nothing new. Even before Internet \u201csocial media,\u201d the old guard \u201cmainstream media\u201d tended to draw fairly narrow lines on either side of the perceived political \u201ccenter\u201d or \u201cconsensus\u201d and avoid coloring (or publishing e.g. reader letters that colored) very far outside those lines. One might support or oppose a tax increase, or even a particular tax, but opposing taxation in general? Why, that was just crazy and not worthy of consideration \u2014 or of column inches.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook Meddles in the 2018 Midterm Elections Photo Source Mike Mozart | CC BY 2.0 On October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251 accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of \u201cspam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.\u201d The purged users stand accused of posting \u201cmassive amounts of content \u2026 to drive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[120,145,5493,18724,1493,3230,14623,1339,496,8213,22336,22337,1169,11716,827,21765],"class_list":["post-39209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-censorship","tag-cnn","tag-counterpunch","tag-election-meddling","tag-facebook","tag-fox-news","tag-free-thought-project","tag-internet","tag-mainstream-media","tag-msnbc","tag-reverb-press","tag-right-wing-news","tag-social-media","tag-thomas-knapp","tag-united-states","tag-us-midterm-elections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39210,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39209\/revisions\/39210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}