APR 25 2013
They say that you haven’t made it as a blogger until you get censored by Facebook. In which case, I’ve made it. It failed to provoke a sense of validation in me though, just nausea and quiet fury. This is yet another case where bloggers filling the gaps left by the main stream media are finding themselves censored on social media – the printing press of the masses.
Censorship
Yesterday I wrote and published the article
The Man Who Pushed a Toy Pig to Downing Street to Save our NHS. It was intended to raise awareness and support for The Artist Taxi Driver’s art based protest of the privatisation on the NHS.
On publishing the article on my Facebook page I was asked (unusually) to fill in a captcha (the little box that asks you to type the letters you see so they know you aren’t a computer). Shortly after, people were reporting that they were being asked to complete captchas to share it. People who tried to open the article were warned by Facebook it was spam and the content unsafe, to dissuade people from reading and sharing the piece. Despite all this, the article spread and had totalled over a thousand shares direct from the blog. Then something weird happened. It disappeared.
The article was removed Facebook, from everywhere it had been shared. It was removed from every personal wall, groups and page where it has appeared. It disappeared from the wall of any user that had posted it. The comments and conversations underway on people’s pages were erased. It was like it had never happened.
I received confused and angry messages from Facebook users who had noticed it vanish from their pages and pages they manage. Now, anyone trying to share it receives the message in the above picture.
This is not an isolated case; Facebook has form on this. Fellow blogger
Tom Pride faced the same treatment yesterday when he satirised the Jobcentre and a disgruntled official had his article removed from Facebook as
spam.
Another Angry Voice has also covered the issue after being branded spam.
More broadly, Facebook has been found censoring users, employing temporary and permanent suspensions of their accounts, after
unjustly labelling them as spammers.
Noone Mention the NHS!
The House of Lords debated and approved new S75 regulations which force the NHS to put all but a tiny minority of its services out for competitive tender. The MPs and Lords voting through this legislation were effectively voting to increase their own fortunes. The excellent work of
Social Investigations demonstrates this legislation has been prepared and voted through by MPs, Lords and Ladies with a personal financial interest in the outcome.
This should be a scandal. It should be on the front page of every newspaper and the leading item on every news channel in the UK: CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN NHS SELL OFF!
Instead, silence.
This story did not appear on the BBC, ITV or Channel 4 flagship news programmes last night.
In aims to prompt mainstream coverage of the Lords debate, The Artist Taxi Driver (Mark McGowan) crawled four miles across London, pushing a toy pig. He pushed the pig all the way to No. 10 Downing Street, where he handed in a letter signed by his children. He did all this while suffering from bowel cancer. He was followed by hundreds of people with banners and placards while Twitter and Facebook raged with coverage and the
#wheresdaddyspig hash tag trended at various points in the day within the UK, and spread around the world. Thousands tuned in to watch live coverage broadcast by
individuals via bambuser online.
There was not a single UK based mainstream media article on this extraordinary event. You could
read about it in New York, but not in London.
Yet, for some individual or group, the mainstream media blackout was not enough; they wiped Facebook clean of our dissent too.
Facebook is not your Friend
We must take this as a note of caution and a reminder that Facebook and other social media sites are not free spaces, they are owned by corporations. If someone came and clasped their hand over your mouth in the street, there would be avenues for redress. If Facebook does the same, options are limited. Perhaps the most sinister element of this is not that we cannot now share this article on Facebook, but the disappearance where it had been shared. This could happen to anyone, and it is happening to more of us all the time. Could there come a day when our entire blogs disappear from the web as ‘spam’? Possibly. This is why we cannot overlook these incidences of censorship. All those with an interest in free speech and dissent ignore it at their peril.
Take Action
You can follow me on
Facebook and let them know I am not spam
You can
contact Facebook and complain about this censorship
Share this article and let people know what’s happening.
The Protest
You can see pictures of the #wheresdaddyspig protest
here
You can see videos of the protest
here
SOURCE |
http://scriptonitedaily.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/facebook-censors-users-during-media-blackout-on-privatisation-of-the-nhs/
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