BEWARE of Facebook CENSORSHIP

A lot of Fractivists are using Facebook as an organizing tool.

This is to anyone who thinks that Facebook is a good place to organize.
It is not.

Facebook is apparently engaged in a WAR AGAINST INFORMATION...

Here is a list of some of the ways Facebook is censoring content:

• MANY PEOPLE BANNED from posting to pages,
  
  Today I was banned from posting to Pages for 15 days by trying to post this link
  to GASLAND's wall. http://tinyurl.com/76GroupsAskFor180Days
  
  Here is what I saw next:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• GROUPS disabled earlier this year.
  
  I was administrator of a group called Abolish Corporate Personhood Now! with 25,000 members.
  Earlier this year, Facebook disabled the ability of admins to communicate with these people for
  many such groups.
  
  
• WALLS are filtered such that no one sees every post, not even a page admin.
  
  I just did an experiment. I asked friends to send me a screenshot of the NYRAD wall
  on facebook. What I discovered is that everyone only sees a subset of all wall posts.
  No one, as far as I can tell, sees all posts on a particular wall, not even an admin.
  
  
  
• NEWSFEEDS are filtered so you don't see everything.
  
  For several years, Facebook has been adding opt-out "features"
  where your newsfeed is automatically filtered (without our knowledge,
  unless you dig through all of your account options) where you only
  see a subset of your friends status updates. Even if you unselect
  the option, it seems there is still filtering going on. (If you visit a few
  of your friends profile pages, you can see items which you never saw
  in your newsfeed).
  

WHY is Facebook doing this?

This is unknown.

It could be purely techinical:
Considering the scale of Facebook, with 250M users,
it is actually a very difficult problem to provide the Facebook Service.

By the way: What is the Facebook Service?

Another good question! The Facebook Service is actually not defined in their Terms of Use agreement!
https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

So basically, it is whatever they give you.
You may ASSUME that FB provides a reliable message delivery service
but they never claim they give you this.

You may ASSUME that a Facebook wall is like 10,000 other walls you've witnessed in your life,
where someone puts a note on it, and others can see it.

Considering that many of the groups and pages where people are getting banned
are having to do with various progressive activist issues,
Gas Drilling, Animal Rights, Corporate Personhood, etc.
it could be something more sinister.

Here is more about what is happening. BEWARE

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/08/15/hey-facebook-are-you-really-censoring-political-free-speech-in-america/

http://www.examiner.com/dogs-in-national/facebook-and-the-death-of-networking?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150264137871868_18630610_10150264171991868

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook


https://www.facebook.com/groups/195391653857122/

UPDATE: GDAC posted this theory:

"HEADS UP: A new tactic that is being used on some of us... There has been a surge of friend requests from people who disagree with us. Here is what they do - they "friend" you, then once your posts hit the activity stream, they flag them as spam or inappropriate which gets your account suspended for 15 days, meaning you can't post on people's walls at all. "

I tried to post this response... but I can't because I'm banned!

Hmmm... I hadn't thought about that. It's in interesting theory.
Do you have a source for this theory?

My best guess was one of these:

Theory 1: Facebook is having a technical meltdown. Their servers cannot handle the load. So they are banning the most active posters as a way to give the programmers some time to solve the problem.

Theory 2: Facebook is using social network theory to determine who are the "influencers", who are the people who make a post, and then this information is repeated. This is a well-known feature of social network theory. So they are intentionally finding the influencers of progressive causes and using various methods to censor or disrupt these communications.

But your is interesting and possible. I accept many friend requests from people I don't know.