Facebook and Twitter coordinate once more over censorship

Facebook recently removed hundreds of accounts for ‘inauthentic’ behaviour and many of those affected have also seen their Twitter accounts suspended.

In a press release entitled ‘Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook’, Facebook explained that its doesn’t like inauthentic behaviour, by which it means accounts that seek to mislead people about their real identities and/or objectives. While there is some concern that this could be driven by the desire to influence politics, Facebook reckons it’s mostly ‘clickbait’, designed to drive and then monetise internet traffic.

“And like the politically motivated activity we’ve seen, the ‘news’ stories or opinions these accounts and pages share are often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate,” said the release. “This is why it’s so important we look at these actors’ behaviour – such as whether they’re using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam – rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, pages or groups to remove.”

So Facebook is not saying it’s the arbiter of ‘authentic’ speech, which is very wise as that would put it in a highly compromised position. Instead it’s taking action against people posting political content via supposedly fake accounts or who are seen to generate spam. It seems to be hoping this will allow it to remove certain accounts that focus on political content without being accused of political meddling or bias.

All this context and preamble was offered to set up the big reveal, which is that Facebook has removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have broken its rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behaviour. It looks like the timing of this renewed purge is influenced by the imminent US mid-term elections, with Facebook keen to avoid a repetition of claims made during the Cambridge Analytica scandal that it facilitated political meddling by allowing too much of this sort of thing to take place during the last US general election.

Of course Facebook is free to quality control its platform as much as it likes, but if it is seen to lack neutrality and objectivity in so doing, it runs the risk of alienating those of its users that feel discriminated against. In this case the loudest dissent seems to be coming from independent media, some of which feel they have been mistakenly identified as clickbaiters.

The Washington Post spoke to ‘Reasonable People Unite’, which was shut down by Facebook, but which claims to be legitimate (let alone authentic). Meanwhile Reason.com reckons libertarian publishers were targeted and spoke to the founder of The Free Thought Project, who also found himself banned in spite of claimed legitimacy.

Matt Agorist, who writes for The Free Thought Project, tweeted the following, and his subsequent piece indicated that his employer had also been removed from Twitter. This seems to be another manifestation (Alex Jones having been the most high-profile previous case) of coordinated activity between the two sites that, together with YouTube, dominate public debate in the US. A number of other publishers removed by Facebook seem now to have been suspended by Twitter.

Other independent journalists have joined the outcry, including Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Pool in the video below. The latter makes the point that many of those purged seem to be left-leaning, which at least balances the previous impression that right-leaning commentators were being disproportionately targeted, and that many of the accounts taken down may well have been guilty as charged. But the inherent subjectivity involved in determining the relative legitimacy of small publishers is a problem that is only amplified by this latest move.

It seems unlikely that the primary objective of these social media giants is to impose their world view via the censorship of content they disagree with, but this kind of coordinated banning does feel like unilateral speech policing and that should be of concern, regardless of your political position. Twitter doesn’t even seem to have made any public statements on the matter. Meanwhile the range of views considered ‘authentic’ by these private companies seems to be narrowing by the day.