There appears to be something rather sinister going on with Facebook and Twitter at the moment. I initially thought it was just me they were targeting until I started to share what was happening and many of my friends responded with comments about similar stories.
In mid December, I was hit with a month long restriction from Facebook and informed that my posts would be ‘lower in the feed,’ simply for reporting on a speech by Andrew Bridgen MP (during a parliamentary debate on vaccine dangers) – something that was reported by a number of other mainstream platforms at the time.
Then, on the 14th January, I had a post flagged by Facebook because it allegedly went against their standards on spam. Given that I’d only posted it to my personal profile and the Spotlight group, I’d hardly call that spamming and, what was the offending post?.. Turns out I’d shared a Guardian article about how Gas prices are expected to drop in July because wholesale prices halved in December.
I managed to offend their sensibilities again on the 23rd January because I’d posted about the BBC’s lack of impartiality after Laura Kuenssberg invited a Tory MP and Boris Johnson’s own sister onto her program to defend Boris after the story broke about the Chair of the BBC helping Boris to secure a loan guarantee.
Then, 3 days ago, they kicked into turbo drive, flagged 5 completely innocuous posts (if you’re not a Tory that is) and slapped me with a 24hr ban. You’ll note, again, that they were flagged as spam, despite the fact that I only posted them to my profile and to our Spotlight group…
Then, yesterday, I was instantly slapped with a 5 day ban for sharing a Care4Calais fundraiser. They were raising funds for legal fees in order to challenge govt plans to ship refugees to Rwanda. Interestingly, this time, it wasn’t flagged as spam. Instead. according to Facebook, “other people on Facebook” had reported it as “abusive.”
They also flagged a couple more alleged ‘spam’ posts yesterday. Admittedly, I did call Starmer a Tory Stooge in one of these posts but I can see how that might offend Tories as well as Labour’s Tory-lite brigade. 
Another interesting development now is that I’ve also been locked out of my Facebook account 3 times in as many days…
The reason is always given as “unusual activity on your account” so I always check the latest changes but I never actually find any unusual activity at all.
It’s certainly possible we could be the victim of a rogue bot or that we might have a troll that’s maliciously flagging our posts but this feels more like a targeted Tory campaign to shut down left wing activists on social media, especially given that the majority of the posts they’ve flagged are critical of the Tory government and bots and trolls don’t generally have any influence when it comes to locking people out of their accounts, do they? Additionally, I’ve been posting about all this to my Facebook profile and so many people have commented to say that they’ve had very similar experiences recently. It also looks like Twitter users are experiencing similar problems…
I think, at this rate, I might just stick to emailing content directly to our members, rather than creating and emailing Facebook/Twitter content, at least until we’re able to launch the AEO website. Speaking of which, our developers have told me we’re getting close to the testing phase so, hopefully not too long now (maybe even just a few days) before I have something super exciting to share with you all.
In the mean time, stay safe, stay warm, hang tough and solidarity to the workers!
Anya Zenn
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