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*Deep breath* Here's something about Jacob Wohl that we're missing and it's painfully clear to me because I was dealt the same fate. Over 3 years, I painstakingly built up a Facebook audience of 1.8 million users. The FB pages Snowflakes, Reasonable People Unite and others.
I was an authentic, genuine, honest, dedicated activist. My audience was growing fast because I was good at curating content, making attractive memes, providing useful information, thoughtful insight and humor.
I sat in on conference calls with Democratic leadership and amplified some of the largest grassroots progressive political advocacy groups. I made connections simply by reaching out and asking "how can I help?"
As I was reaching 10 million Facebook users per day with progressive messaging, my pages were removed ahead of the mid-terms, along with a FB press release riddled with outrageous disinformation.
We're all going to cheer now when our political adversaries are purged by social media giants. But these companies hold a partial-monopoly on political discourse, giving them enormous political power. They are platforms upon which the future of the world will be decided.
Inherent in this new form of power is a new threat of corporate totalitarianism. Social media giants are weaponizing disinformation, meddling in elections, exercising the limits of abuse of their power and we do not care.
We're now so accepting of the fact that American politics is a shit show, social media is a shit show and social media giants are a shit show that we dismiss every punitive action against activists as little more than a crackling of the dumpster fire.
But we no longer have to imagine a world in which social media giants, corrupt, reckless and partisan, guided by power brokers working influence behind the scenes and under the guise of protecting the integrity of elections, dishonestly portray as bad actors political activists…
…and organizations who are domestic, influential and authentic, citing rules, or using any vague language like "inauthentic coordinated behavior", in order to silence them. They did it to me and they can do it to anyone.
Obviously when obnoxious, hateful people who peddle in lies and that we loathe are purged, we don't really care the reason. Jacob Wohl is trash. But is having 4 accounts enough to silence political speech? Not even close.
Are we really now going to accept social media giants accusing domestic political activists attempting to influence U.S. elections as sufficient reason to ban them? That's literally all you have to be accused of and we accept it.
Facebook and Twitter couldn't endure the political backlash if these arbitrary punitive actions were carried out across the board. Few legitimate, influential progressive advocacy networks would be left standing. Many of the most prominent would be gone.
If having "fake" accounts or multiple social media accounts is reason to be silenced, well, on Facebook, there isn't one major political player that I'm aware of that couldn't be banned for it.
Any FB page that you know of that has more than one million followers has multiple pages, as they should, and have admins or editors who've necessarily and appropriately administered "fake" accounts. They're not bad actors.
"Fake accounts" protected them from troll armies who found out they could game the reporting system to shut down political pages.
"Fake accounts" protected them from the arbitrary, often erroneous enforcement of "hate speech" that's being outsourced to unqualified, cheap foreign operations that aren't even provided clear guidelines.
Having "fake profiles" is not a serious or appropriate reason to silence anyone, especially anyone's political speech. MANY Twitter users have multiple accounts. You're allowed to. Many popular Twitter users have one account that could easily be deemed "inauthentic" or "fake".
Millions of Facebook users had "fake" profiles for their pets. Millions. Do you realize that could be sufficient reason for your political speech to be silenced?
I won't list them. But your biggest political allies and beloved social media personalities could be banned for many of the same reasons Facebook and Twitter have cited.
Facebook has been particularly egregious, in every imaginable way. They're being guided by bad actors. They're being sued for fraud. Their recklessness is criminal.
As scandals pile up, I don't know how Facebook's incompetence, corruption and dishonesty impacts its future earnings or stock price. The stock is doing great. Facebook will probably always make lots of money.
What I do know is that they're wielding their enormous influence over our politics with the same incompetence, corruption and dishonesty, and it's a recklessness that can produce far graver consequences in our society than any individual falling stock price.
As social media giants arbitrarily silence political speech, citing violations of intentionally ambiguous rules and standards, even erroneously, sometimes framing legitimate, authentic and honest political activists as bad actors, media reports it as fact, Senators praise it,…
…we are whistling down the path of corporate totalitarianism. It's hard to see the forest from the trees when you're giddy and giggling about that douche bag who just got shut up.
