Covid era censorship finally getting some significant attention

Plus: $30k for (only) non-citizens to buy homes, Google and CA want to control journalism, Watch Chris Cuomo (no joke) tell the truth about corporate capture at the DNC

Sometime in late winter of 2021 I got a message from Facebook informing me that Against Crony Capitalism’s Facebook Page was being throttled.

We had seen throttling in the past. There was a time when the amount of traffic we got from Facebook was staggering. It was awesome. Then Trump got elected and the powers that be in the social media industry decided that some people were getting a little too much of a voice. Everyone in news, conservative and liberal, saw their traffic from Facebook (and other social media) take a hit. Talking with other people and following what was going on with other publications online it appeared that almost all news sites had their social media referrals significantly curtailed in the 2017-2019 era. In many cases traffic from socials tumbled by fifty percent or more. We got hit hard but not as hard as others. Then Facebook announced that it was seeking partnerships with legacy media outlets (while shunning independent media) and many of us in the “alternative” media saw the writing on the wall.

In the next few years we, and many other outlets, saw our Facebook distribution diminish and diminish further. By about Covid time social media referrals seemed to have stabilized, albeit at a much lower rate. This was the case across the new media. (Not that that made me feel much better.) The ecosystem was seeing fewer referals from socials than in prior years but the bleeding appeared to have stopped.

I was wrong on this. The worst for us was still to come.

We knew that Covid was a near no-go topic on Facebook but we were a year into the pandemic and found an interesting article from the esteemed medical journal Nature that we wanted to share. I don’t remember the exact specifics but it was something about how masks weren’t actually that effective or something like that. It struck me as an interesting bit of information that our readers would appreciate. More importantly the article came from Nature, which surely had to be an “approved” media source.

Even still, I was was reluctant.

In the end however I did decide to post the Nature article, but I also decided against any commentary just to be safe.

But we weren’t safe. I soon got a notification that a fact checker at some university in England somewhere deemed our post “misinformation” and that as a result ACC on Facebook would be further throttled - though not eliminated from the platform.