Facebook censors German anti-lockdown movement under new rules to prevent users from organizing & amplifying ‘harmful’ ideas
RT | September 17, 2021
No longer content to go just after bots and trolls, Facebook has established a new category of “social harm” posted by genuine users, starting with purging pages and Instagram accounts of a German anti-lockdown group Querdenken.
Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher announced the action on Thursday, saying that his team has been working for months to “expand our network disruption efforts so we can address threats that come from groups of authentic accounts coordinating on our platform to cause social harm.”
The closest his post comes to defining “social harm” is content that “calls for violence or to discredit medical science.”
Gleicher says his group has removed a network of Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages and groups “for engaging in coordinated efforts to repeatedly violate our Community Standards, including posting harmful health misinformation, hate speech and incitement to violence.”
Sharing their domains on Facebook and Instagram has been blocked as well, he added, but noted that “we aren’t banning all Querdenken content.”
The Querdenken – German for “lateral thinking” – movement is “linked to off-platform violence and other social harms,” Gleicher wrote, adding that the content posted on the banned pages “primarily focused on promoting the conspiracy that the German government’s [Covid-19] restrictions are part of a larger plan to strip citizens of their freedoms and basic rights.”
According to Facebook, the group “typically portrayed violence as the way to overturn the pandemic-related government measures limiting personal freedoms.” The group “engaged in physical violence against journalists, police and medical practitioners in Germany,” Gleicher claimed citing “public reporting.”

Police officers scuffle with a demonstrator during a protest in Berlin, Germany, on August 1, 2021. © Reuters / Christian Mang
There have been multiple mass protests against coronavirus lockdowns in Germany, with the authorities denouncing them as the work of the “far-right,” neo-Nazis and other extremists. While the UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer raised concerns about police brutality in dispersing the demonstrations, last month, Berlin police responded that violence is “still part of our legal system.”
“Direct enforcement is violence. Violence harms. Violence hurts. Violence looks violent,” Berlin police spokesperson Thilo Cablitz told DPA last month.
Facebook has cracked down hard on “debunked” and “false” claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, loosely defined as anything that contradicts the guidance by the World Health Organization or national health authorities. It stopped censoring the claim that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China back in May, however, citing “new facts and trends” that emerged.
Biden administration demands Facebook hands over data on “misinformation” and vaccine skeptics
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 21, 2021
The Biden administration continues to pressure Facebook to collaborate and help it achieve its goals, one of them being to counter COVID vaccine skepticism and get more people in the US vaccinated.
After Biden shockingly denounced Facebook and others as “killing people” because they are allegedly letting COVID misinformation run rampant on their platforms, that pressure now continues in media reports, like the one The Washington Post published, citing three anonymous administration sources.
According to them, The White House and Facebook have had a series of meetings whose aim was to get the social media giant to turn over massive amounts of user data to the government, apparently as a “good will gesture” – since there doesn’t seem to be any legal ground for such a request.
Instead, the “tense” meetings saw the administration’s COVID crew “begging” Facebook to give them access to data showing how many people on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp see content branded as coronavirus misinformation, how many are still undecided whether to get the jab, and also the efficiency of Facebook’s censorship algorithms, i.e., how many people still get to see content that it aims to block.
It’s not obvious why the officials quoted by the article thought Facebook was under obligation to do this, but they accused the company of “hiding, filibustering and deflecting” – while at the same time commending Google and Twitter for apparently being much more accommodating in similar meetings around the same subject.
Although it is clear that these meetings are initiated and the data sought by the government, the criticism of Facebook in this matter conflates the notions of government and the public, saying it was the latter that “needs to understand” the scale of COVID misinformation and how to “potentially” fight this real or perceived problem.
The data Facebook has collected from its billions of users is described as “singular” and so complex and fine-grained that it can reveal people’s behavior and position on issues – clearly this is where the belief that the data would show the Biden administration how many users are still undecided on the vaccine comes from.
“It’s not that they wouldn’t provide data. It’s that they wouldn’t provide meaningful data, and you end up with a lot of information that doesn’t necessarily have value,” Andy Slavitt, who represented The White House in the meetings, said.
Facebook suspends Canadian political candidate Marc Emery during campaign season
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 22, 2021
A Canadian candidate for political office who is currently running for a seat in parliament has been suspended by Facebook, most likely for posts critical of the country’s COVID policy.
Facebook cited five posts published over the past year as the reason, and one of them, Marc Emery took aim at what he called “the evil Covid dictatorship.”
The ban – which will last as long as his campaign and thus cut him off from communicating with his potential voters on the world’s largest social media site – came because Facebook found the posts to violate its community standards on “hate speech.”
Emery, who is a libertarian and a candidate of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), is also an activist and entrepreneur who is known as “prince of pot” for his previous activism to legalize cannabis, and who has run for various offices in the past.
It was precisely the government’s response to the pandemic and the way many Canadians are accepting the sometimes draconian restrictions that inspired Emery to return to politics.
Among the posts that Facebook said contained hate speech is one featuring photos of a takeout bag from a restaurant ruined by lockdowns. Emery linked the shutting down of the restaurant with Canadians being “soft, weak, unprincipled” and “virtually begging for this dictatorship because of hysteria, propaganda, lies and manipulation.”
In the same post, he accused what he said was “the hysterical and evil Covid dictatorship” for destroying businesses every day, something he added was a tyranny happening at all levels of government.
The rest of the posts marked as “hate speech” show what is said to be marijuana that Emery bought legally, and one of cannabis samples he received as a gift.
Twitter will allow you to deny the genocide of Palestinians, but not a ‘Uighur genocide’, so I’ve been banned
By Maram Susli | RT | August 7, 2021
Big Tech censors are shutting down voices like mine, because they don’t like me exposing the truth of what’s going on in Palestine. But they’re happy with tweets about killings in Xinjiang, even when there’s no evidence for it.
Twitter has a bizarre new policy of censoring political discourse around ‘violent events’. On the 21st of July, I woke up to find my account was locked for supposedly violating “rules against abuse and harassment”. I have had my account for 10 years and amassed a following of 150,000. I use it, or rather used to, to share my articles and interviews. The flagged tweet stated:
“There is a genocide against Palestinians. But there’s no Uighur genocide. There is evidence for one but not the other. We can see Palestinians being slaughtered. On top of which Israeli leaders have admitted they want to exterminate Palestinians. The truth shall set you free”.
The only thing that was wrong in this tweet was that “the truth shall set you free”. Turns out, the truth shall send you to Twitter jail. I do not believe my tweet violated Twitter’s terms and conditions, which makes this scenario all the more insidious. It means that any tweet in the future, no matter how innocuous, could get you censored. Rather than accept Twitter’s demand to delete the tweet and get back my Twitter after 12 hours, I decided to take a stand by appealing the decision.
I’m no stranger to censorship by Big Tech. In 2018, I woke up to find that my Facebook account of 40,000 followers had vanished alongside a slew of headlines that the British government had deemed me a “Russian bot”. After a series of videos and interviews which proved that I am, in fact, human, my account was restored without any acknowledgement of, or apology for, what had occurred.
I’m not unique in my experience of such censorship. I am one of many people who have been unceremoniously silenced on social media, sometimes without a reason given. The demand for censorship by special interest groups has increased to the point that Big Tech have had to relegate the job to artificial intelligence, which gets things wrong about half the time.
This is what I had initially assumed had occurred with my tweet, that it was all a mistake that would quickly be rectified once a human moderator reviewed it. Wrong. That was almost two weeks ago, and my tweet is still, apparently, under appeal. A quick Google search revealed that many people have waited months without any human oversight over the appeals process. I decided to email Twitter support. But what I heard back was even more shocking.
“We’re writing to let you know that your account features will remain limited for the allotted time due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules against abusive behaviour and denial of violent events.”

Twitter’s letter to Maram
It appears Twitter has now deemed questioning the lack of evidence for a “Uighur genocide” as a “denial of violent events” and hence a thought crime. Yet there is currently no United Nations body which has concluded that there’s such a Uighur genocide going on. Even journalists writing in The Economist and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) have questioned whether the genocide label is the right fit for what is happening to Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province.
In fact, no one is even accusing China of conducting mass killings of Uighurs, or a ‘violent event’ in Twitter’s terms. What has been claimed is that China is putting Uighurs in a prison camp. China says the men are being put in “vocational education and training centers”, and says they have terrorist sympathies; the US contends that they are being put into the camps simply for being Muslim.
I am originally from Syria, so I know all about war and genocide. I also know that up to 5,000 Uighur fighters joined Al Qaeda to fight against Syria and that terrorism has been a real threat faced by both Syria and China. Regardless, a prison camp does not constitute a genocide; if it did, the US would be charged with genocide for having put Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay for the last 20 years. Let alone the mass incarceration of its own peoples, many of them disportionately black, in ordinary jails.
This goes to show the hypocrisy of how Twitter selectively implements its rules. You will not be censored off Twitter for denying the genocide of Palestinians. Even though there is decades of undeniable evidence of systematic massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the state of Israel. Palestinians are kicked out of their homes, thrown in jail or killed simply for the ‘crime’ of being Palestinian. They’re not allowed to raise their own flag, retain their identity or even move freely in their own land. In contrast, there is no evidence nor even an accusation of massacres against Uighurs. Ironically, it is the existence of this double standard that my tweet tried to highlight, and Twitter’s censorship has proved my point.
The narrative of the ‘Uighur genocide’ is the latest humanitarian crisis thought up by Washington to justify the next war, and Twitter is selectively censoring anyone who dares question that narrative. Lest we forget how many millions have died across the Middle East thanks to the US, based on exactly such lies. The babies in incubators that sold the first Gulf War. The non-existent WMDs that sold the war in Iraq. The lies about Gaddafi using black mercenaries in Libya. The lies about Syria’s chemical attacks which were used to justify multiple bombing campaigns and the current occupation of that country by the US and its stooges. An occupation that, along with sanctions, is starving 17 millions Syrians of bread and fuel. These lies, that Twitter is denying us the right to question, are what cause real violence. By selectively choosing which claims of violence can and cannot be denied, Twitter has become an echo chamber of the US State department.
I would be remiss not to mention the pro-Israel lobby’s involvement in this. It’s possible the reason for my censorship has more to do with the declaration of a Palestinian genocide than the lack of evidence for a Uighur genocide. My Twitter account was recently mentioned in the Israeli media for defending former Senator Cynthia Mckinney’s right to free speech. It cannot be a coincidence that my Facebook account was also recently locked twice for posting a video that compared Israel to ISIS. I’m also a frequent target of the infamous pro-Israel wikipedia editor “Philip Cross”, who attempts to defame me and many other prominent anti-war voices. It’s possible we are being targeted for our pro-Palestine stance, and any excuse will do to silence us.
What’s the solution to this censorship? It is inevitable that we must migrate to social media alternatives to Big Tech. Twitter alternatives such as PanQuake and GAB, and YouTube alternatives such as Bitchute and Odysee, could eventually overtake the giants. In the meantime, we must take a stand for free speech wherever possible. I reached out to Twitter to give them a chance to comment, but I have not heard back. If you’d like to question them on their censorship, please feel free to tweet this article at @Twittersupport.
Maram Susli is a Syrian-Australian political analyst and commentator.
Twitter To Work With Reuters & AP To Tackle Disinformation
By Richie Allen | August 3, 2021
Reuters and The Associated Press will work with Twitter to tackle disinformation on the social media site. The news agencies will provide Twitter with context and background information on events which create a high volume of Tweets.
Twitter believes that the collaboration will boost its efforts to stop the spread of misleading information and remove so-called fake news from its platform. Another way of putting it is that Twitter has appointed itself, Reuters and AP as the arbiters of what is true and what isn’t.
According to the BBC:
Currently, when large or rapidly growing conversations happen on Twitter that may be noteworthy or controversial, Twitter’s Curation team finds and promotes relevant context from reliable sources in order to counter potentially misleading information posted by users.
In a blogpost, Twitter said the new programme would “increase the scale and speed” of this work by increasing their “capacity to add reliable context to conversations happening on Twitter”.
Twitter and Facebook are the embodiment of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. They have total control of public discourse. It is terrifying. Social media was given to the world as a gift, but in reality it was a trojan horse.
We were told that we could connect and interact with one another in ways that were previously unimaginable. We were told that we could increase our visibility, enhance education, access markets, disseminate information and connect with people in real time and at any time.
In reality we were kettled. It was a coup. Twitter, Facebook and the rest were set up for one reason and one reason only, to administer truth. In 1984, Orwell’s ministry of truth was a misnomer. It didn’t spread truth, rather it spread falsehoods and propaganda to keep citizens in a perpetual state of fear and confusion. Sound familiar?
It’s exactly what Twitter and Facebook does today. Orwell’s ministry introduced newspeak to the population. In Orwell’s world, newspeak is a simplified language designed to reduce complicated issues to a few simple absolutes.
Again, doesn’t that sound familiar? Where do you think terms like hate speech, hate crime, white privilege and transphobia came from? Newspeak placed limits on citizens ability to think for themselves. Social media companies are doing it today. They don’t even try to hide it.
Working with the World Health Organisation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its subsidiaries, Twitter and Facebook sold the fake covid pandemic to the world. They also ruthlessly de-platformed anyone who dared to challenge it, no matter what their credentials were.
Newspeak is everywhere. Hands, Face, Space. Keep your distance. Don’t kill Granny. Protect the NHS.
Now Twitter has announced that it will be collaborating with the two biggest news agencies on the planet, to help rid the world of fake news once and for all. Facebook will follow suit. Dissent will not be tolerated.
It makes you wonder what’s coming next, doesn’t it?
Facebook bans English Historian YouTuber Tom Rowsell
By Christina Maas | Reclaim the Net | July 28, 2021
A British historian, filmmaker, and writer announced he and his wife have been permanently banned from Facebook without explanation or warning. The historian speculated that he was banned for what the social media platform suspects him of thinking.
“My wife and I both just had our facebook pages deleted without warning, or reason given nor is there an option to appeal,” Tom Rowsell posted on his Patreon account. “There was nothing on there that went against community standards. The page had no strikes at all. They have given up all pretence of reason, and are just unpersoning people without reason.”
Rowsell, born 1985, is a writer, filmmaker, and historian known for his 2014 film From Runes to Ruins and his YouTube channel “Survive the Jive,” that focuses on history.
The channel has over 139,000 subscribers, and he describes it as an initiative whose focus is the “religions of ancient Europe’.” and to examine the “linguistics, genetics, anthropology and other disciplines in order to gain insights into ancient peoples.”
Speaking to MRC Free Speech America, Rowsell said the ban would have a negative impact on his business and the social life of him and his wife.
“The page was very helpful for me to raise awareness of my video content and was therefore part of my business. It had no community strikes or objectionable content on it,” Rowsell said.
He further explained: “This will inevitably negatively impact my earnings but also my social life and that of my wife who uses that platform to stay in touch with her family in Sweden.”
Speculating why he was banned, Rowsell said: “I think this has social implications since I am only posting about historical subjects and not the controversial topics of immigration and vaccines that normally get people banned. I may be the first person banned not for what [I] have said, but for what they suspect me to think. Obviously this isn’t as big a deal as when they banned the President, but can be seen as a next step in their steady decline into totalitarian censorship.”
White House admits US government works with Facebook to censor free-speech
Press Secretary says Biden admin is “flagging disinformation” which social media giant then removes
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | July 24, 2021
Government agencies are flagging posts as “misinformation” for Facebook. Essentially telling internet companies who to censor. We’ve always suspected as much, but now they’ve actually admitted it.
Jen Psaki, Biden’s Press Secretary, said as much in a press briefing last week:
We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation”
If true – and that’s never a given when Psaki is talking – it’s a frank admission that the White House is actively breaching the first amendment rights of US citizens (and potentially the human rights of foreign nationals too).
The issue of censorship on the internet is one we have discussed at length at OffG. It has been slowly and steadily increasing for over a decade, with marked acceleration after the Ukraine conflict kicked it to the top of the to-do list in 2015.
Every act of terrorism, every controversy, every election… every “pandemic” is new excuse to place fresh restrictions on who is allowed to say what, where.
This culminated in every single social media and internet platform coordinating to completely remove the incumbent President of the United States from the internet.
News that X celebrity, Y journalist or Z website has been deleted or demonetized or de-platformed is an everyday occurrence now. The internet, or at least the mainstream internet, has become a quasi-police state. The digital Gestapo knock on doors in the middle of the night and *poof*… the dissident voice is quieted.
The mainstream media is, of course, fine with this. They outright refuse to talk about “censorship”. Instead choosing to talk about “free speech having consequences”, or arguing that “free speech needs a new definition in the age of social media”.
The “liberal” or “progressive” stance has always been that free speech is only about state suppression, not about private companies or individuals.
The argument has always been that Facebook/Twitter/Google etc. are private companies that have every right to decide what appears on their platforms. Of course, if the state is actively instructing the private companies on what to remove… that argument crumbles to dust.
Psaki’s casual revelation means this sophistry is no longer simply logically flawed, it is now inherently dishonest.
It also confirms that the pantomime of government vs social media is just that…, a pantomime. Every time a politician rails against Facebook for allowing hate speech, or bemoans the lack of regulations for internet giants, they are lying.
It’s a false conflict. A constructed PR exercise designed to hide a basic truth – The government tells Facebook what to remove, and Facebook removes it.
They said it, and they can’t unsay it… but they’ll probably try to stop us repeating it.
Facebook employees were caught spying on users
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim the Net | July 17, 2021
In a story that shows just how much detail Facebook has on the lives of its users, a new report says that Facebook fired 52 employees who were involved in obtaining location data of women they were romantically interested in.
Male programmers were able to view women’s whereabouts, personal messages, deleted photographs, and more because of their access to user data through Facebook’s internal systems.
This story follows an engineer who was on vacation with a woman in Europe. After a fight, the woman left the room they were sharing. The Facebook developer then used the location information he had access to locate her down at a hotel nearby.
In another case, following their date, a woman stopped replying to a Facebook engineer’s messages. He then surreptitiously spied on her using the position. He had exposure to years of private Facebook messages with contacts, events attended, photos shared, and postings she had remarked about or clicked on. He could also track her real-time location because she has Facebook installed.
In September 2015, Facebook’s top security officer, Alex Stamos, apparently informed Mark Zuckerberg about the situation.
According to Stamos, Facebook staff spied on individuals “almost every month.” At the time, over 16,000 workers had access to confidential user data. Stamos made many suggestions, including limiting access and forcing workers to submit formal requests for data access.
According to the article, male Facebook engineers were able to exploit their access to the information to access private conversations, whereabouts, and even deleted photographs of women they were intrigued with, based on an excerpt from a newly released book by New York Times writers Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang.
According to the report, one of Facebook’s developers obtained the location data of a woman he liked and discovered she visited Dolores Park in San Francisco, so he started visiting there in the hopes of stumbling into her.
Facebook responded to this saying that they’ve always maintained a zero-tolerance policy for data misuse and have dismissed any employee found to be doing so. They’ve been working to improve staff training, harassment detection, and preventative processes since 2015.
White House admits ‘flagging problematic posts’ for Facebook, says it’s needed to fight medical ‘misinformation’

RT | July 15, 2021
As the Biden administration called “medical misinformation” a public health threat, the White House said it was working with social media to flag “problematic” posts. Critics called it an end-run around the First Amendment.
“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday. In addition to directing the company to censor people, the government is also working to “get trusted content out there” by putting medical professionals in touch with social media influencers.
Psaki’s admission came after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring misinformation “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.”
“Misinformation takes away our freedom to make informed decisions about our health and the health of our loved ones,” Murthy said at the White House. During just the Covid-19 pandemic, it has led to Americans refusing to wear masks, “turn down proven treatments” and choosing not to get vaccinated, which, he said, cost lives.
Murthy is a “tyrant” who wants “Big Tech to crack down on what amounts to open inquiry and free exchange of ideas,” commented journalist Jordan Schachtel, one of the notable skeptics when it comes to official pandemic narratives.
Looking at the surgeon general’s recommendations, Grabien’s Tom Elliott pointed out that the government is literally instructing private companies to “abridge the freedom of speech, and of the press, and the rights of people to peaceably assemble and petition the gov’t for redresses of grievances” – in other words, violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped publish NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance abuse in 2013, called this union of corporate and state power “one of the classic hallmarks of fascism.”
“If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian,” said Greenwald.
“This is ‘Ministry of Truth’ level malfeasance. They’re literally admitting to colluding with [the] media to control the narrative. This is censorship,” tweeted Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), adding that such tactics befit dictatorships and that throttling speech with which the government disagrees crosses a line.
Conservative columnist Stacey Lennox argued that censorship would actually make Americans question the White House’s narrative even more.
“If your ideas are the best, they can stand on their own. Censorship will make people question it more. Every. Single. Time,” she tweeted.
Democrats have clamored for social media to censor “misinformation” ever since the 2016 election, which resulted in the surprise victory of Republican Donald Trump over mainstream media favorite Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign had bypassed corporate gatekeepers by reaching out to Americans directly via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.
Four years later, under the pretext of fighting misinformation and “Russian interference,” thousands of users had been purged from the platforms, while Twitter and Facebook suppressed a newspaper for publishing a story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the information found on his laptop. They also cracked down on any questions about new electoral practices, such as mass mail-in voting, labeling them “misinformation.”
The Biden campaign actually demanded Facebook censor Trump himself for “misinformation,” which the platform initially refused to do.
Eventually, however, Trump was banned from all social media platforms – while he was still the sitting president – as much for allegedly “inciting violence” over the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, as for continuing to argue the 2020 election wasn’t honest.


