The Houston Chronicle has published a piece about the cancellation of The Truth About Guns Facebook page. You can read that story here. Full props to the Chron’s Erica Grieder who quoted me accurately and did a fair and balanced job of reporting what happened.
Maybe the most interesting aspect of the story was the fact that Grieder managed to get a hold of an actual human unit who works as part of the Zuckerborg. The unnamed drone she quoted had this to say about nuking our Facebook page:
A spokesperson for Facebook on Friday confirmed that The Truth Against (sic) Guns’ Facebook page had indeed been taken down, “as part of our ongoing work to remove coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
“coordinated inauthentic behavior”
If you’re not clear what that meaningless wordvomit means, you’re in good company. It’s every bit as devoid of meaning as the usual excuse Big Tech gives for disappearing users with whom they disagree: “they violated our community standards.”
In point of fact, TTAG uses — sorry…used — our Facebook page to reach about 400,000 people who followed us there. We regularly posted links to our current posts accompanied by a short, snappy intro to catch the reader’s eye.
That’s it. No “coordination” with anyone else. No “inauthentic” content (TTAG happens to be NewsGuard approved for our publishing standards and practices). No use of the “stop the steal” hashtag or any mention of the controversy that followed the November election.
In the end, of course, that didn’t matter. All that mattered is the fact that TTAG’s content runs counter to the politics of Facebook and its legion of millennial marshmallows who run the social network. So it was an easy choice for them to flip a switch and make our page disappear.
We’re at least grateful to Grieder for getting that much out of the faceless Facebook monolith. When you work for one of the largest daily newspapers in the country, Zuckerberg’s minions apparently feel obligated to deign to reply to your requests for comment. That’s far more of an obligation they think they have to any of their 2.7 billion users.
Again, we weren’t the first firearms-related site to be deplatformed and we won’t be the last. We hope that you’ll sign up for our email list as a way to keep in contact now that Facebook no longer appears to be an option.
In any case, the truth will not be silenced.