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The Free Thought Project
Time to Pay Attention: Facebook is Aiding the Police State By Purging Police Accountability Pages
One month ago, Facebook and Twitter — without warning or justification — deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers. During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups like Cop Block, Filming Cops, and stifled the reach of Photography is Not a Crime. We reacted to the purge by starting new pages with the 2.0 appendix at the end of them. On Sunday, exactly one month after they wiped these pages from the internet, Facebook struck again, and again, no reason was given.
The only statement given for the new purge was the following: “It looks like recent activity on your Page doesn’t follow the Facebook Page Policies. If you think your Page was unpublished in error, you can appeal and we’ll take another look.”
The implications of such a move to censor those who expose the police state are horrifying. Before it was deleted, Police the Police was the largest police accountability group on the internet and now, it is no longer.
For years, we have exposed criminal cops and shined light into the darkness where other media outlets were scared to go. Police the Police and these other pages taught people how to flex their rights, film the police, and to not be afraid to stand up to the police state.
Never once did any of these pages encourage violence, seek to stoke divide, or perpetuate any hatred toward police. We simply called out the problems with many of the tactics used by police and proposed solutions to them. Now, with the click of a mouse, this wealth of content and information is gone and Facebook appears to be going after anyone else who questions the police state, including Police the Police 2.0.
In 2015, states across the country began passing what are known as “Blue Lives Matter Laws” which added the job of police officer to a protected class of citizen.
Per the ridiculously unnecessary legislation, the voluntary choice of becoming a police officer, emergency responder, and firefighter are protected against hate crimes the way historically persecuted categories like race, gender, creed, religion, and sexual orientation have been — making crimes specifically targeting cops hate crimes with enhanced penalties in the eyes of the law.
Although we have never encouraged violence, always promoted peace, and never stoked hatred, simply reporting on police crimes has apparently become a violation in the eyes of Facebook.
What’s more, its not just police accountability they are after either, they moved to silence the antiwar movement as well.
In May, after Americans were successfully whipped into a tizzy of Russian hacking and meddling, along with the fake news hysteria, the Americans begging for censorship craze came to a head when Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council.
Facebook announced that it partnered with the arm of the council, known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab that was brought on to help the social media behemoth with “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”
The Free Thought Project was one of these “threats.”
As we previously reported, the Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri.
The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the Airforce.
This propaganda arm disguised as a “think tank” is helping both Facebook and Twitter remove pages they deem a threat and the content is anything but threatening. If police accountability and pro peace movements are threats to this group, what exactly is it that they stand for?
Unless we fight back in the form of sharing information deemed “wrong think” by the censors, this problem will only continue to get worse. We must continue to alert our fellow humans to this censorship before it becomes the norm. We must use this recent purge as our Streisand moment and turn this massive and blatant act of censorship around as a tool to expose the tyrants behind it.
Make no mistake, October 11, 2018 marked the day the battle over information became a war and the deletions on Sunday show how far we have to go.