Facebook Reverse ZeroHedge Ban After International Conservative Backlash
Tom Pappert
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After major conservative voices from around the globe castigated Facebook for its decision to declare all content by ZeroHedge against its community standards, the website quietly reversed its decision and unbanned ZeroHedge from the platform.
Last weekend ZeroHedge was summarily banned from being posted to Facebook for unspecified violations of Facebook’s community standards. According to the publication, this came as a surprise to them considering they do not even maintain an official Facebook page for the website.
The story was covered by major conservative outlets, including Big League Politics, leading prominent conservatives including Donald Trump Jr., Nigel Farage, Paul Joseph Watson, and many others to speak out publicly about the apparent censorship by the Big Tech Giant.
Late Tuesday, Facebook then reversed its ban in what ZeroHedge calls “a strange 24 hours.”
And then on Tuesday morning, everything had suddenly returned to normal, and whether due to the unexpectedly widespread support we received, or because Facebook had made a sincere error, the ban was reversed.
While Facebook has yet to contact us directly, they did comment with a Facebook spokesman saying that “This was a mistake with our automation to detect spam and we worked to fix it yesterday.” He added that “we use a combination of human review and automation to enforce our policies around spam and in this case, our automation incorrectly blocked this link. As soon as we identified the issue, we worked quickly to fix it.”
We still have no insight into which article(s) Facebook decided was sufficiently “spammy” to block everyone’s access to our content, or on what basis Facebook’s “automation and human review” had made the decision to quarantine our small website from the rest of Facebook’s 2.3 billion monthly users.
This is far from the first time Facebook has backed away from censorship after major backlash.
Just two weeks ago, former Breitbart London editor-in-chief Raheem Kassam had his Facebook ban reversed after similar backlash from Trump Jr., Big League Politics, and other major conservatives.
Former editor-in-chief of Breitbart London Raheem Kassam’s Facebook account has been restored following pressure from the conservative community.
“Following this intervention from [Donald Trump Jr.] and others, Facebook has now reinstated my account. Thank you to Don Jr. and all the others who got so involved and ahead on this story. I’ve no doubt you frightened Facebook into acting,” Kassam said on Twitter.
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