10 ms·

Facebook took our election ad money then bulk-deleted our pages

259 points by stanislavb 5y ago

mgraczyk 5y ago
I can't say for sure, but my take is that this is what happened. The article claims that Facebook deleted the pages once they stopped paying for ads. That's probably not what happened. Instead, this coincided with the election ending. It's more likely that facebook waited to delete the pages until after the election. Just a guess, I'd say I'm 70% sure this is the explanation.
- samspenc 5y ago
  But it doesn't explain why they would delete an entire page and all its contents?? This is equivalent to saying that it's alright for Facebook to delete the pages and all the content of the Democratic Party, Republican Party AND individual politicians in the US right after a big election (say the 2020 election.)
  - mgraczyk 5y ago
    I didn't say it's alright, I'm just pointing out that it's more likely that it the timing was caused by the election rather than the ad money.
Syonyk 5y ago
Why bother serving pages when the ad money ends? Facebook runs on one simple principle: "What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck." More yacht-feet. More... actually, I've no idea what he actually cares about, beyond more ZuckBucks. Everything else is secondary to, and subservient to that. Big conspiracy? "We are so, so sorry that you caught us doing that, because if you think we're evil, you might view fewer ads by spending less time engaged in the site. We promise to tell you that we're going to do the work to learn how to get caught less often doing that thing you found us doing." Facebook isn't your friend. They're not your companion in your quest to... whatever. They are purely interested in how much money you can bring them, either directly through ad spend, or indirectly through being super engaging such that other people spend more time on Facebook viewing ads. Anything else you think of them is simply wrong.
- 3gg 5y ago
  Simple truths. If we just took for-profit corporations for what they are, things would be easier to comprehend. As far as I understand it, Facebook is a private, not public, space, and they can technically delete anything they want on their own platform. The big mistake is for us to pretend that they are a public space and that they owe us some kind of fairness and equal treatment. Why do we expect this? The sole reason for their existence is profit, they owe us nothing. Rather than taking the platform for granted as the new norm of social and political life, I think we would all be better off destroying it and creating a true, public cyberspace in its place. Facebook does not need to be fixed, it just needs to be destroyed.
  - legulere 5y ago
    It’s not that simple, behind the company are people. While earning money might be probably the biggest goal there are a lot of other goals by the people working there. Workers act on their beliefs up to a certain point (because they have a lot of discretion about things that don’t hurt the bottom line), managers often want to feel in power, Mark Zuckerberg wants to be like a roman emperor.
    - jand 5y ago
      > It’s not that simple, behind the company are people. I get your sentiment, really. But where is the tipping point? When does it become the responsibility of an employee to quit? Which atrocity has to be committed after which i cannot claim personal innocence as an employee? (in a general sense, not only facebook)
      - sebmellen 5y ago
        The sliding scale goes from minor concerns about freedom of speech to the gas chambers. I don’t say this to exaggerate — I really think that’s how things spun out of control in Germany. There’s a somewhat terrifying book on said topic: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. A book review reads: “[this is] a shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews”. The real lesson of the book is that each and any of us could be these ordinary men. So I’m not sure there really is a tipping point. Maybe we can invent one in retrospect, but as the slow-motion train wreck happens, it’s hard to find any one point where things really go awry. It’s an integrated process. It’s possible to pass the the buck back forever. The root cause of WW1 is that a group of primitive apes became intelligent and migrated through and out of Africa. The only thing we can hope to do is fix things as they stand now. We’re probably far past the tipping point already, what with all the damage social media has caused our society.
soheil 5y ago
There seems to be a fundamental problem with outsourcing your content moderation. If one of your rather semi-highly trusted mods strongly dislikes what others are saying and your policy is on the vague side the mods could take down content primarily just because they don't like it as seems to be in this case. Not a huge issue if you're FB and as long as the masses don't find out about most of the deleted content, a real issue for the society.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Doesn’t leaning on the scales in this manner (banning users or pages or other content) constitute election interference? Removing content from the digital public square (which I feel Facebook constitutes is the same as donating to whatever the opposite side is.
- croes 5y ago
  It happened after the election.
6510 5y ago
I'm not trying to rationalize trial by robot but its odd to think what you posted on the page it self had anything to do with it. It was more likely the sum of your entire online activity.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  Facebook: "Hey, web devs, put our like button on every page! Just host the image from our servers, run a bit of our Javascript hosted from our servers. We're not doing anything with it, just a convenient and fast hosting arrangement for you!" Investors: "... so, how, exactly, are you planning to make money again?" Facebook: "Well, we could... collect data from the like buttons scattered across the internet, and aggregate user behavior across a huge swath of internet, build shadow profiles, and figure out what people like... and sell ads! Yeah, let's do that!" I mean, at least they never had "Don't be Evil" as a motto or something. It's entirely consistent with their character.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    Exactly. And everybody who - willingly and knowingly - put that 'Like'-button on their website is an accomplice. An accomplice in violating human rights, that is. I wrote a small piece about that not so long ago. https://www.hellowebsite.online/?module=blog&link=1&post=4 https://www.hellowebsite.online/?module=blog&link=1&post=4
    - 6510 5y ago
      If not sure how ridiculous that deal is try asking any business for a list of their clients. If they ask why tell them it is, you know, for their competitor and for drone strikes. I can give you something in return for it. How about these decorative glass beads?
jrm4 5y ago
I'm sorry, am I supposed to feel bad about this or something? It just feels like we should all be well past naively thinking that Facebook is something like a "fair and balanced social media platform in which advertising dollars spent equals decent reach, and now buyers and sellers are happy!" This silly little complaint exemplifies "tip of the iceberg."
croes 5y ago
If you want your webpage in the internet host it by yourself. All pages on Facebook don't belong to you but Facebook. You can still use FB ads but don't use it like webhoster.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  A million times this. And it's true not just of Facebook, but all other companies that provide similar services. It's a mistake to treat such services as if they are in some way permanent or under your control.
malloreon 5y ago
Everyone on this page spends a lotta words saying Facebook is evil while ignoring that 40,000 employees work hard every day to make it that evil. Facebook doesn’t exist in its current form without their tireless efforts.
supermatt 5y ago
I am not sure what a "page" means in this sense. Does the page "belong" to the ad campaign, or does it "belong" to the user/company? If it is the former, then I can understand why facebook would close it when the ad campaign is over. If it is the latter, then it should not be tied to the campaign, and should not be closed when the campaign is over. In the latter case, if I set up a page about a product/service and decided to pay for some advertising to drive traffic to that page, I wouldnt expect my page to be deleted after the ad spend is discontinued. In fact, I would argue that the ad spend in that case was a waste of money - all the users that I have driven to my page, are no longer able to access that page. As an individual, I would likely seek recompense through the courts in that case. T&Cs don't give you immunity from being a dick - at least in the EU. Not sure what the situation is for companies.
- samspenc 5y ago
  A Facebook "page" is a collection of posts and other content. Think of it as similar to a website or blog, except that it's hosted right on Facebook and has additional Facebook specific features. Facebook allows people to set up "pages" for businesses, famous individuals (including celebrities and politicians), locations, groups, etc There are a lot (millions?) of Facebook pages that keep the Facebook community alive and thriving and a lot of them are probably not even aware of, or use, paid or sponsored promotions to "boost" their content. It seems bizarre to me -- but not unheard of -- that Facebook would keep their page running right until the very moment they stopped running their ad campaigns. Having said that, given Facebook's past and especially more recent behavior, I am not surprised at all by this story given the power Facebook has over its platform and how it has managed to abuse it recently.
  - unishark 5y ago
    As the post says, paying accounts are less likely to be "accidentally" removed. I'd guess political opponents were reporting the page as spam or racist or something, and while the candidate was a paying customer he got a higher level of protection from such attacks. Perhaps human moderation versus automated.
veselin 5y ago
For those unfamiliar with the country, this is likely not a post against Facebook. In fact Facebook was instrumental in this party's campaign. The country ranks at the bottom in the EU in media freedom. In the last 10 years, all mainstream TV channels got into the hands of a handful of people that also happen to receive plenty of funds from the government. As a result, an opposition party had no media coverage at all, or if there was anything, maybe negative one. I don't think parallels to some TV channels in the US capture the extent of the problem. But by using Facebook, this party managed to win in the capital and now they are part of the parliament (not anywhere near ranked first still, and btw I am not affiliated with them). Despite all its problems, Facebook was not painted as something bad here. Also they were not painted good, because they were paid for the promotions. Still, some of these policies are puzzling. It is unlikely to be related to the end of the election cycle, because (due to the composition of the parliament now) the next elections may by as close as 3 months away or as far as 4 years away.
- robotomir 5y ago
  >As a result, an opposition party had no media coverage at all The party in question is supported by an entire media conglomerate, Ikonomedia, and they have always supported first and foremost the interests of the local oligarch Prokopiev who owns Ikonomedia. P.S. This is not a story of the good underdogs being oppressed by the evil system, those are politically motivated players with an aggressive and often provocative political message, pursuing goals that favor specific people.
  - veselin 5y ago
    I didn't endorse anybody in my post, but your post has a strong political bias and wrong facts. Ikonomedia is a small media player with different biases and I am not sure what they support.
    - slivitritonov 5y ago
      >Ikonomedia is a small media player with different biases and I am not sure what they support. You're either taking the piss now or a complete tool, lol... Their medias are among the top 5 in engagement and they clearly support a specific party, even Stevie Wonder should be able to see this..
gampleman 5y ago
I have a family member who was in national politics in an EU country. I spent a lot of time talking about the role of Facebook in the political process with him. Some takeaways: 1. Facebook is essential in their country to have a chance getting elected; especially so if (due to your policy stances) you rely on the younger portions of the electorate for your votes. AFAIK in the US this is not entirely the case, since Twitter provides strong competition in this space, but in our (EU) country your options are Facebook and Instagram. 2. This is particularly annoying situation for the politicians themselves, since they need to engage social media specialists and optimise their political presence to "engage" on these platforms. Apparently this means mostly short, casual videos. This takes up a lot of time which is not going to serious policy based discussions and more in-depth write ups. So in some sense it directly contributes (involuntarily in the case of my relative) to a trivialisation of politics and turning it more entertainment oriented. I hate to see what happens when the Tik-Tok generation starts voting... 3. Aggressive politics also do really well. My relative had a post with some strong criticism of another public figure that was (IIRC) their most popular post by far. 4. The geo-political implications are troubling. Democracy is fragile enough (our country saw its top politician buy up all the top newspapers), without the political process being strongly influenced by a private company in a foreign power block. No offence to our honoured American allies of course...
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  > Facebook is essential in their country to have a chance getting elected; especially so if (due to your policy stances) you rely on the younger portions of the electorate for your votes This is why we are all doomed
- locallost 5y ago
  I guess it depends. A counter example would be the kind of grassroots organization Mozemo from Croatia whose candidate recently was elected the mayor of Zagreb, and they hold almost the majority in the city hall (which is difficult for a single party as there are many parties).They also did well in multiple cities. I checked their Twitter a while back, and they only had about 6k followers. On Facebook, they have 50k likes, but this is in general not a lot since they were a major regional story. I wouldn't be surprised if half of those likes came from outside the country. I don't think their good result is really powered by social media. So I don't think communicating with voters is a solved problem, and I don't think Facebook / social media is the only channel you have. It's important maybe, but I'm not sure if it's definitely "essential".
MikeUt 5y ago
> And before you ask “well, has there been any objectionable content?” the answer is “no”. I sure am glad we have Facebook, a foreign company in this case, setting the bounds of acceptable discussion for politicians.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
slivitritonov 5y ago
Good that this happened, really! I was sick of all the online propaganda the tools from DB had ordered for these elections. Back in the day I actually closed my facebook page as I was getting targeted messages and invites to their facebook groups. It’s funny how the guys claims they dint have objectionable content, all their content is buzz-words, lies and empty promises. Also funny that they spent a fortune on facebooks ads, since facebook is a DB echo-chamber anyway…
- paganel 5y ago
  Same thing happens right now across the Danube, in Romania (I'm Romanian myself). It doesn't affect any political parties directly but two of the media entities that strongly favour DB-like parties here have been suspended/have had their traffic coming from FB drastically reduced, cue the complaints and the cries of "Facebook is censoring us!". I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, one of the reasons being that they were actually cheering on Facebook (and Twitter) actively censoring one side of the US political debate late last year.

259 points by stanislavb 5y ago

I can't say for sure, but my take is that this is what happened. The article claims that Facebook deleted the pages once they stopped paying for ads. That's probably not what happened. Instead, this coincided with the election ending. It's more likely that facebook waited to delete the pages until after the election. Just a guess, I'd say I'm 70% sure this is the explanation.

samspenc 5y ago
But it doesn't explain why they would delete an entire page and all its contents?? This is equivalent to saying that it's alright for Facebook to delete the pages and all the content of the Democratic Party, Republican Party AND individual politicians in the US right after a big election (say the 2020 election.)
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  I didn't say it's alright, I'm just pointing out that it's more likely that it the timing was caused by the election rather than the ad money.

Syonyk 5y ago

Why bother serving pages when the ad money ends? Facebook runs on one simple principle: "What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck." More yacht-feet. More... actually, I've no idea what he actually cares about, beyond more ZuckBucks. Everything else is secondary to, and subservient to that. Big conspiracy? "We are so, so sorry that you caught us doing that, because if you think we're evil, you might view fewer ads by spending less time engaged in the site. We promise to tell you that we're going to do the work to learn how to get caught less often doing that thing you found us doing." Facebook isn't your friend. They're not your companion in your quest to... whatever. They are purely interested in how much money you can bring them, either directly through ad spend, or indirectly through being super engaging such that other people spend more time on Facebook viewing ads. Anything else you think of them is simply wrong.

3gg 5y ago
Simple truths. If we just took for-profit corporations for what they are, things would be easier to comprehend. As far as I understand it, Facebook is a private, not public, space, and they can technically delete anything they want on their own platform. The big mistake is for us to pretend that they are a public space and that they owe us some kind of fairness and equal treatment. Why do we expect this? The sole reason for their existence is profit, they owe us nothing. Rather than taking the platform for granted as the new norm of social and political life, I think we would all be better off destroying it and creating a true, public cyberspace in its place. Facebook does not need to be fixed, it just needs to be destroyed.
- legulere 5y ago
  It’s not that simple, behind the company are people. While earning money might be probably the biggest goal there are a lot of other goals by the people working there. Workers act on their beliefs up to a certain point (because they have a lot of discretion about things that don’t hurt the bottom line), managers often want to feel in power, Mark Zuckerberg wants to be like a roman emperor.
  - jand 5y ago
    > It’s not that simple, behind the company are people. I get your sentiment, really. But where is the tipping point? When does it become the responsibility of an employee to quit? Which atrocity has to be committed after which i cannot claim personal innocence as an employee? (in a general sense, not only facebook)
    - sebmellen 5y ago
      The sliding scale goes from minor concerns about freedom of speech to the gas chambers. I don’t say this to exaggerate — I really think that’s how things spun out of control in Germany. There’s a somewhat terrifying book on said topic: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. A book review reads: “[this is] a shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews”. The real lesson of the book is that each and any of us could be these ordinary men. So I’m not sure there really is a tipping point. Maybe we can invent one in retrospect, but as the slow-motion train wreck happens, it’s hard to find any one point where things really go awry. It’s an integrated process. It’s possible to pass the the buck back forever. The root cause of WW1 is that a group of primitive apes became intelligent and migrated through and out of Africa. The only thing we can hope to do is fix things as they stand now. We’re probably far past the tipping point already, what with all the damage social media has caused our society.

soheil 5y ago

There seems to be a fundamental problem with outsourcing your content moderation. If one of your rather semi-highly trusted mods strongly dislikes what others are saying and your policy is on the vague side the mods could take down content primarily just because they don't like it as seems to be in this case. Not a huge issue if you're FB and as long as the masses don't find out about most of the deleted content, a real issue for the society.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Doesn’t leaning on the scales in this manner (banning users or pages or other content) constitute election interference? Removing content from the digital public square (which I feel Facebook constitutes is the same as donating to whatever the opposite side is.

croes 5y ago
It happened after the election.

6510 5y ago

I'm not trying to rationalize trial by robot but its odd to think what you posted on the page it self had anything to do with it. It was more likely the sum of your entire online activity.

Syonyk 5y ago
Facebook: "Hey, web devs, put our like button on every page! Just host the image from our servers, run a bit of our Javascript hosted from our servers. We're not doing anything with it, just a convenient and fast hosting arrangement for you!" Investors: "... so, how, exactly, are you planning to make money again?" Facebook: "Well, we could... collect data from the like buttons scattered across the internet, and aggregate user behavior across a huge swath of internet, build shadow profiles, and figure out what people like... and sell ads! Yeah, let's do that!" I mean, at least they never had "Don't be Evil" as a motto or something. It's entirely consistent with their character.
- rambambram 5y ago
  Exactly. And everybody who - willingly and knowingly - put that 'Like'-button on their website is an accomplice. An accomplice in violating human rights, that is. I wrote a small piece about that not so long ago. https://www.hellowebsite.online/?module=blog&link=1&post=4 https://www.hellowebsite.online/?module=blog&link=1&post=4
  - 6510 5y ago
    If not sure how ridiculous that deal is try asking any business for a list of their clients. If they ask why tell them it is, you know, for their competitor and for drone strikes. I can give you something in return for it. How about these decorative glass beads?

jrm4 5y ago

I'm sorry, am I supposed to feel bad about this or something? It just feels like we should all be well past naively thinking that Facebook is something like a "fair and balanced social media platform in which advertising dollars spent equals decent reach, and now buyers and sellers are happy!" This silly little complaint exemplifies "tip of the iceberg."

croes 5y ago

If you want your webpage in the internet host it by yourself. All pages on Facebook don't belong to you but Facebook. You can still use FB ads but don't use it like webhoster.

JohnFen 5y ago
A million times this. And it's true not just of Facebook, but all other companies that provide similar services. It's a mistake to treat such services as if they are in some way permanent or under your control.

malloreon 5y ago

Everyone on this page spends a lotta words saying Facebook is evil while ignoring that 40,000 employees work hard every day to make it that evil. Facebook doesn’t exist in its current form without their tireless efforts.

supermatt 5y ago

I am not sure what a "page" means in this sense. Does the page "belong" to the ad campaign, or does it "belong" to the user/company? If it is the former, then I can understand why facebook would close it when the ad campaign is over. If it is the latter, then it should not be tied to the campaign, and should not be closed when the campaign is over. In the latter case, if I set up a page about a product/service and decided to pay for some advertising to drive traffic to that page, I wouldnt expect my page to be deleted after the ad spend is discontinued. In fact, I would argue that the ad spend in that case was a waste of money - all the users that I have driven to my page, are no longer able to access that page. As an individual, I would likely seek recompense through the courts in that case. T&Cs don't give you immunity from being a dick - at least in the EU. Not sure what the situation is for companies.

samspenc 5y ago
A Facebook "page" is a collection of posts and other content. Think of it as similar to a website or blog, except that it's hosted right on Facebook and has additional Facebook specific features. Facebook allows people to set up "pages" for businesses, famous individuals (including celebrities and politicians), locations, groups, etc There are a lot (millions?) of Facebook pages that keep the Facebook community alive and thriving and a lot of them are probably not even aware of, or use, paid or sponsored promotions to "boost" their content. It seems bizarre to me -- but not unheard of -- that Facebook would keep their page running right until the very moment they stopped running their ad campaigns. Having said that, given Facebook's past and especially more recent behavior, I am not surprised at all by this story given the power Facebook has over its platform and how it has managed to abuse it recently.
- unishark 5y ago
  As the post says, paying accounts are less likely to be "accidentally" removed. I'd guess political opponents were reporting the page as spam or racist or something, and while the candidate was a paying customer he got a higher level of protection from such attacks. Perhaps human moderation versus automated.

veselin 5y ago

For those unfamiliar with the country, this is likely not a post against Facebook. In fact Facebook was instrumental in this party's campaign. The country ranks at the bottom in the EU in media freedom. In the last 10 years, all mainstream TV channels got into the hands of a handful of people that also happen to receive plenty of funds from the government. As a result, an opposition party had no media coverage at all, or if there was anything, maybe negative one. I don't think parallels to some TV channels in the US capture the extent of the problem. But by using Facebook, this party managed to win in the capital and now they are part of the parliament (not anywhere near ranked first still, and btw I am not affiliated with them). Despite all its problems, Facebook was not painted as something bad here. Also they were not painted good, because they were paid for the promotions. Still, some of these policies are puzzling. It is unlikely to be related to the end of the election cycle, because (due to the composition of the parliament now) the next elections may by as close as 3 months away or as far as 4 years away.

robotomir 5y ago
>As a result, an opposition party had no media coverage at all The party in question is supported by an entire media conglomerate, Ikonomedia, and they have always supported first and foremost the interests of the local oligarch Prokopiev who owns Ikonomedia. P.S. This is not a story of the good underdogs being oppressed by the evil system, those are politically motivated players with an aggressive and often provocative political message, pursuing goals that favor specific people.
- veselin 5y ago
  I didn't endorse anybody in my post, but your post has a strong political bias and wrong facts. Ikonomedia is a small media player with different biases and I am not sure what they support.
  - slivitritonov 5y ago
    >Ikonomedia is a small media player with different biases and I am not sure what they support. You're either taking the piss now or a complete tool, lol... Their medias are among the top 5 in engagement and they clearly support a specific party, even Stevie Wonder should be able to see this..

gampleman 5y ago

I have a family member who was in national politics in an EU country. I spent a lot of time talking about the role of Facebook in the political process with him. Some takeaways: 1. Facebook is essential in their country to have a chance getting elected; especially so if (due to your policy stances) you rely on the younger portions of the electorate for your votes. AFAIK in the US this is not entirely the case, since Twitter provides strong competition in this space, but in our (EU) country your options are Facebook and Instagram. 2. This is particularly annoying situation for the politicians themselves, since they need to engage social media specialists and optimise their political presence to "engage" on these platforms. Apparently this means mostly short, casual videos. This takes up a lot of time which is not going to serious policy based discussions and more in-depth write ups. So in some sense it directly contributes (involuntarily in the case of my relative) to a trivialisation of politics and turning it more entertainment oriented. I hate to see what happens when the Tik-Tok generation starts voting... 3. Aggressive politics also do really well. My relative had a post with some strong criticism of another public figure that was (IIRC) their most popular post by far. 4. The geo-political implications are troubling. Democracy is fragile enough (our country saw its top politician buy up all the top newspapers), without the political process being strongly influenced by a private company in a foreign power block. No offence to our honoured American allies of course...

encryptluks2 5y ago
> Facebook is essential in their country to have a chance getting elected; especially so if (due to your policy stances) you rely on the younger portions of the electorate for your votes This is why we are all doomed
locallost 5y ago
I guess it depends. A counter example would be the kind of grassroots organization Mozemo from Croatia whose candidate recently was elected the mayor of Zagreb, and they hold almost the majority in the city hall (which is difficult for a single party as there are many parties).They also did well in multiple cities. I checked their Twitter a while back, and they only had about 6k followers. On Facebook, they have 50k likes, but this is in general not a lot since they were a major regional story. I wouldn't be surprised if half of those likes came from outside the country. I don't think their good result is really powered by social media. So I don't think communicating with voters is a solved problem, and I don't think Facebook / social media is the only channel you have. It's important maybe, but I'm not sure if it's definitely "essential".

MikeUt 5y ago

> And before you ask “well, has there been any objectionable content?” the answer is “no”. I sure am glad we have Facebook, a foreign company in this case, setting the bounds of acceptable discussion for politicians.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

slivitritonov 5y ago

Good that this happened, really! I was sick of all the online propaganda the tools from DB had ordered for these elections. Back in the day I actually closed my facebook page as I was getting targeted messages and invites to their facebook groups. It’s funny how the guys claims they dint have objectionable content, all their content is buzz-words, lies and empty promises. Also funny that they spent a fortune on facebooks ads, since facebook is a DB echo-chamber anyway…

paganel 5y ago
Same thing happens right now across the Danube, in Romania (I'm Romanian myself). It doesn't affect any political parties directly but two of the media entities that strongly favour DB-like parties here have been suspended/have had their traffic coming from FB drastically reduced, cue the complaints and the cries of "Facebook is censoring us!". I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, one of the reasons being that they were actually cheering on Facebook (and Twitter) actively censoring one side of the US political debate late last year.