Ok, Zuck, the Jig is Up

Back in January, I wrote a post about Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to end censorship on the platform, and my suspicion that this was an empty promise. Four days later, I published a follow-up post detailing how Meta had rejected our advertisement regarding our lawsuit on behalf of fired California kindergarten teacher Mirella Ramirez. I again expressed skepticism that Zuckerberg was truly committed to eliminating censorship on Meta, but said I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, since he did say that these changes on the platform would be implemented “in the coming months.”

Fast forward six months, and I’m no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, the censorship we’ve experienced on Meta has only gotten worse. Take for instance the fact that we attempted to run another Facebook ad just about two weeks ago, about our fight to restore the religious exemption to school vaccinations in Connecticut. That ad was quickly rejected for noncompliance with Meta’s “Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.” In all honesty, that didn’t really surprise me. But in the last couple of weeks, Meta has deployed a new and even more sinister censorship tactic against us. When we drop a comment on a popular post and share a link - be it to our website, a video of an event we’ve hosted, or one of our fundraisers - the links are no longer hyperlinked. This means that the only way someone can visit the link is by copying and pasting it into their browser window. And honestly, how many people will take the time to do that while scrolling through the comments on a Facebook post?

The answer is not very many, and that’s just the point. As if it weren’t bad enough that Meta shadow bans us so that almost none of our 28,000 followers see our posts, now they’ve made it so that even when we comment on a post that is seen by tens of thousands (or more), we can’t share working links to direct people back to our social media and website. This is, of course, a recipe for disaster, almost guaranteeing that we will never be able to grow our presence on the platform.

Now I know there are those among you reading this right now saying, “So what? You don’t want to be on their communist platform anyway! Just post all of your content on the “conservative” alternative social media platforms like Truth Social, Gab, and Gettr.” The problem with that is that we’ve done that, to no avail. We’ve had accounts on those platforms pretty much since their inception, and our following is even smaller there than on Facebook and X. That’s because, like it or not, those platforms just don’t have the reach of Facebook and X, and I’m not sure they ever will. Think about it. If a platform created by President Trump himself (Truth Social) hasn’t even been able to grow its user base to anywhere near the level of Facebook and X, what hope does any alternative platform really have? Since its launch in February 2022, Truth Social has amassed about five million total active users, according to reports. Compare that to Facebook - with over three billion total users - and X - with over 500 million total users - and you’ll quickly realize that it really is no competition at all.

But you may be asking yourself, if almost no one is seeing your posts on Facebook and X anyway, what’s the point of posting there at all? Wouldn’t it still be better to just focus on posting on Truth Social, for instance, where at least a few more people will see your content? In theory, yes. But the reality is that we still get almost no engagement on Truth Social even without rampant censorship, because the reach is so limited. There, the problem isn’t censorship, it’s a miniscule user base. The only people who tend to have large followings on those platforms are people who also have large followings on the mainstream social media platforms, people like President Trump himself, and other conservative celebrities. On the Big Tech platforms, ordinary people can break through and amass a following of hundreds of thousands of users, or even millions. That is nearly impossible on a platform like Truth Social.

And that is what makes Meta’s conduct even more disgusting and, I would argue, a violation of our free speech rights. Although Meta isn’t technically the government, they function like it, since they own the largest public online speech platform, which is the modern public square. They are controlling whose speech will be heard, and what kind of speech will be heard. And, as Zuckerberg himself has admitted, the government has even heavily influenced or controlled Meta’s censorship scheme, as during the covid pandemic. So how, exactly, is that not a violation of our First Amendment rights? The Supreme Court, in other contexts, has said that the government can’t use a third-party proxy to violate someone’s Constitutional rights, as when law enforcement attempted to use a criminal suspect’s wireless carrier to access cell phone location data without a warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment (see the 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision). So I don’t see why the same reasoning can’t be applied here, Section 230 immunity notwithstanding. When you cross the line from publisher/provider to government agent, you should be subject to suit for Constitutional violations.

What do you think? Is this a cause worth us taking up? The problem is, that due to the intense censorship on these platforms, our funding is greatly restricted compared to what it would be without the censorship. This is also intentional. By so severely limiting our reach, they have in turn severely limited our funding. So we have to be very selective in choosing our legal battles. (On that note, if you are one of the lucky few who actually sees this post, please consider a donation to our mission today!) At any rate, I’d love to know whether you think it’s worth using our precious resources to fight this battle, and also whether you have any other ideas to help us overcome the censorship (keeping in mind that we are also unable to spend significant amounts of money on advertising, due to the same lack of funding). We’ve tried just about everything we can think to do within our means to solve this problem, but so far nothing has worked, not even trying to get those with large accounts to share our content. Even on the rare occasions that a large account has shared a post about our work, it has had little to no impact, since it only happens once. Celebrities and influencers share a ton of content, so even if they share something of yours once, it gets lost among the dozens of other things they post in a given day. What we’d need is for someone with a following like that to be consistently sharing our content and repeatedly recommending that people like or follow our page, which isn’t likely to happen for free (and, for the third time, we don’t have the funds to pay them what they’d demand to do that).

So I guess what I’m asking is, how do we reach people when 1) we are censored to the point of being invisible on all major social media platforms, 2) we don’t have the funds to spend on a major advertising campaign, and 3) we can’t pay celebrities or influencers to share our content? (Oh, and we’ve also been trying for years to find volunteers who have the skills, ability, and willingness to assist us in growing our social media following - even to the point of posting ads like this for help online - to no avail.) If you are someone who can help us solve this problem, we’d like to hear from you! Email us at info@wethepatriotsusa.org, or drop a comment below.