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Yellow Vest Facebook group with 350k members frozen on European election day

78 points| mmoez | 6 years ago |wsws.org

31 comments

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[+] mmoez|6 years ago|reply
It is worth noting that FB made an agreement with the French government last year to directly cooperate with them on filtering and controlling spread of shared content:

> Zuckerberg’s meeting with Macron on May 10 reviewed the first half of a year-long collaboration—the first of its kind with any government in the world—in which French officials have been invited directly into Facebook’s content “moderation” offices to analyze the material censored from users’ news feeds. Because what shows up in a given user’s news feed is determined by Facebook’s own algorithms, the company and the state can control the spread of material.

[+] nscalf|6 years ago|reply
This is actually normal, and is done in a lot of countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence. According to this, France acts "on the Saturday before the Sunday election; polling silence included"
[+] aikah|6 years ago|reply
> This is actually normal, and is done in a lot of countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence. According to this, France acts "on the Saturday before the Sunday election; polling silence included"

The yellow vest aren't a political party, they may have individuals running but that page wasn't one of a political party, they aren't even an organisation. This is purely Facebook enforcing political censorship to please the French government, there is nothing normal about it.

People are not forced to stop talking about politics on a public forum the day of the elections, that's complete bullshit.

It would be like saying, that people gathering into a bar on election day are barred from talking about politics. There is absolutely no such law that mandates that in France.

So please explain us what is normal about it again?

[+] sasasassy|6 years ago|reply
A ban on political campaigning is very different from banning speech on politics in general.
[+] scohesc|6 years ago|reply
What I'd like to see is if there's any other social media pages on the other side of the political spectrum that have been blocked.
[+] Miner49er|6 years ago|reply
Does anybody know if this effected other FB groups? Were any other political groups silenced around this time in France?
[+] yllus|6 years ago|reply
There's a Yellow Vest Canada group on Facebook that is in full-on tinfoil hat conspiracy mode (wildfires in Alberta are being set by Muslims, stuff like that; see https://twitter.com/theBurlyChef/status/1133592129639313409 ). I wouldn't be surprised if the use of a European group to spread disinformation or even promote violence caused this to happen.
[+] tapland|6 years ago|reply
These rapid growing movements seldom have any requirements to join and allow the spread of all kinds of misinformation really well.

Another group will pop up in x weeks and the facebook groups will have people doubting vaccines, blaming immigrants, blaming the current government, and as an average user you can't sort who's just an angry middle aged person or a russian bot.

[+] petre|6 years ago|reply
There's a lesson to be learned here and noboby lerns it every time this happens. They should have been using Discourse or something else rather than being at the mercy of facebook. France also has some draconian telecom laws. Like the requirement for obtaining a license to operate a public WiFi AP.
[+] wyxuan|6 years ago|reply
I'm sure there just be more to this story. World socialist web site doesn't seem like a particularly trustworthy source.
[+] arthur5005|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, very generic title, full of trash articles.

Seems like an outlet for disinformation itself.