28th May, 2021
By Ryan Mullins – WuW Founder
The Short Version:
Facebook has deleted Wake Up World’s page. Despite our 3.8 million followers and our 10-year history, Facebook removed Wake Up World from its platform without notification, against its own terms, and although we have tried to contact Facebook many times they have refused to respond to requests for information, advice or support.
Why? Facebook is systematically purging independent news pages. In the last few years over a thousand “alternative media” pages have suffered the same fate as Wake Up World.
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The Full Story:
Facebook has been systematically purging independent or so-called “alternative” news pages for many years now. In the last few years over a thousand “alternative media” pages have suffered the same fate as Wake Up World, while hundreds of millions of free-thinking social media users have lost access to pages they intentionally followed – and benefited from.
On 21st of April, without notification, Facebook removed Wake Up World’s page from its platform along with 3.8 million followers and 10 years of searchable posts, memes, articles, and community comments and discussions.
It started with our admins being personally blocked from posting or commenting on Facebook – including me. Then our page was taken down without notice. The last time we heard from Facebook was on the 10th April when they decided that a post from the 25th September 2017 went against their Community Standards – standards that weren’t implemented until the 24th April 2018. This brings us to…
Question #1: How can a page be penalized for a post that was published months before their Community Standards were made public?
The post that Facebook focused on was a meme that quoted infamous propagandist Joseph Goebbels, head of the Nazi “Ministry of Enlightenment” (the department of propaganda) about the nature of propaganda itself. It simply read:
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”
As an observation from an influential propagandist on the nature of successful propaganda, his words were posted as a warning on how the psychology of propaganda actually works – and indeed, how it is still working in our society today. Wake Up World does not advocate Goebbels’ ideals or the outcomes his propaganda created; we posted that one sentence as a factual statement – a quote – from which we all should learn. Given how successful Goebbels was influencing an entire society’s thinking, we believe it is important that people today understand his methods and realize how the tactics of propaganda and thought-control actually work.
Facebook clearly disagrees.
Their community guidelines state:
“If we remove content that you have shared in violation of our Community Standards, we’ll let you know and explain any options you have to request another review, unless you seriously or repeatedly violate these Terms or if doing so may expose us or others to legal liability; harm our community of users; compromise or interfere with the integrity or operation of any of our services, systems or Products; where we are restricted due to technical limitations; or where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons.”
Question #2: Why isn’t Facebook adhering to its own terms of use? An explanation and our right to appeal has so far been denied to us. Our team and I have reached out to Facebook countless times and we have had zero response.
Queue the tumbleweeds.
The lowdown:
At this point I have to be honest, I’m surprised Wake Up World lasted on Facebook as long as we did. Since this purging of “alternative media” began, the writing has been on the wall for many years. We have posted countless articles and memes that question the mainstream culture and the powerful corporations that control it. We have seen our peers slowly get picked off, sometimes it was one by one, others were wiped out in mass purges where hundreds of pages would disappear at once. An information war is being waged – we’ve all heard it before – and Facebook is a big, powerful, corrupt part of it. It is removing “alternative” voices and cleansing social media so all that remains is the controlled mainstream narrative. It is all part of the larger mission to control the thinking of our society… and since Facebook themselves are directing its users to intentionally limited media sources while leaving them “confident they are acting on their own free will”, it will probably work on those who don’t question the mainstream.
No wonder Facebook didn’t appreciate our post. It is in their best interest to limit our awareness and discussion of media, propaganda and thought control.
It’s time social media users Wake Up to the fact that major social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are just as controlled – and corrupted – as the mainstream TV and news media they are rejecting in droves. Are you really okay with social media corporations deciding what you do and don’t read, and think?
Ask yourself – who and what is Facebook, really? It’s a big corporation with its hands in the pockets of other corporations, governments and power-players. It’s another part of “the problem”. Censorship, propaganda (there’s that word again), hypocrisy, and corporate and government interest rule social media today, just as they do the mainstream media. And it isn’t just Facebook that’s purging alternative media. YouTube blocked Wake Up World’s ability to make advertising revenue on our channel, just as they did with many other alternative channels – or just banned them all together. Google reduced the search traffic to our site from an average of around 7,000 readers per day in 2017 to 100-200 per day in 2021.
And we’re not alone. Alternative websites that used to reach millions of readers now get zero traffic – literally zero from Google– and all because big powerful media corporations want us gone.
The takeaway:
Long story short – powerful social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are shutting down independent media.
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