{"id":117154,"date":"2018-08-27T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=117154"},"modified":"2018-09-03T10:53:10","modified_gmt":"2018-09-03T09:53:10","slug":"facebook-suspended-a-latin-american-news-network-and-gave-three-different-reasons-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/08\/facebook-suspended-a-latin-american-news-network-and-gave-three-different-reasons-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Suspended a Latin American News Network and Gave Three Different Reasons Why"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration: Soohee Cho\/The Intercept<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Aug 2018 – <\/em>On August 13, Facebook shut down the English-language page of Telesur, blocking access for roughly half a million followers of the leftist media network until it was abruptly reinstated two days later. Facebook has provided three different explanations for the temporary disappearing, all contradicting one another, and not a single one making sense.<\/p>\n

Telesur was created by Venezuela\u2019s then-President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez in 2005 and co-funded by hemispheric neighbors Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Uruguay \u2014 Argentina pulled support for the web and cable property in 2016<\/a>. As a state-owned media property, it exists somewhere on the same continuum as RT and Al Jazeera, though like the former, Telesur has been criticized as a nakedly partisan governmental mouthpiece, and like the latter, it does engage in real news reporting. But putting aside questions of bias and agenda, Telesur\u00a0does seem to exist on a separate plane than, say, Infowars, which exists primarily to peddle its particular, patently false genre of right-wing paranoia fan fiction packaged as news (and brain pills<\/a>), as opposed to some garden-variety political agenda. Unlike RT, Telesur hasn\u2019t been singled-out for a role in laundering disinformation for military intelligence purposes, nor is it a hoax factory, \u00e0\u00a0la Alex Jones.<\/p>\n

So it was unexpected when Telesur English blinked out of existence on the 13th, and even stranger when Facebook struggled to explain its own actions. At the time of its suspension, Telesur received this boilerplate message from Facebook:<\/p>\n

Hello,<\/em><\/p>\n

Your Page \u201cteleSUR English\u201d has been removed for violating our Terms of Use. A Facebook Page is a distinct presence used solely for business or promotional purposes. Among other things, Pages that are hateful, threatening or obscene are not allowed. We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group, or that are set up by an unauthorised individual. If your Page was removed for any of the above reasons, it will not be reinstated. Continued misuse of Facebook\u2019s features could result in the permanent loss of your account.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Facebook Team<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later that day, a Facebook customer support agent told the network that the suspension appeared to be due to a technical glitch \u2014 a go-to<\/a> explanation for<\/a> the company<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 rather than a violation of the company\u2019s Terms of Use, adding that the issue was \u201cunder analysis by the engineering department.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have a mishmash of incompatible justifications.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The next day, Facebook wrote Telesur again, this time saying that the company\u2019s engineers had conducted \u201cseveral tests\u201d and assured the outlet that \u201ctechnicians\u201d continued to look for an answer. On Wednesday, after a 48-hour blackout, Facebook wrote once more to say the page had been suspended due to a mysterious \u201cinstability on the platform,\u201d which had now been corrected. It\u2019s unclear whether Facebook would have corrected this \u201cinstability\u201d had Telesur\u00a0not complained to them, and equally unclear why the company had initially claimed that Telesur had violated its terms of service.<\/p>\n

But Facebook has a third reason for suspending Telesur: In an emailed statement to The Intercept, a company spokesperson said, \u201cThe Page was temporally unpublished to protect it after we detected suspicious activity.\u201d The term \u201csuspicious activity\u201d does not appear in Facebook\u2019s terms of service. The spokesperson would not explain what \u201csuspicious activity\u201d was observed on Telesur\u2019s page, or define the term, or explain why it was initially blamed on rule-breaking by Telesur and then technical problems on the social network\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

Even if you were to assume the worst about Telesur \u2014\u00a0that it exists to parrot the opinions of repressive regimes \u2014 and even if you could come up with an argument that Telesur in fact ought to be suspended for one reason or another, it\u2019s hard to imagine an argument that Facebook has no obligation to explain its actions in a manner that could be described as even mostly coherent, if not transparent. This is typical behavior for the company, which both touts its use of automated rule enforcement<\/a> and scapegoats<\/a> the algorithms when they go awry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Telesur\u2019s case, there\u2019s no word as to whether a human or string of content-policing computer code \u201cunpublished\u201d the page, mistakenly or not, justifiably or otherwise. Instead, we have a mishmash of incompatible justifications, the latest in a long stream out of a company that\u2019s struggled to create intelligible rules for acceptable content and behavior, let alone enforce them. To its credit, Facebook published a long account of its reasoning behind suspending Infowars\u2019s Alex Jones<\/a>, though this likely has more to do with public relations angst than some commitment to consistency and transparency. For a company that\u2019s testified before Congress and bought billboards around the country saying they\u2019re working on accountability and earning public trust, this is a problem \u2014 it\u2019s difficult to picture anything further from accountability than enforcing rules from behind a curtain.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Related:<\/em><\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg Is Either Ignorant or Deliberately Misleading Congress<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Predict Your Future Actions for Advertisers, Says Confidential Document<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>As Twitter Suspends Alex Jones, Should We Worry About Silicon Valley Regulating Speech?<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sam Biddle<\/a> – sam.biddle@\u200btheintercept.co<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Aug 2018 – Facebook offered a jumble of explanations for why Telesur’s English-language page was suddenly taken down and then reinstated two days later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":117155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}