Facebook Censors Ron Paul!

[maxmerkel]

As a programmer, "it" might be a rogue programmer who decided to inject his/her own political agenda into this. Meaning, they might just flipped the flag to omit Ron Paul's search results and will say "oh, I inadvertently did that..sorry'

right, and sadly there is NO way of doing something like this inadvertently. (it would at least be very very very very strange coincidence)
as you said, this might be the idea of a facebook employee or the company itself. either way it was done on purpose.
(i'm a programmer, too)

 

[Nefertiti]

Is my memory correct, or wasn't there someone in these forums a day or two before the 5th asking people with Facebook accounts to go to all the Ron Paul groups and message the members asking them to donate? And wasn't there some remark too about certain people getting their Facebook accounts yanked for this mass mailing?

Before blaming this on some political plot I would suggest reading the Facebook terms of service and see if this previous action would not have been in violation of those terms. And if so, we have one of our own to blame for encouraging what could only be called a spam attack.

 

[maxmerkel]

on the techcrunch blog is this response :

I work on our political features at Facebook.

This is a technical glitch. Facebook would never censor an individual candidate as you suggest. Mr. Paul has a politician profile on Facebook, and all of his groups are still there. This is just a bug with our search.

We are investigating the problem to see why this is happening.

 

[maxmerkel]

Is my memory correct, or wasn't there someone in these forums a day or two before the 5th asking people with Facebook accounts to go to all the Ron Paul groups and message the members asking them to donate? And wasn't there some remark too about certain people getting their Facebook accounts yanked for this mass mailing?

Before blaming this on some political plot I would suggest reading the Facebook terms of service and see if this previous action would not have been in violation of those terms. And if so, we have one of our own to blame for encouraging what could only be called a spam attack.

something like this would not trigger a search censorship but a censorship of all messages sent around that contain "ron paul". so i say no, this is not the reason. and by the way, 1600 messages (this was the amount of contacte persons if i remember correctly) containing a special word are SO below facebooks radar - as a comparison think of a mexican beetle crawling over the border

 

[mport1]

For once this is not a conspiracy. Something is actually wrong here and must be corrected. The RP Facebook group has 40,000 members.

 

[maxmerkel]

For once this is not a conspiracy. Something is actually wrong here and must be corrected. The RP Facebook group has 40,000 members.

a conspiracy would involve multiple persons - so you might be right and this involves only one malicious facebook programmer. still, there IS code somewhere that says : search_results = 0 if query == 'ron paul'

 

[mport1]

Try it now. When I type "Ron" i get a message saying that searching is unavailable but then when i change it to another word the search works.

 

[mport1]

From somebody on Facebook: "A contact of mine that works for Facebook confirmed this is a technical issue and not a deliberate attempt to censor Ron Paul."

 

[maxmerkel]

Try it now. When I type "Ron" i get a message saying that searching is unavailable but then when i change it to another word the search works.

yes, they changed it that way till they find the malicious code that causes 0 results. they are informed and apparently want to make clear that there ARE in fact search results, but that it does not work at the moment for "ron" and "ron paul".

 

[maxmerkel]

From somebody on Facebook: "A contact of mine that works for Facebook confirmed this is a technical issue and not a deliberate attempt to censor Ron Paul."

after they resolved this, i'd really like to get the explanation. the technical explanation.

 

[maxmerkel]

they solved their "technical problem". it works again.

 

[maxmerkel]

here is the explanation (so far):

the word “ron” fell out of our groups search index. so groups for anyone named “Ron” weren’t showing up in search. other terms seem to have fallen out of the index as well, but we’re still investigating which ones and why.

again, Facebook would never target an individual politician as people have suggested. we are excited that Ron Paul has been using Facebook in his campaign, and we welcome the efforts of his supporters to use Facebook to promote him as well.

 

[expatriot]

Link?

here is the explanation (so far):

No doubt of this, but where is this quote from, authoritatively?

Third-hand quotes are mere rumours...

 

[Pepper]

someone needs to submit a story to digg/ reddit about this facebook censorship asap

ABC owns facebook??? If so that explains it.... AIPACS biggest supporter is Eisen of Disney and he owns ABC and they are for Hillary. ABC has become another fox.

Mahatma Ghandi said:

First they ignore you
then they redicule you
then they fight you (this is the stage that has just begun)

then you WIN!!!!

The war was declared when Ron Got that huge record breaking donation on one day with 18,000 new contributors added to his already extensive support list resulting in 38,000 donors with average donations of $103 each. That is when they started to take him seriously and knew that "ignoring" and "rediculing" wasn't working. So now they are going to war against him and I have seen the slander they are doing to him on both conservative and liberal forums, Fox news,
Wolf Blitzer, THE EX AIPAC EMPLOYEE and mossad agent, of CNN has stepped up his attacks on paul and especially during interviews when Ron tries to answer his charges, he interrupts him so he doesn't get his message out loud and clear.

Wolf continues to call him a libertarian when he is in fact for 20 years a republican which Wolf refuses to acknowledge, and the slams Ron by saying the fund raiser was to support Fawlks day which was a violent revolution type act to blow up parliamnet. Wolf never talks about how it was V for Vendetta that started it and that film was a peaceful march on the elite to get them to change. He totally ignores all of that.

So the war is joined, what are we the supporters going to do to counter these assaults??? I have spent hours documenting and arguing with others on forums to counter the lies, but its hard work.... Anyone got any other suggestions???

 

[Brinck Slattery]

um "fell out?" That sounds like total bull to me. Sorry.

 

[Lord Xar]

Besides all of this...... IS IT fixed now?

 

[lloydian]

Bump Has the problem been corrected

 

[Patronus]

I received this message from Facebook Wednesday evening and it was fixed shortly afterwards. It has been working fine since.

We are aware of the problem that you described and hope to resolve
it as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience. Let me know if
you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Anjali
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

 

[walt]

not good enough, they need to apologize on their blog more publically.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Everyone on facebook, test this out.

In the upper left hand search bar, type in Ron Paul and hit enter. Returned are only 'people'- no groups, no events, etc.

Now hit back and try this.

Type in any other presidential candidate and hit enter. Voilà! Amazing...

Zuckerberg (the libertarian) has been censoring libertarians since 2007...