It came to our attention yesterday when we were sharing WUWT articles, that Facebook now treats WUWT articles as “abusive”. Apparently this is a new tactic of the warmists to abuse the FB abuse process in order to suppress free speech. WUWT readers have reported that this has also started happening on other skeptic blogs with their articles.
Until Anthony gets back, when we can see about a more permanent solution, we want to encourage our readers to all share WUWT articles via your Facebook accounts, and when FB gives you “this is an abusive site” pop-up, as seen in the graphic above, to click the “Let us know” appeal link to submit an appeal. Hopefully if FB staff start seeing enough appeals from enough of our readers, that they will realize that their system is being gamed by our opponents.
While on FB, we encourage you to join the WUWT FB group.
UPDATE: As of this moment, new WUWT articles are posting to FB without the abuse warning, but anything from yesterday or days prior is getting the warning and requires an appeal. Apparently whoever has been up to these games hasn’t gotten online yet today. We still encourage our readers to help ensure that WUWT articles are able to be shared on FB without interference, and to ensure that other skeptic blogs are also able to be published on Facebook. It’s clear that the warmists are engaging in guerrilla tactics now.
I got shoehorned into F*c*b**k and regretted it immediately. However there are nice people there. Working on a Climate Science presentation at present, that is much more fun because I hope it will be more objectively useful.
I posted this link to FB in the UK, went through without any problems.
Mike Nicholson (April 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm),
Our Constitution only prevents our government from censoring speech. Private individuals and/or private companies can censor all they want (at the risk of alienating all who witness their cowardly travesties).
Mike Nicholson says:
April 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm
“There is a half remembered quote from someone I completely forget, but the sentiments are sound. “Sir, I totally disagree with everything you have said, but by God, I will fight to the death to uphold your right to say it!””
Yeah, but it wasn’t a warmist.
It might be worth putting a link to the Wattsup RSS feed (or something similar) onto Facebook so it’s easier to see what’s going on on Wattsup from Facebook and help to spread the message. At present it is all very passive on Facebook. Not sure what is technically possible so just a thought. I proudly claim to be your 1886th like on Facebook.
At present FB and I are having *issues* over linking to Willis’s “A pox on both” article. As fast as I can post the link, it gets deleted, so I post it again, and again, and again.
I haven’t had any notification from FB, and in scrolling back through my posts in FB, all the links I had up for WUWT have been deleted as well.
Someone is playing silly buggers as the saying goes here.
Tried Randy’s approach. It worked just fine. We posted the URL for wattsupwiththat and a graphic.
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
That’s Voltaire – and the sentiment is at the heart of the Enlightenment. Without it, we have despotism, both politically and intellectually.
30 minutes ago I tried to share the article “WUWT – Voted Best Science Blog in the 2011 Bloggies” (page 10 of the older posts) and sure enough someone had reported the link as abusive content and FB wouldn’t share it.
What I do occasionally is just post a link to WUWT in the “What’s on my mind?” thing. Never had a problem.
So far…
DaleC says:
April 9, 2011 at 1:42 pm
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
That’s Voltaire…
Voltaire eh? He invented batteries too. Clever bloke.
Just had the recent article about James Delingpole blocked. This is outrageous, it really is. Anthony, I think you need to get in touch with Facebook and get this fixed…
Cheers,
Tim
It was blocked for me so I immediately posted a complaint. I will continue to do this with each new post.
Mike Nicholson says:
April 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm
“To all my American Friends. You have an enviable position in having enshrined within law, the right to freedom of speech. Facebook has taken an action that seems to ignore that. ”
Facebook is not the government. That free speech thing applies to the government curtailing it. Though reprehensible and childish, they are perfectly within their rights to abusively censor or not listen to what they wish.
Yet another reason to avoid agenda driven, large bureaucratic organizations.
TimiBoy says:
April 9, 2011 at 2:08 pm
It’s OK TimiBoy – I’ve just managed to post Deller’s latest….
I just want to say that one of my ‘friends’ has 367 Facebook friends! Can anyone beat that?!…
Seriously, though, lots of her ‘friends’ may now be looking at the latest WUWT link I have just posted…
Mony a mickle mak’s a muckle..
What’s ‘facebook’ ?
Roy UK says:
April 9, 2011 at 9:00 am
I don’t have a facebook account because I have real friends who I can actually count on the fingers of two hands. I had no desire to have 42,000 friends I had never met, reading all of my personal musings.
HEAR HEAR! I have no interest. I like my privacy, what little I have left thankyou.
I assume that Facebook uses/relies on GOOGLE’S DEFINITION OF “ABUSIVE”, so I think this is Google issue, not a Facebook one.
Time will tell, and soon.
Jimmy Haigh says:
“I just want to say that one of my ‘friends’ has 367 Facebook friends! Can anyone beat that?!…”
Well, I’m currently at 0, but when I get my first friend that will show an infinitely fast-rising trend, and in no time at all I’ll have millions and billions of BFF’s. That’s how trends work in climate catastrophe science.
First, though, I’d need to sign up on FB.
You can be pretty sure Google is working at reducing the availability of skeptical views of any type on its search engine.
I was blocked on Thursday when I tried to post an article from The National Post (Canada) called “Climate Models Go Cold” on facebook ; but I was able to do so today. Maybe the gremlins don’t work on Saturday. Cheers.
Note: The WUWT Facebook Page is linked to our right hand column and is primarily a fan page for people to “like” us and post messages. The “Group” on FB I created today allows a lot more user interaction, including chat among group members, posting various sorts of content and setting up events, etc. While there are over 1880 people who have “liked” the Page since it was founded a year or so ago, our Group has gotten 250 members in its first 6 hours of existence. We’ve been getting mixed reports of different levels of blockage by FB of WUWT articles, and group members are actively sharing more WUWT articles and filing appeals for those that were blocked.
Mobilizing our reader base to engage in this sort of activism is a fantastic exercise, and it proves to the warmists that their claims that skeptic sites are “astroturf” is a bunch of hokum.
SSam says:
April 9, 2011 at 2:44 pm (Edit)
Mike Nicholson says:
April 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm
““To all my American Friends. You have an enviable position in having enshrined within law, the right to freedom of speech. Facebook has taken an action that seems to ignore that. ”
Facebook is not the government. That free speech thing applies to the government curtailing it. Though reprehensible and childish, they are perfectly within their rights to abusively censor or not listen to what they wish.”
Actually, under Marsh vs Alabama, company owned communities are required to respect the Constitutional rights of their residents and visitors. While more recent court rulings like the AOL case and the Sony case have eroded this ruling somewhat, I personally expect that as people spend more of their lives online that there will be greater demand that individual rights be strengthened even when a private company owns an online community. They dont actually own us or our information or our relationships, they just own the servers.
Mark Suckerberg and the other social media gurus met with our bully president, who I’m sure asked for more tactics to prevent opposing messages from getting out. After this closed meeting FB changed the way you see friends or they see your posts so only a handful are visible based on your last few interactions- the rest don’t show up. You can change that in settings but it doesn’t change theirs and I noticed mine went back to the “new” settings on its own. I have almost 2000 “friends” and can see only about 20.