The Patriot Post® · Facebook: Oops. Sorry, <em>Patriot Post</em> — Our Mistake!

As the marketing and social media director for The Patriot Post, I can tell you the last two years of deliberate Big Tech efforts to suppress free speech have created enormous challenges for us, particularly with the shadowbanning of our content by Facebook. I have had a front-row seat to witness the corrupt collusion between social media platforms and the Democrat Party, and we have documented this collusion.

The Wall Street Journal exposed Facebook’s politically motivated effort to silence conservative voices, but your Patriot Post team has documented the BIG Tech assault on our publication in hard data detail.

But with the midterm election in the bag, and Facebook/Meta stock collapsing to a five-year low, all of a sudden The Patriot Post has had all the restrictions against our account lifted. Must just be coincidence…

After 25 years of growth, which increased significantly as a result of posting our content on social media platforms since 2010, The Patriot Post’s incoming traffic from Facebook began to drop precipitously in June 2020. In fact, in a matter of months, it dropped 85% — the direct result of shadowbanning and suppression of our reach, ostensibly justified by ratings for our site from Facebook and other leftist media platforms. Facebook has censored our verifiably factual content using its spurious so-called third-party “fact-checks” under the auspices of “transparency.”

In Mark Alexander’s recent analysis, “Hypocrisy Alert: Facebook’s Record Fine for Transparency Violations,” he provided the latest evidence of how Facebook has become the Democrats’ biggest marketing and promotion platform. “Mark Zuckerberg, DBA ‘Meta,’ which owns Facebook and Instagram, coordinated with the feds to suppress information unfavorable to Joe Biden in 2020,” he wrote, “and since then coordinated with the Biden administration to continue this suppression.”

Meta was fined a record $24.7 million for campaign finance disclosure violations — a fine imposed by one judge in one state, Washington. Judge Douglass North issued a ruling fining Meta the maximum allowed penalties for more than 800 violations of Washington’s Fair Campaign Practices Act.

That’s right. The world’s most prolific speech-suppression platform, the self-appointed arbiter of truth, is being fined for its lack of transparency. Writing a check for $25 million is chump change for Zuckerberg, but exposing his abject hypocrisy is priceless.

I joined The Patriot Post team to find the best avenues for promoting our timeless analysis of issues important to American Liberty, and early on, that was a breeze! Given that Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, it was, and remains, an unavoidable resource for getting our message in front of a large audience. At the time, we had a rapidly growing number of followers — those who actively indicated to Facebook that they wanted to see our content in their news feeds.

We still have a very large and growing number of Facebook followers, but they have been seeing little or none of our content.

The Patriot Post has had accounts on all top social media platforms for as long as they have been important information providers. Significantly, our advancement director, Christy Chesterton, protested the early signs of social media suppression of our content, noting, “We built Facebook.”

Indeed, there are more than 100 million grassroots American conservatives on Facebook, and many use the platform as one of their primary news sources. We know this, and Facebook knows this, which is precisely why our publication and others have been actively suppressed.

Ahead of the 2020 election, Zuckerberg decided he knew best what information Facebook users should see — and what he and his leftist cadres did not want them to see. But how to do that?

Earlier in 2020, we received a “hate speech” strike from Facebook. The subject was a meme we produced asserting that parents who subject their children to gender dysphoric indoctrination and alteration are guilty of child abuse. At the time, Alexander discovered a group of Rainbow Mafia thugs that was reporting to Facebook any content we posted objecting to its gender-confused agenda. Likeminded speech suppressors then did their bidding to ensure the reach of our dissenting views was increasingly limited.

As punishment, our audience reach was greatly diminished. Throughout the year, we were subjected to nine different “fact-checks” or “community standards violations,” a mind-numbing increase. In June 2020, Facebook permanently banned us from advertising, which was a requirement in order to extend our reach. Its broad reasoning: repeated “violations” of its community standards. We appealed this suppression of speech, but were advised the decision was final, despite the fact that we were never pointed to the specific community standards we had supposedly transgressed. No recourse, no details, just done.

I have routinely checked every month for two years to see if the appeal process had changed. That door was welded shut … until this week.

With the midterm elections over and with Meta hemorrhaging value, Zuckerberg laying off more than 11,000 employees, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter promising an end to suppression of free speech, this week the option to review and appeal the strikes against our account mysteriously opened.

I submitted a request and waited. Within a matter of hours, The Patriot Post’s account was fully reinstated. The official response we received after two years of requesting reviews: “We determined that access to advertising was incorrectly restricted. Your Business Account’s ads, shops and other assets that were affected will return to their previous status. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

In other words, “Oops.” Nevertheless, our ability to expand the reach of our content was restored.

As Alexander has noted previously, it is long past time for Congress to take on this behemoth and end its politically motivated speech suppression. Under Democrat control, he wrote, “The Big Tech platforms are assured of no meaningful Demo challenges to their Section 230 protections and they will not be subjected to congressional anti-trust hearings and litigation.” Now, however, “There is a new sheriff in town.”