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Facebook has banned a Blue Lives Matter article from being posted on their platform for at least the second time.
On Tuesday, Blue Lives Matter posted a news story about a truly tragic situation where Los Angeles Police Department officers inadvertently, fatally shot a hostage while trying to shoot a suspect who was cutting the hostage’s neck.
Within the story was a copy of the bodycam footage released by LAPD, accompanied by a warning about the nature of the content.
The footage blurred the face of the victim.
This is the exact same footage that LA Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, and The Virginia Gazette, included in their news articles on the shooting. It is the same footage that KNX Radio actually uploaded to Facebook.
While the articles for all of those other news sources remain active on Facebook, the social media company banned Blue Lives Matter’s news article on the subject.
All links to the article were removed from their platform, and anybody who attempts to post the article is given an error message.
To make yourself immune from Facebook censorship,sign up to our newsletterto get a daily list of all of our articles in your inbox, and be sure to look for it each morning.
UPDATE: Facebook appears to have reversed the article ban Wednesday morning.
This is not the first time that a Blue Lives Matter article has been banned by Facebook.
Facebook previously banned a Blue Lives Matter news article about about an officer who died in an off-duty motorcycle collision. There was seemingly nothing controversial about the article.
There may be more articles banned than just these two, because after each article was banned by Facebook, they did not contact us to inform us that they banned links to our articles. Each time, we only discovered the bans because our readers told us that the articles were being censored, and we checked and confirmed what they told us.
Facebook is effectively making an editorial decision on what news sources they will allow you to see, and what news sources they won’t let you see.
We started our news website to counter the misleading, if not outright false, information coming from mainstream media. We couldn’t stand seeing Michael Brown continually be referred to as an “unarmed black teen shot by a white police officer” with no mention of the fact that Brown was actively trying to murder that officer after committing a robbery.
Facebook wants to control what news you see, and it’s not the sort of news that’s fair to police officers.
By blocking access to Blue Lives Matter’s content, while allowing only left-leaning news sources, Facebook is controlling how people perceive important events when police officers use deadly force.
Unfortunately, Blue Lives Matter has encountered more bias from Facebook than just being banned.
When I attempted to get our Facebook page verified, I was repeatedly told that our page could not be verified because it did not represent a local business, company or organization, despite the fact that I had submitted a copy of our business license to them.
I repeatedly submitted our business license and tax ID information to Facebook 6 times before they finally approved us to get a grey verification mark. At the time we were approved, our Facebook page got inexplicably changed from being listed as a Media/News Company to being listed as a Community Organization, which should render us ineligible for a blue mark (opposed to our grey) because blue marks are reserved for “public figures, media companies, or brands.” That is, unless you call yourself Black Lives Matter.
There are at least 24 Black Lives Matter community organizations with blue verification checkboxes.
But you can take action to counter Facebook’s changes. Here’s how:
Sign up to our newsletter to get a daily list of all of our articles in your inbox.
Tell Facebook you want to see Blue Lives Matter first on your newsfeed. You can do this on the mobile Facebook app by going to the menu button in the upper right, then scrolling down to “News Feed Preferences.”
Then click on “Prioritize Who To See First” and select Blue Lives Matter.
On desktop, you can select who you see first by clicking the dropdown arrow in the upper-right and clicking on news feed preferences from there.
4) The next thing you can do is to like/comment/share an article after you read it. This will tell Facebook to show our content to more people and counteract anti-police people flagging the page.
Please help spread the word about what Facebook is doing. Thank you for your support.