Intellectual Takeout, a project of the Minnesota-based Charlemagne Institute, said it was prevented from publishing new content on Facebook in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election.
“You may have noticed that not much is coming out of Intellectual Takeout right now, and that’s because, as of late Friday — prior to the election — we have been blocked from publishing to our Intellectual Takeout page with almost 700,000 followers as well as a few other pages that we control,” Charlemagne Institute CEO Devin Foley said in a Wednesday video.
According to an article in Chronicles, another project of the Charlemagne Institute, none of Intellectual Takeout’s scheduled posts for the weekend were published.
“When attempting to post new material, Facebook informed us that restrictions are now in place to ‘help protect the community from spam,’” said the article, written by Intellectual Takeout editor Annie Holmquist.
The outlet attempted to resume posting content Monday morning, but was notified that Facebook was limiting “how often you can post, comment or do other things in a given amount of time in order to help protect the community from spam.”
In an email to Facebook, Foley noted that his team has “spent nearly 10 years building up our audiences.”
“We’ve noticed extreme changes in traffic around major elections, but we have never been blocked completely from posting to our Facebook pages, until today,” he said.
Big Tech censorship kicked into overdrive this week as ballot counting continued in several battleground states and both presidential campaigns expressed confidence in their chances of prevailing.
According to one report, half of President Donald Trump’s posts since Election Day have been censored and flagged as misinformation on both Facebook and Twitter.
Meanwhile, Facebook completely removed a group called “Stop the Steal” from its platform. The group had been publishing information about voter fraud and plans for protests.
“The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” a spokesperson for the tech giant told NPR.
Conservative radio host Mark Levin said Facebook placed restrictions on his page on the eve of the election “based on an extremely dishonest Politifact review of my link to an accurate story.”
“Big Tech has made it very clear to us in the last few weeks that they are set against us,” Foley said in his Wednesday livestream. He also said Mailchimp plans to censor any emails that it considers to be “disinformation.”
“Google Ads has shut us down. They will not work with our website because we’re conservative,” Foley continued. “These power plays extend even beyond Big Tech. In the last year or so, we’ve had two different insurance policies canceled on us because we’re conservative.”
Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
