Facebook threatens Voice of Europe for criticizing migration

(VOICE OF EUROPE) — We were one of the fastest growing European news sites on Facebook with at least 30,000 people joining us every month. On some days 5,000 people joined us, but those days are gone after Facebook decided to censor us, suspend us and threaten us.

While we’ve changed nothing in our postings, Facebook’s behavior towards us changed. Several innocent postings were a reason for Facebook to suspend our moderators.

For example posting a picture of Poles protesting behind a banner with ‘Mohammed not welcome’ was a reason to suspend one of our moderators for 24 hours and we had to delete content as well. But it would become much worse..

This week we were even banned for posting our own news and our moderator received a suspension for 30 days! While we understand news can be ‘Hungary’s Prime Minister’ as well, we don’t think this was the case here.

We’ve posted book review of a former Czech president who said: “The migrant influx is comparable to the barbarian invasions of Europe.”

While the article heavily criticizes migration, it is news, like any other article on our site. But not according to Facebook: The article was removed, we received a 30-day suspension and Facebook threatened to remove our page over it. But something even more strange happened.

That day we saw a somewhat similar article was posted by Russia Today on Facebook (see below). They didn’t receive a suspension over it, because that would be all over the media.

We’ve now decided we will not post all our news on Facebook anymore, because we don’t want to lose our page. While Facebook blames us for posting ‘hate speech’ we think the real reason is our site was becoming too successful with between 30,000 and 40,000 followers every month this year.

Our statistics have now fallen to very low levels because we posted a news message that criticized migration.

Hungary’s Prime Minister once said: “Europe is not free, because freedom begins with speaking the truth. In Europe today it is forbidden to speak the truth.”

He is right.

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