Facebook Censors Data Justice
by Ashby Hayes
We’ve known for a long time that Facebook has a habit of censoring people, ideas, and companies that threaten their empire. Now Data Justice has become a target. Like Signal and its recent ad campaign, Aviame has been speaking out against data exploitation by Big Tech, resulting in swift and immediate censorship.
On Saturday April 24th Soumeya Benghanem and Malaika Paquiot hosted a room on Clubhouse featuring Ashby Fiser (CEO of Aviame) talking about the impact of the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ and the Data Justice movement.
Towards the end a person named Carlos who self-identified as an engineer at Facebook asked a question and the following is a transcript from the memory of those who attended.
Carlos: ‘I don’t think people will want to do this or the subscription model, the idea just seems too simplistic and half-baked?’
Ashby: ‘It’s about transparency. Once people know what’s going on. Once people know how much companies are making from their data they will be able to make a choice. I think people are going to be down with sharing their data and paying for the service, companies can just deduct the service fee from the monetization of their data. In the vast majority of cases I believe users will make money. I see subscriptions working hand-in-hand with data sharing.’
Carlos: ‘Wouldn’t this just spam people?’
Ashby: ‘No, not at all. This is an opt-in situation. They’ve told us what ads they want and they are getting paid to receive them. This isn’t spam, this is the highest form of Opt-in.’
The Ban
On April 28th we noticed that Aviame’s public Facebook page and Ashby’s associated Facebook account had been shut down. Ashby’s account only has her profile pic, no posts or other information. There was no information on our company page, yet these were shut down without any reason, with the message that we’d violated community standards.
We appealed the ban. Ashby had to give them her phone number and a video facial ID just to go through the process to appeal the ban, which was invasive and (we later learned) highly unusual.
We believe that Ashby was censored by Facebook for advocating for Data Justice. When people learn that they are being exploited by Facebook, they may stop using the platform or change their privacy settings and this would be bad for business.
On May 4th Ashby tried to log into Facebook and found that her account had been restored and that the Aviame page had been unpublished. She republished it but didn’t add any content or information. There were no emails, messages, or details on why the accounts had been shut down and none on why they had been restored.
It’s entirely possible that now that Facebook has Ashby’s face and information they will simply eliminate or bury all related images and content that are posted on the platform. This is a scary but real and completely plausible scenario.
How many legitimate companies, people, and ideas have been buried by Facebook and others? In a world where misinformation spreads unchecked, we cannot pretend that this self-proclaimed ‘neutral’ organization is doing anything other than what’s in their best interest. Above all Facebook wants to control the narrative around their product at the expense of people thinking for themselves. They swiftly eliminat anything that might harm them. But only combat false, deadly or damaging information when it’s convenient or in their best interest.
The reality is painfully obvious: they don’t care about you. They don’t care about connecting people or about community, at least not anymore. They only care about their stockholders and their billions. They only care about retaining their power.
Are you willing to give up your power to a company who doesn’t care about you? I’m not.