Since last October, our team has had many discussions about this very article. We all knew that it would happen, it was simply unavoidable. This article is not only exposing the legal violations, policy violations, and abuse from Facebook, this article is serving as a testament of the results from these abuses. While we have written articles previously discussing what was being done to our team, it was agreed that we needed to write the conclusion to those articles.

If you followed us on Facebook, you already know what the results were. If you’ve been following, in general, you already know what has been occurring. However, if you aren’t aware, let’s start by giving you a quick rundown to get you up to speed on things.

In September, Facebook had done an unknown action that prevented our bot from automatically posting our articles to our Facebook page, this began shortly before the other events, which will be discussed shortly, began. It took us a few weeks to even notice that this had happened. While our website showed that Facebook was connected, Twitter was connected, and so fourth, the posts simply were not going up on Facebook. After attempting to resolve this issue, with no success, we began manually posting the articles.

Though this was rather annoying, we did what had to be done. For a few weeks things were fine; this changed around October 20th. One by one, admins of the WoC page were being completely blocked out of their profiles. They were unable to comment, like, post, share, etc. However, they were able to send instant messages. In total, five of the seven admins were completely blocked from doing anything on their accounts. Facebook offered no explanation, no resolution, not even a policy that was violated. We began sending daily disputes, though Facebook blocked us from doing this as well. Finally, out of desperation, I personally began sending messages to them via the “feedback” feature. After doing this for about a week, that too was blocked.

These blocks lasted until December 19th. The entire time, we could do nothing aside watch as the platform suffered from our lack of activity. During this time, the admin who had not been affected, took control of the platform. Finally, when we were unblocked, it was decided that we would tread cautiously; this did not work.

On December 25th, I got online to four messages. Once again, the admin were blocked on Facebook. I immediately checked my profile to find that, like last time, it was also blocked. This block lasts for thirty days. As with the previous block, we have no ability to contest it. In fact, looking into the “violations” section, shows nothing. Essentially, as far as Facebook is concerned, we aren’t blocked. Though I have, once again, begun sending feedback to the site, that has now also been blocked. With this, our team had a difficult choice to make. Do we continue operating on what is clearly a site that willfully violates constitutional rights, or do we shutdown?

With much discussion, we removed the platform from the public eye, we unpublished the page. While this was a move that none of us had wanted, there simply was no alternative action. Facebook has made it abundantly clear that we are being targeted, a violation of their harassment policy, in fact. Extending beyond that, it contradicts the very words of Mark Zuckerberg, who had stated that Facebook would not censor free speech. With the removal of our Facebook page, we effectively lost more than 97% of our followers. If you aren’t aware of what this means, it means War on Corruption is on a path toward shutting its doors, or the difficult path of having to rebuild the entire platform; at this time, we are still discussing our future.

Meanwhile, Facebook is not held accountable. We aren’t the first platform to be censored out in this way. CopBlock, Freedom Thought Project, and many others have been targeted by the social media giant. Around 2018, we witnessed what many called the “Facebook purge.” During this time dozens of independent media platforms were simply shutdown by Facebook. No explanation, no reason, not even an email explaining why. Thankfully, many of these platforms recovered. Hopefully, with time, we shall too.