Facebook restricting organic reach of pro-EU pages

By Chris Bovey

Facebook has become an instrumental part of people’s lives for sharing and disseminating information.

Newsfeeds will show you a mixture of paid-for sponsored ads together with posts from friends, groups you have joined and pages you have chosen to like.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal which allowed them to harvest the personal data of millions of people’s Facebook profiles without their consent and used it for political advertising purposes.

This was instrumental in the fraudulent Brexit referendum campaign that was narrowly won by the cheating and lying Leave campaign back in 2016, as well as helping the British Conservatives and Donald Trump secure election victories.

The Feed The Birds Facebook page last year had a reach on average of one million people a month. A couple of months ago, we saw our reach virtually wiped out, although it has since recovered, but not to the reach we used to get.

This post reached just 29 people, normally we reach thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands, even a few with over one million.

Facebook doesn’t want people to know that Boris Johnson is a liar.

I put this down to a blip in the Facebook algorithm, at the time it was reported in the news Facebook was experiencing technical issues.

Pro-EU pages being denied organic reach

However, I since heard of other pro-EU pages complaining Facebook was not showing their post in organic search results.

An anti-Brexit page with over sixteen-thousand likes that shared the following anti-Brexit meme only reached just six people and one of them was me.

Bo Jo’s ‘No Deal’ stance is illogical, but the Zuk doesn’t want you to know this.

As you can see it was shown to only 6 people.

Again, from the same page, this article was shown to just 20 people and engaged with by nobody.

Boris’ cabinet from hell …. shhhh, his financial backers also give Facebook a shit load of money.

This is deeply worrying. We know Facebook was paid a fortune by Cambridge Analytica to illegally influence the democratic process, however, they will not be able to get away with that again, since they got caught and are under greater public scrutiny.

The Zuk refuses public scrutiny

Mark Zuckerberg refuses to attend a summons to the Commons International Committee investigating Fake News. We do know that Facebook hates the EU tax directive which is to come into force in 2020 that would make Facebook pay their fair share in tax. Given that, it shouldn’t be a great deal of surprise that Facebook should seek to restrict access to pro-EU information. The Zuk isn’t keen on paying more tax on his billions, despite the phoney image he likes to promote that Facebook is about building communities.

We contacted the office of Facebook’s Public Relations man, Sir Nick Clegg,  former Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister, to put forward our evidence that Facebook was deliberately trying to stifle the organic reach of pro-EU articles while at the same time giving more prominence to pro-Brexit pages. Sir Clegg’s Office declined to comment, not really surprising, you’d think after what he did to the Liberal Democrats, he’d be the last person on Earth you’d want to hire to manage your PR.

This is the kind of reach we can get on a small cannabis Facebook page with a silly weed meme, 28,098 reached on a page with little over 2,700 likes.

Facebook has no problem with weed, just don’t diss Brexit or Boris.

Yet here on our pro-EU page with over 50,000 likes, you can see this funny photo of a sign outside a pub in London taking the piss out of Boris Johnson was shown to only 11 people.

They gave away more free pints than Facebook gave that photo reach.

The Inconvenient Truth

Another anti-Brexit page, The Inconvenient Truth, which has nearly 8k likes has also experienced unexplained drops in reach. The following screenshot shows how badly they were hurt, although they’ve since recovered.

An ‘inconvenient truth’ for Facebook is pro-EU activists have noticed they are deliberately restricting the reach of liberal anti-Brexit pages.

Facebook is essentially a monopoly, which means they have a duty of care to their billions of users of whom they make obscene amounts of money from by targeted advertising. If somebody chooses to like a Facebook page then it should not be for Mark Zuckerberg to decide what information comes up in people’s Newsfeeds. What they are doing is effectively censorship.

We are not sure why Feed The Birds’ Facebook page or other pro-EU pages have been targeted by Facebook to reduce their organic reach. Feed the Birds seems to have somewhat recovered, but we find it very strange that pro-EU pages appear to be given unwarranted penalties that prevent their posts from appearing in Newsfeeds. We can only conclude that Facebook wants to restrict the organic reach of pro-EU pages as they hate the EU’s forthcoming tax directive.

Mass reporting by Leave loonies

Another theory is the Leave campaign has a coordinated campaign to mass report Facebook pages which are then penalised by a computer algorithm since they are not checked by a human. Anti Brexit page Inspire EU, which has over 17k likes was recently given a ban for no good reason which will end on the 13^th September.

Another large pro-EU Facebook page with over 17,000 likes has its reach taken away by Facebook without explanation.

Chris Bovey is a businessman, writer, artist, musician and practical joker. He lives in Devon with his partner, two children and cat. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter @_dr_dremp.