Facebook arbitrarily limits The Left Chapter with no explanation or appeal

Today Facebook limited, without any meaningful explanation, The Left Chapter's ability to be seen on the forum. While our Facebook page is still up, the posts are not showing up in Facebook's news feed essentially rendering it invisible.

Note that this does not actually explain what "doesn't comply with Facebook's policies".

We, of course, appealed the decision, only to later see that the notice had been changed to say we could not appeal it, we could only "disagree" with it.

We are continuing to attempt to appeal the decision through other means. 

The Left Chapter page has been active for over 5 years on Facebook. It has had the same admins for most of those years and has gone through the identification process for an admin. It has thousands of followers.

Facebook is a private enterprise and can essentially do what it wants, but given its power and grip on social media, arbitrary decisions without proper explanation or the right to appeal to an identifiable person are unacceptable and profoundly hypocritical given that Facebook demands admins on pages like ours identify themselves to Facebook.

This leaves decisions up to the whims of hidden admins who may themselves have biases politically or otherwise. 

Obviously the one week limitation of The Left Chapter is not one of the great issues of our time, and at least -- unlike some left pages like Telesur English that have been taken down entirely on more than one occasion (only to be eventually restored) -- this decision is apparently temporary.

But it does speak to the undue influence Facebook has more broadly and the ability it has to tamper with debate and discussion  in its forum with absolutely no oversight. The Left Chapter is a page dedicated to the fight for socialism, worker and human rights, internationalism and support for feminism and anti-racism. As such, as a forum -- unlike many right wing pages on Facebook -- it is not a place where you will find the kind of hate speech, sexism, homophobia or racism common on Facebook.

Let us take this opportunity to also thank again all our readers and supporters.

Please note that during this week the page is still up and you can visit it for our usual content and updates and you can still like and share content.

You can also follow us on twitter.