Ron Paul
is a Republican Congressman and Physician
FaceBook Censors Ron Paul???
Supposedly all Ron Paul groups have been blocked on FaceBook. I initially picked up this story at TechCrunch and it reads as follows:
Michael Arrington writes:
"The theme of my email inbox this morning (it’s morning for me, anyway) is that for some reason a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. The reason isn’t because there aren’t any Ron Paul groups - a search for “Paul” shows hundreds. For some reason, the search is blocked. Other candidate show up just fine. More than 500 groups show up for each of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and others. But the wacky Ron Paul? Nada. I’ve got calls into Facebook but everyone is still in New York after the big announcement yesterday and they don’t seem to be super responsive today. Update 2: Facebook says this is now fixed in the comments, and blames this on a bug, which is…highly unlikely."
Does anybody have any more information on this? Why would FaceBook, which is supposedly non-partisan, censor a specific candidate?
Likely because they're becoming more advertising-centric, like Myspace. Thankfully they've yet to be bought out by media conglomerates like Fox/Newscorp as Myspace has, but Facebook definitely has become more advertising-centric.
I would not be surprised to learn that Facebook has been influenced by groups providing financial support in exchange for modifying the search pattern. It's almost like lobbyists in Congress...
I happen to know a handful of people who work at Facebook, so I've gotten a little more of an inside perspective of it than the usual user. I haven't asked about this specifically, but based on other conversations, I think the people at Facebook consider it in their best interest to keep the site truly nonpartisan. It probably was just a bug-- they've been growing so fast, new bugs pop up every second. If it was an intentional incident, my guess would be to blame it on unruly users-- Paulites can get pretty rowdy on the web, and maybe they violated some Facebook rules or something. But I doubt that's the case, otherwise, I think they would've just said that.
