I share my deep concern about Facebook Jail eroding Freedom of Speech by constraining activists with sharing to groups restrictions, with no clear rules laid down. (Article 1); #2: my best articles over ten years, particularly on protecting consumers worldwide; Article #3 will be on where this once fervent Democracy is going, with the political pendulum swinging to the Left again. Thank you for one million OpEdNews page views

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I have learned so much over the past ten years posting several hundred articles here, which I would like to distill for you in the course of a 3 part article, starting with the thing that troubles me the most at the moment, a serious problem on Facebook for any and all activists of any kind, called Facebook Jail. I am at the moment in Facebook Jail for about five more days, unable to post anything to any groups. However, many of those who were active in many Bernie Sanders related efforts see Facebook Jail as a kind of Merit Badge for Good Deeds.

By this point with you and OpEdNews, you must realize how incredibly unique this alternative news venue truly is!

If you write an article for OEN, it is worth advancing your efforts to more than a few hundred readers. This is quite easy to achieve by simply joining a lot of Facebook groups and then sharing your article to them, either directly by pasting the URL into the group page, or by using the Facebook sharing button at the top of article. This also applies of course to Twitter, Reddit, Fark, etc., but I prefer Facebook, because you know how many like minded people you reaching out to.

If you write a letter to the editor of 150 words or less, maybe within a week or ten days, they will perhaps publish it, and then it may no longer be topical. Maybe you might get 650 words in an OpEd twice a year, and then only locals will read it, with many dismissing it as just another opinion, which are like noses: everyone has one.

Sharing it to groups creates an immediate feedback and dialogue, which is important, unless you are just content to keep your ideas in a hermetically sealed vacuum. My articles have now reach one million viewers, and Facebook group posting has been an essential part of that effort, especially the one article I did that had the first video clips of the violence in North Dakota at the Pipeline. Almost 200,000 people looked at that.

Another big one for me was one I did a long time ago on the dangers caused by a birth control device made by Mirena, like horrible mood swings, uterine perforations, etc.

I know that the article I did on Dasani Water having a deadly chemical called potassium chloride had a huge readership, but sadly, Coca Cola never took out the chemical, and Mirena is still on the market largely because several New York Judges in the Federal Appeal Court dismissed all of the huge number of class action suits against the manufacturers of the birth control device.

But thanks to Facebook Groups and to OEN, many thousands of people have learned the truth, and can avoid these products as consumers.

All political activists using Facebook comprehend completely what an excellent and beneficial tool this form of social media truly has become. When individuals can publish their favorite articles by others or by themselves, how much truer all of that rings than the corporate mainstream media, which has its own axe to grind, and generally avoids getting too controversial or getting out of line with their advertisers.

Mark Zuckerberg's lofty intentions and higher pronouncements about bringing the world closer together are really at odds in toto with what is happens when you post something too many times in groups, but Facebook never clearly identifies how many times is too many, or over what period of time, or in how many groups.

I have written so many times about this to the Facebook executives, but never received one answer. I am Facebook jail right now because after the victory by Doug Jones was announced last night, I posted one single solitary link to BuzzFeed, whose coverage of the Alabama Senate race I found to vastly superior to the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and others. Instantly, like as fast as the speed of light and electrons would permit, I received a notice that I was restricted from posting to all groups for one week. It was almost like a trap, but one that no one could prepare for.

This is, I think, the 20^th time I have been in Facebook Jail over the past eighteen months, and when that happens, I am disallowed to post a kind word or a single article or a concurring encouragement in any group, even the one that I started, Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Win, nor any of the other four for which I am the sole administrator.

Facebook has been marvelous in making very valuable new friends and for finding kindred spirits. I have even found a few art buyers that resulted from my art page, Santa Fe Ledger Art and Pueblo Painting.

All in all, I am still a great fan and devoted Facebook user, because I envision the effort similar to how Mark Zuckerberg sees it: a vast opening of communication and dialogue, both of which are truly vital in our evolving 21^st Century Democracy.

But something else far more strange and even sinister is going on, which I don't understand, and which Facebook Executives seem unable or oblivious to correct, respond to, or even deal with.

I am a very law abiding citizen. I strictly observe the rules, the laws, the ordinances, and the regulations, wherever they are clear and/or posted in our society. That is the problem: on Facebook, nowhere are they ever posted. I have queried the well-educated executives of Facebook many times, both in personal messages and in FedExed letters, and all of these fine folks educated at Stanford Law, Dartmouth, Harvard, NYU, Berkeley, and Columbia, have never answered once.

I realize they are very busy with apps, inventions, speeches, pontificating, and dining in the wonderful corporate cafeterias which are so well known in Silicon Valley.

Consider this: do an internet search for Facebook telephone numbers and none of them will work. This corporation with what how many? Two billion users? and not one accessible telephone number! Perhaps this is by intent, with so many geniuses not wanting to be bothered by the vulgar rabble that use their services?

"Chuck" from the Facebook Help Team wrote this:

There isn't a direct phone number that will connect you with Facebook support. You may be able to submit a request via email or chat from the business resource page, but this option isn't available for everyone. If available those resources can be accessed here: https://www.facebook.com/business/resources/?ref=u2u

Getting thrown in Facebook Jail is not as bad, I am sure, as a regular jail in the United States, but when your First Amendment rights are usurped, abrogated, and stomped on, you have to wonder where this is all going.

The Founding Fathers felt that Freedom of Speech was important enough to make the First of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, along with Freedom of the Press and Freedom to Petition for a Redress of Grievances. Maybe you sign something in starting on Facebook that quietly revokes your Freedom of Speech in participating in this social media which is really just a gigantic private corporate network, like many corporations have EULA agreements to protect themselves.

In any event, the appeals process is a joke. No matter what you have to say when they restrict your group posting, the response is always the same: "Thank you for your feedback." Sometimes, you get a notice saying that such and such a post appears to be spam; you say it isn't, and then they immediately reply that we have reviewed your post and found that it doesn't violate Facebook's community standards.

What a joke! I have many times seen Facebook pages that are outright ads for prostitutes which clearly state what they will do and what they won't do, in no uncertain terms, plus how to make a private message to make a date and consummate the deal. I complained, and got messages back that these posts were examined and found not to violate Facebook's community standards.

Sometimes, if people don't like you or your message, they will make a report, saying that a particular post is spam, or insulting, or a host of other negative words. This was done in the primary campaign in 2016 with great effects by Hillary Trolls, who were organized into what was called The Clinton Social Media Re-education Team.

The night before a vital primary with five elections in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Maryland, they posted child pornography on the first pages of at least seven of the largest Bernie Sanders group pages. Then their shills or compatriots complained about pornography, and all seven or more pages were shut down for at least six hours. This was devastating to most of the members to have an important group page totally disappear the night before a major primary election, but even more so who were using the pages to arrange rides to the polls, etc.

The culprit in the Clinton campaign was identified, and there was even a Moveon.org petition to the FBI asking that that particular young man be prosecuted for posting child pornography, but somehow that disappeared and dropped off the agenda of those who could have taken action. Facebook was unprepared to deal with it, and maybe they are better prepared for the midterm elections in which even worse dirty tricks will no doubt occur, with all of the millions of dollars they have spent on new apps and new software to ostensibly prevent such occurences and all related Fake News.

About the Fake News and the Russians controversy which hit the fan about a month ago: I noticed in my Advice and Strategies group that there were so many daily posts of obviously fake news, always beginning with "Breaking News" and some breathless announcement of something so obviously fake and absurd that if you googled news, there was nothing whatsoever anywhere else on that subject on the internet. The posters were almost always from Macedonia, Serbia, or Russia, and it seemed clear that this was some concerted effort organized by the lower apparatchiks in the KGB/GRU.

I was spending time evaluating the posts and then deleting all of them every day, and finally, one day I just removed all 150 of these folks from the group, blocking them entirely and permanently. I did write to Facebook Executives but they must have been just so busy, they never responded and probably never even read the letter about Russian Fake News that I sent many months before the story split open.

It must have been humiliating for them to be grilled by a Senate Committee, particularly by Dianne Feinstein from Facebook's own glorious state of California, the real cutting edge state in the whole global context. Facebook Advertising accepted the money for the ads, and never once seemed to interfere in the individual posts, as obviously fake as they were, even when people like me wrote at length to them.

Does this personify a culture of corporate indifference? Perhaps so. This is something that would be so easy to fix, not like rocket science or software engineering. Maybe in the realm of data mining, some have told me, Facebook makes all of its money, but I really don't believe that at all, personally.

It would be so easy to fix all of this with a clarification of group posting rules. Then when Facebook takes away your Freedom of Speech while generally simultaneously encouraging your Freedom of Speech, it would not seem so destructive and would not seem so "arbitrary and capricious," the terms that Judges quite often use.

I do not for a moment concur with what one prior Facebook President said about "tearing apart the fabric of our society." Quite the contrary, I perceive the exact opposite effect to be the real truth.

I will in due course discuss this with my senior US Senator and some other fine legal minds, perhaps at the ACLU, which has had many complaints along these lines about Facebook, according to their website.

Maybe even the Federal Communications Commissioners will have some insights. I am not trying to turn over something as vast nor as abstract a concept as Net Neutrality, which I confess to not completely understanding in the first place.

But having my freedom of speech taken away, even if only for one week, is something I also don't understand nor am I willing to lazily accept, especially with no rules posted anywhere clearly on Facebook. I don't think this is too much to ask, so I am going to ask Facebook executives one more time to make these clarifications.

After achieving more than one million page views here at OEN, I have learned a lot and would like to share some of these insights with you. I welcome your comments and your insights. We have a lot of work to do before the November 2018 Midterms, and the political pendulum's swing to the Left is by no means guaranteed.

(Article changed on December 14, 2017 at 19:27)

(Article changed on December 14, 2017 at 19:48)

(Article changed on December 14, 2017 at 19:54)

(Article changed on December 15, 2017 at 01:06)

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev