Facebook Restores Catholic Pages After Unexplained Purge

Facebook Restores Catholic Pages After Unexplained Purge


DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - After going dark for a day, dozens of popular Catholic Facebook pages are back online after being deactivated without explanation. Now Facebook is blaming anti-spam bots for the censorship. Conservatives remain skeptical, however, as the software only seemed to target conservative sites.

Beginning Monday, 24 Catholic pages — some with millions of followers — were blocked, rendered inaccessible even to administrators. The majority were based in Brazil; four were English-language sites with administrators based in the United States and Africa.
One of the pages affected, Father Rocky, is managed by Fr. Francis J. Hoffman, executive director of Relevant Radio. On Wednesday, Relevant Radio's Lindsey Kettner addressed the incident.
 
"On July 17, all page admins to the Relevant Radio 'Father Rocky' Facebook page were locked out of their Facebook accounts," Kettner said. "Upon regaining the ability to log into their personal accounts, they found a single notification that the Father Rocky page had been unpublished, with no other details or explanation."
Kettner explained that her team remains in the dark as to what happened and why. "Relevant Radio remains perplexed about why this happened," she explained. "The Relevant Radio Facebook pages are not political in nature, and promote the Catholic Faith by emphasizing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful."
There have been instances in which user accounts were inadvertently blocked owing to technical glitches or a rush of complaints against the page in a brief period of time. In those cases, Facebook restored the accounts after reviewing their content.
But the incident has provoked unease among Catholics, with some wondering if it is a harbinger of increasing restrictions on religious speech. 
Facebook has repeatedly censored conservative content. Former employees concede they artificially inserted stories with a leftist slant into the trending news module.
In 2016, Facebook launched the "Initiative for Civil Courage Online" to monitor and rid the platform of "hate speech." The initiative focuses its efforts on Germany, which has been struggling to cope with the enormous influx of migrants since 2015.
In June, Facebook joined with other leading tech firms Google, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to launch the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. Described as an effort to combat "terrorists and violent extremists," the project concerns critics because it fails to define "extremists."
Facebook routinely penalizes sites critical of Islam. Tuesday, Church Militant reported that since July 11, the company has been blocking Steve Amundson, founder of Counter Jihad Coalition, from his account. Amundson's page is used to "educate people on political Islam" and the threat posed by sharia law.    
Facebook and Twitter have suppressed Catholic author Robert Spencer's Islamist watchdog site, Jihad Watch, leading to a massive drop in traffic.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement Monday calling for the Federal Communications Commission to mobilize "the strongest legal authority available" to protect "open internet regulations."
Absent such protections, "the public has no effective recourse against internet service providers' interference with accessibility to content," warned USCCB assistant general counsel Katherine Grincewich.
Open internet regulations are vital to content producers "committed to religious principles," who rely upon the internet to reach their audiences. "The internet," said Grincewich, "is an indispensable medium for Catholics — and others with principled values — to convey views on matters of public concern and religious teachings … ."