“Our days as an independent journalism organization on authoritarian social media platforms are numbered,” Mintpress News said.
US-based Mintpress News has been promoting a funding campaign as they claimed their content is being censored on social media platforms.
In the past publishers moved West to avoid censorship. Thanks to digital censorship from monopoly controlling social media companies, there often seems to be nowhere left to hide.
According to Mintpress, Facebook is flagging many of their articles and readers’ comments as spam or inappropriate content, in addition to Google banning their articles from search results.
The independent news platform mainly the war in Yemen, the Israel-Palestine conflict and Syria, has raised concerns that they might get banned and their accounts deleted as part of social media platforms crackdown on them.
On top of this, the platform’s founder, Manar Muhawesh, accused the NATO-funded Atlantic Council of helping to suppress Mintpress content after partnering with Facebook. There does not seem to be any information to support this claim.
This comes in a time while Facebook is being accused of bias by censoring Palestinian content under Israeli pressure. It was highlighted by Mintpress Founder who raised speculations over Facebook’s policy and bias.
In addition to the Mintpress founders claims that Google had threatened to cut off their ads from Google AdSense which affected their advertising revenue and their readership.
If this turned out to be true, Facebook and Google will be facing a rising tide of complaints from across the political spectrum.
In the US, social media have been facing increasing pressure after accusations of liberal-bias against conservatives or anti-establishment channels on Youtube.
With campaigns and media reports shedding more light on this issue, social media users are becoming more aware of the fact that social media platforms are being controlled systematically, amid fears that freedoms in the west are being undermined by a combination of powerful interests.
Read More: Has Digital Censorship Arrived in the West?
