Facebook isn't censoring posts on NHS protests because, frankly, they aren't worth censoring
Last night, there was a minor internet furore after a Bristol-based blogger claimed her blog posts about a clever NHS privatisation protest were being censored by Facebook. I can't quite believe I'm having to write a blog debunking this – it is, of course, utter paranoid nonsense.
I'm having to debunk it because the rumour is spreading
like wildfire on social media; my first piece of evidence that the lady
in question is wrong is that her blog post reporting the "censorship" in
fact has over 10,000 Facebook shares itself, so if Facebook has a
censorship team, they are pretty terrible at their job.
Secondly, Edinburgh-based media blog The Drum, having only just wiped the mass of egg off their face for praising Hyundai's disgusting exhaust pipe suicide advert, leapt to be first on the story, and published it all but verbatim,
taking the claims breathlessly and irresponsibly at face value, with
hardly a shred of fact-checking or common sense coming into play.
A quick chat to Facebook confirmed what was happening was
that there was a small amount of code that Facebook's anti-spam
algorithms recognised as spam embedded in her site; hence, people
received a warning that the link was potentially dangerous by clicking
on it. When enough people clicked "report spam", the post was
automatically taken down.
This isn't just a problem affecting the Bristol blog; it's
also affected a wide variety of other blogs hosted on WordPress too. If
you look on the "help" section of the WordPress site, you'll see it
mentions several issues connected to Facebook. A quick surf around the
Internet found several other, non-political blogs suffering the same
problem.
More than anything else, Facebook has better things to do
than censor minor blog posts on, what to Facebook, is a minor political
issue in a foreign country. It was a sweary man pushing a toy pig to
Downing Street, for goodness sake. Amusing, interesting, but worth
censoring? No.
This isn't a conspiracy. It's a case of technological
illiteracy, combined with the hysteria generated by a group of Left-wing
bloggers, living in a bubble that gets all its news from other
Left-wing blogs, which believes that a mainstream "media blackout" has
prevented a full-scale revolution over NHS privatisation.
The myth runs, if only the public knew the NHS was being
privatised by stealth, they would rise up and overthrow the evil
government. The Right-wing media barons keep it out of the papers –
threats to the BBC keep it off the television. Nobody knows the NHS is
being altered. The media is in on the conspiracy.
The supposed NHS media blackout is another myth worth
debunking. Again, it's paranoid nonsense – every paper has covered the
NHS reforms, and the potential pitfalls of them, in great detail.
Indeed, in the last few days alone those well-known bastions of
Left-wing thought the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun and this fine paper have all run pieces critical of the reforms. Most papers have health editors who write about little else.
A great deal of this myth – especially as concerns the BBC –
stems from the work of Eoin Clarke, who writes extensively about the
NHS privatisation on his blog "The Green Benches". Now, I'm not sure if Clarke is a partisan fantasist or merely tragically credulous, but he's had to delete 60 or so articles from his blog because of defamatory content, and issue at least four grovelling public apologies.
Nonetheless, he's widely regarded as the oracle on the Left
on these matters, and many take his word as gospel. Ed Miliband is said
to read the blog. You can reconstruct several of his claims about the
BBC blackout of NHS coverage from this turgid 8,000-word "exposé" of the supposed conspiracy, throughout which the links to the Green Benches blog are mysteriously broken.
The central claim is that the BBC "only" ran 146 articles
on its website in the run up to the passing of the NHS bill. This of
course ignores the fact that the BBC is the British Broadcasting
Corporation. It mostly – clue is in the name – broadcasts.
A titanic amount of coverage in flagship current affairs
shows – Newsnight, Question Time, Marr on Sunday – was devoted to the
bill, and the issues surrounding it. The Daily Politics covered the bill
endlessly. It was debated on Radio 4, before an audience of millions on
the Today programme, more than 20 times.
There were radio documentaries; bulletins on local and
regional radio and TV; coverage on all the major national news
bulletins, as well as rolling coverage on what was called News 24 when I
worked there. There was even a Panorama special where Gerry Robinson
spent half an hour listening to both sides and then confronted Andrew
Lansley with the concerns raised. At one point Robinson delivers a piece
to camera where he says that making cuts by bringing in private
providers is "cowardly and wrong".