Finally, on 9 June 2019, Facebook banned Natural News, grifter Mike Adams' pseudoscientific woo-pushing, anti-vaccine website. If only Facebook would clean up some of the anti-science junk on their website, maybe we would actually respect them more, but clearly, despite their public claims of removing fake news about vaccines, they aren't really doing enough to get rid of anti-vaccine groups.
Facebook needs to do more to remove pseudoscience and fake science from its website. This is a start.
Facebook banned Natural News – science is happy
But let's get back to the story of Facebook banned Natural News. According to the Daily Beast,
Facebook on Sunday removed the page for Natural News, a far-right conspiracy outlet that had nearly 3 million followers. The page violated Facebook's policy against spam, the social media company told The Daily Beast on Monday.
Natural News’ founder Mike Adams wrote on fellow-right wing conspiracy site Infowars that his site was “permanently banned” from posting. He told the Gateway Pundit, another far-right site, that the apparent ban is evidence of a conspiracy against his website.
The Daily Beast reported on Saturday that Natural News and its founder had a history of pushing hoaxes and calling for mass arrests against the left. Before the ban, Natural News had more Facebook followers than Infowars at its peak. Natural News used the page to push its trademark combination of natural remedies and far-right conspiracy theories, including disinformation about vaccines.
I follow the Facebook page for the CDC because whenever they post something about vaccines, the anti-vaccine religious acolytes come out of their caves to post stupidity about the topic. Of course, a significant number of the comments quote Natural News. These are always followed by ridicule and snark from pro-science people who know that Natural News ranks at the very bottom of science "knowledge."
Although the reason for the ban or whether it is permanent is not clear, Facebook has stated that it is not a fan of extremist websites:
We've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology," a Facebook spokesperson said of the bans in May. "The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.
So, it is possible that Facebook banned Natural News, not because of their pseudoscientific nonsense, but as a result of some of the hatred that Mike Adams has been pushing there lately. YouTube banned Natural News last year (which still seems to be in place) and Google temporarily stopped indexing the website because it was gaming SEO rules to push its ranking higher.
Of course, each of these actions against Natural News has caused Adams to become more and more delusional and angry. We are amused by this.
Mike Adams goes full angry dude
The Facebook ban would be sufficient amusement, except Adams gave us more, much more. According to Gizmodo, made some of the right-wing nutjobs look positively reasonable with his over-the-top, violent response:
Mike Adams, who calls himself the Health Ranger, called the Facebook suspension an “online ethnic cleansing” that’s being carried out by people who are hoping to “enslave humanity and create Hell on Earth.” Adams also called for military action against the social media companies.
“The techno-fascists, including Wikipedia, have decided that no speech that questions any official narrative will be allowed on any platform,” Adams wrote on his website Sunday. “Anyone who questions the safety of toxic vaccines, 5G cell towers, geoengineering, chemotherapy or glyphosate weed killer chemicals is now maliciously attacked, smeared and de-platformed.”
Adams published a graphic on his website with the title “Enemies of Humanity” that includes photos of genocidal dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini next to tech CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
Yes, Adams called for Trump to start "military action" against social media companies, one that both Adams and Trump abuse for their own nefarious purposes. I'd actually laugh at Adams' response if it weren't a bit frightening to read.
Finally, Adams writes:
These criminals like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook (Tim Cook, CEO of Apple) are un-elected, subject to zero transparency and offer no mechanism for due process whereby channels who are banned might defend themselves against unfair, dishonest smears or fake news attacks run by left-wing journo-terrorism hacks.
In essence, the entire internet is now run by the most lawless evil war criminals imaginable, and they have zero respect for human rights, human dignity or free speech.
Typical of the right-wing (and science deniers everywhere), their Dunning-Kruger cognitive bias not only applies to science but also to constitutional law. Only the government is prevented from restricting speech (mostly), but private corporations, who provide the platforms like Facebook and Twitter for free, can pretty much regulate speech in almost any way they feel is appropriate with a few restrictions.
Again, we are not sure why Facebook banned Natural News, but the reasons almost don't matter. For me, one more anti-vaccine, pseudoscience-pushing website is gone, and that's good enough for now.
Oh, one more thing. Despite the right-wing nature of Natural News, it is laughable and ironic (or ironically laughable) that "progressives" use the website all of the time as "evidence" for pseudoscience about GMOs (which are scientifically safe), supplements (mostly worthless), and other cargo cult science. And, of course, vaccines.
