Facebook's History of Squelching Dissent
Facebook has a rap sheet sheet when it comes to silencing critics. In addition to shutting down the account of a critical commenter as mentioned yesterday, the social network banned the team behind a critical book in Argentina.
As with the commenter and anti-Facebook-CEO group discussed yesterday, there was no smoking gun in the Argentine case to show Facebook specifically targeted critics for retribution. But the situation looked very suspicious: The author of Faceboom, a book critical of Facebook, had his account revoked, as did two people involved with the book and its marketing, according to a VentureBeat article by Vinod Sreeharsha. This occurred right after the author appeared on a late-night talk show. Also, a group of nearly 30,000 fans of the book was deleted.
What's more, the author could not get answers to why his account was deactivated despite emailing Facebook for nearly a month. After the VentureBeat article, the account was re-activated. For a communication medium, Facebook has an awful track record of communicating. Facebook should probably fix that, already.