Weather forecasts aren’t always 100% accurate, but does that qualify as fake news? Facebook apparently thinks so. The social media giant blocked several pages of the National Weather Service, including one in South Carolina during a massive storm. There’s a reason why meteorologists say things like “there’s a 30% chance of precipitation.” That’s not fake news, that’s a reasonable prediction of rain based on all available scientific data.
The Charlotte Observer reports that several National Weather Service Facebook pages have been locked down recently:
NWS officials said Friday morning that their Columbia, S.C. Facebook page was disabled in late November “due to FB’s newly implemented security requirements.”
That means the weather service in Columbia was not allowed to post anything on the major winter storm that roared across the Carolinas last weekend.
The Columbia NWS Facebook page was locked down on November 24 and it was restored until last Friday, December 14. That’s over 3 weeks FB put the NWS out of commission, which is longer than the BS “community standards” violation suspensions they hand out to conservatives.
So what exactly did the this NWS page do to get a 3-week Internet jail sentence? Nobody actually knows. Facebook ain’t saying, but the news has a theory:
NWS officials announced Friday the account had been re-activated, apparently after Facebook was convinced the Columbia office wasn’t impersonating the nation’s leading weather forecaster … or trying to influence an election.
It’s hard to say if that was a bit of snark on the part of the reporter or if the NWS actually got some information from Facebook indicating the company thought the weather service had tried to influence an election.
In a post on their newly-restored page, the Columbia NWA indicated that many more NWS pages had also been locked.
“Our account was one of the many NWS accounts across the country which was locked,” they wrote.
How many more accounts were blocked and have the others been restored? The exact numbers of blocked NWS accounts hasn’t been given, but US National Weather Service HQ began warning of the blocks as early as November 13.
Last month Facebook purged the platform of a billion accounts they called fraudulent. That these NWS pages were locked in this time frame indicates that Facebook feels weather reporting is fake news.
When Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election fair and square to Donald Trump, liberals needed a better narrative than she ran a terrible campaign and people don’t like her. What they came up with is that the Russians spread fake news on social media to alter the outcome of the election, stealing Hillary’s rightful victory. The liberal media has bought into this silly story and so did social media.
In reaction to the preposterous idea that the Russians could influence the US presidential election by posting goofy memes on social media, Facebook has vowed to crack down on fake news. The end result has been a lot of suppression of conservative speech and a wholesale assault on the reporting of weather conditions. Take all together, it’s fair to say that because Hillary Clinton ran a bad campaign, people in South Carolina couldn’t get information about a massive snow storm. But hey, at least democracy has been saved, so it was all worth it.
Speaking of the ridiculousness of the conspiracy theory that Russia stole the election with memes, here’s one of them now as reported by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
This is an actual meme from the Russian troll farm, in which Jesus counsels someone addicted to masturbation:
“Reach out to me and we will beat it together.”
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 17, 2018
If that’s what kept Hillary Clinton from being president, then she really truly didn’t deserve the position in the first place. Stupid shit like this is why social media sites are burying, suspending, and deleting conservative accounts.
