ALIPAC Report to Congress & Media on Social Media Company Censorship
ALIPAC Report to Congress & Media on Social Media Company Censorship
Released October 2, 2018
by William Gheen
President of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC)
www.alipac.us
We believe our organization Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) is being severely censored, hampered, and abused by the Silicon Valley corporations of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which publicly oppose and lobby against our positions while simultaneously providing us with unequal services based on our political creed which can be defined by our support for America's existing border and immigration laws and our opposition to any form of Amnesty for illegal aliens which these companies all support.
While ALIPAC originally experienced great results and access to American audiences through Google, Twitter, and Facebook from 2004 through 2011, our experience took a dramatic turn for the worse in January of 2012!
Since 2012, these companies have collectively reduced our web traffic to our main website at ALIPAC.us, reduced our search result rankings drastically, banned us at times, shadow banned us covertly, suppressed our content and releases, blocked ads, removed our ability to place ads, deleted videos and content, made multiple false accusations of "hate speech" or "hateful content" against us, and refused to verify our accounts.
Each of these actions against ALIPAC by these Silicon Valley corporations has had an impact on US elections, legislation, and policies, and we believe we are being targeted because of our success in helping to stop Amnesty legislation in Washington many times since 2004.
Our activist researchers are currently compiling a list of other conservative non-violent and racially inclusive groups and activists similarly targeted by these Silicon Valley companies, and at the time of this report, we are currently tracking more than 75 victims. (View List)
https://www.alipac.us/f8/list-conser...witter-363125/
Here is our account of ALIPAC's difficulties with Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter since 2012. Copies of these reports will be sent to each company by certified mail with a request for explanation and request they cease all censorship of ALIPAC. While they have declined to answer most of our inquiries in the past, perhaps they will respond now that Congress and federal agencies are considering remedies to these issues.
GOOGLE / YOUTUBE
In January of 2012, ALIPAC was on page one search results for our key term "illegal immigration" on Google since we are the world's largest archive of information about illegal immigration, which is referenced by many media sources and the Library of Congress.
On January 15, 2015, a Google employee or a pro-Amnesty activist empowered by Google was given administrator access to our vibrant YouTube channel ALIPAC1 without our permission or consent. We had painstakingly built the channel up to 115 videos, many of which were shown on national TV channels and linked to by CBS, ABC, MSNBC, Fox News, and many others.
While we asked Google/YouTube to return control to us within three hours, this hacktivist attack had deleted all 115 videos, thus destroying the inbound links from thousands of other websites that collectively generated more than 4.3 million views on our channel. These videos were a large part of ALIPAC's message to lawmakers and the nation. Countless volunteer and employee hours of work had been erased.
After the attack, we begged Google/YouTube for assistance restoring the videos and links, but their company refused to answer our emails, website help report submissions, faxes, calls, certified letter, and inquiries from the media and lawmaker staffers. They refused to restore the videos and they even refused to answer our numerous calls for assistance and explanation.
(View documentation video)
https://youtu.be/Rw9TPupXcgM
<a href="https://youtu.be/Rw9TPupXcgM" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Rw9TPupXcgM
While we slowly rebuilt our ALIPAC1 YouTube channel, Google decreased our web traffic and our ad revenue to ALIPAC.us from over $1000 per month to barely over $100 per month.
Then in 2017, we began receiving notices that our new videos, including my public speeches at events, were no longer allowed to be monetized on YouTube. Then they demanded we take down graphic pictures at ALIPAC.us that showed horrible atrocities Muslim extremists were committing against Christians in other countries. When we hesitated and appealed, Google removed our ability to carry ads permanently on our website and YouTube channel, and blocked us from doing live stream videos. Google denied our appeal to these sanctions.
Sometime around 2012, Google moved ALIPAC.us to page 2 search results for our most important search term "illegal immigration," which really hurt our visibility, but in 2018 they removed us from the top 100 pages virtually banning ALIPAC and the world's largest archive of information about "illegal immigration" from their search results.
Comparatively, ALIPAC.us is found on page one searches for "illegal immigration" on Bing and on page two results on DuckDuckGo.com. But if you are looking for information about illegal immigration on Google, ALIPAC.us and the organization Americans for Legal Immigration PAC now no longer exists.
We have now abandoned efforts to upload videos to YouTube because they have reduced our video visibility and traffic from more than 350,000 views in 2017 to a projected 35,000 in 2018, which is a reduction of 90 percent.
(View documentation video)
https://youtu.be/KrsgI9LTLt0
<a href="https://youtu.be/KrsgI9LTLt0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KrsgI9LTLt0
In response, we have removed all Google products from our website yet we still post links to videos in our forums as we fully believe the Google corporation or their employees seek to harm us and violate our civil rights in an effort to affect the outcome of US elections, issue debates, legislation, and policies.
FACEBOOK
On Facebook, our main page for "William Gheen President of ALIPAC" quickly grew to more than 17,000 followers in our first three years from 2010-2013, but in the following years, our account has slowly grown to 21,000 followers due to what we believe to be Facebook application of hidden penalties and shadow banning.
While our 11 different Facebook groups and pages have over 600,000 people who selected our pages to support and receive information from, we are lucky if 10,000 see any individual post we make and spread to all of our groups and pages unless we pay to advertise.
Just yesterday I posted a request for the 21,000 followers of our main page to please Like and Comment if they could even see my post. At the time of this report, (View Post Here) less than 40 people have responded, and less than 400 people have seen my comment which is barely a 2% reach!
In February of 2013, we attempted to conduct an event called National Protests Against Barack Obama, scheduled Saturday, Feb 16, in all 50 state capitals to express our political opposition to Obama's unconstitutional and law violating DACA Amnesty orders.
The Facebook event page we created to support the event had over 5,000 users expressing interest in attending and over 55,000 people invited. But then, Facebook blocked our ads to promote the event without explanation, leaving the ads in permanent "pending" status.
(View Documentation Video)
https://youtu.be/f-ZTINjI1Sc
<a href="https://youtu.be/f-ZTINjI1Sc" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/f-ZTINjI1Sc
Then we discovered that only people invited to or associated with the event could find the event in Facebook's search feature. Anyone else searching for our protest on Facebook's search engine could not locate our event as we were censored out of Facebook's search results for the vast majority of Facebook's users.
But the worst of it was when a large groups of troll accounts using fake names and making horrendous posts, both of which violated Facebook's terms of service, began attacking our event page and anyone who signed up to go to our event was besieged by vulgar comments, advocacy for violence, and comments implying bestiality and pornographic acts. These trolls even threatened the families and employment of our protest supporters.
Despite our best attempts to report these comments and fake accounts, Facebook refused to take action to stop the attacks and even prevented us from banning these users from our event ourselves or even deleting their comments in many cases. The pro-Obama attackers intent upon disrupting our constitutionally protected rights to assemble possessed power and privileges far beyond our own on Facebook, and with the assistance and protection of Facebook employees, they wrought havoc on our event page even though five of our volunteers stayed up late hours trying to curtail the damage. Facebook moderators protected and allowed these super-trolls to violate Facebook rules and viciously attack us in a large sustained disruption campaign that was defamatory, obscene, aggressive, and threatening against our protesters and activists.
By the day of the event, many Americans who opposed Obama's DACA Amnesty as we did were intimidated and fearful for their safety and employment security due to these attacks.
Breitbart News reported an account of our experiences a year later in Feb 2013--“Last July when we were trying to organize a rally to protest unlawful amnesty, our event page came under fierce attack from trolls using overtly fake names, which according to Facebook’s own terms and services is not allowed,” Gheen told
Breitbart.
“The trolls attacked anyone trying to join the event,” he said. “Threats of violence, gross defamation, accusations of bestiality, and other pornographic assaults were hurled onto our Facebook followers… [the trolls] even tracked down information about the attendees and posted their home addresses on the web,” he said.
“We reported these attacks over and over again to Facebook monitors, explaining that they had multiple violations for Facebook terms and services [but] Facebook responded by asserting that these trolls did not violate terms and services,” he said. “Facebook monitors let them continue the attack. We were defenseless. Many of our followers who wanted to attend [our event], wound up not doing so because of these attacks.”
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/...l-immigration/
In October of 2015, we attempted another more successful round of national protests called Protests Against Illegal Immigration and Amnesty where we worked in coalition with the groups Overpasses for America and NumbersUSA to conduct 250 demonstrations across America in one weekend.
While our events had much more success than prior efforts, 24 hours before the demonstrations launched, Facebook locked me out of my main "William Gheen President of ALIPAC" page with over 15,000 supporters and one of our other largest pages with 90.000 supporters. James Neighbors, the leader of Overpasses for America was locked out of his Facebook-based organization for most of the time in the week preceding the events!
(See documentation video)
https://youtu.be/WH5UoZq43Fs
<a href="https://youtu.be/WH5UoZq43Fs" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/WH5UoZq43Fs
On July 17, 2018, our access to our ALIPAC Facebook accounts were blocked on all desktops without warning or explanation for several days.
In August of 2018, Facebook removed my comment to a relative of Mollie Tibbetts who was unfortunately slain by an illegal immigrant who is in the United States due to our unenforced border and immigration laws.
I addressed a Facebook comment by Tibbett's aunt saying, "Please do not make this about race Billie Jo Calderwood. Many Americans are fighting to stop the thousands of murders of U.S. citizens by illegals that occur each year due to our government’s failure to enforce the existing border and immigration laws of America.”
Censored ALIPAC Post about Mollie Tibbetts
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/cc/02/6c/c...fbd64f09c5.jpg
Facebook removed my post and notified me it was "Hate Speech." When The Washington Times contacted Facebook, they claimed this was just another mistake and said they were lifting the ban on my account and restoring the post.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...m-gheen-immig/
While my account was restored and the ban was lifted, Facebook never restored the post censored post as they promised. They had lied to The Washington Times and the nation.
TWITTER
While it took Facebook three years of requests before they finally verified my "William Gheen President of ALIPAC" account with the blue check mark indicating it is the real me, Twitter has refused for years although I meet all of the listed criteria for account verification on Twitter.
While most other activists and group leaders that support Amnesty for illegal aliens have the coveted blue check mark of verification which increases the visibility of their comments, Twitter has denied my request for verification more than six times.
We are also confident that our Twitter account is shadow banned and receives less visibility than other users because of Twitter's opposition to our political stances against illegal immigration. While ALIPAC has over 26.1 thousand followers on Twitter, we rarely get more than 10-15 responses to our posts which is so low other Twitter users often comment on our low response level.
We are convinced that Twitter has us shadow banned, discriminates against us, and provides us with access to a vastly inferior product based on our political creed.
In November of 2017, Shortly after a Twitter employee briefly deactivated President Donald Trump's account, Twitter rejected our ad to encourage Americans to call Congress against Amnesty legislation falsely labeling our ad as "hateful content." Our ad was an image of a woman shouting into her phone and simply read, “CALL CONGRESS TO STOP AMNESTY NOW!”
ALIPAC Posts / ads deemed "Hate Speech"
https://www.wnd.com/files/2018/01/ADS-1.jpg
https://www.wnd.com/files/2018/01/ADS-2.jpg
Reported by DML News
https://dmlnews.com/twitter-rejects-...-stop-amnesty/
Then over Christmas of 2017, my account was suspended for 7 days over posts that did not violate Twitter TOS but was our celebration over defeating Dream Act Amnesty legislation before the break. Twitter called it “hateful content” and banned us for 7 days and took away our ability to ever place ads again.
We believe that our successful opposition to Amnesty legislation in Washington, DC, angered some Twitter employee or employees resulting in our ads being banned and our account stripped of advertising abilities.
Ad that led to ALIPAC 7 day suspension for hate speech
https://www.wnd.com/files/2018/01/ALIPAC-1.jpg
https://www.wnd.com/files/2018/01/ALIPAC-2.jpg
Reported by WND
https://www.wnd.com/2018/01/twitter-...hts-complaint/
CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, our national organization must engage the communications products of Google, Facebook, and Twitter to reach our American audiences in a way similar to how most companies depend on phone and power companies to operate and succeed market and public spaces.
While we respect the rights of companies to set their own polices and operate as they see fit, American conservatives like us face rules that are arbitrarily and capriciously enforced.
Our organization's abilities, influence, and capabilities have been greatly harmed by what we believe to be unfair business practices and violations of our American civil rights by the Silicon Valley corporations of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others.
We call on Congress, the US Department of Justice, the White House, Supreme Court, and other federal agencies and regulators to take swift action to remedy this abuse of power which is displaying a consistent pattern of abuse, which is having a negative and sometimes foreign influence on our elections, legislation, and national policies which should be reserved form American citizens and voters.
We believe that these companies are mounting a massive, large-scale censorship campaign that could be affecting thousands of companies, campaigns, groups, and activists, while simultaneously suppressing the voices and access to information for millions of conservative Americans who do not share the left-wing views of Silicon Valley corporation owners, CEOs, and employees.
For more information contact...
AMERICANS FOR LEGAL IMMIGRATION PAC
Post Office Box 30966, Raleigh, NC 27622-0966
Tel: (919) 787-6009
FEC ID: C00405878
www.ALIPAC.us
