What is The Anti-Media?
Our approach as an independent news organization has always been to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport. All of our content is professionally fact-checked and edited.
However, the Internet’s media gatekeepers didn’t like the fact that we expose corruption wherever we see it, be it in the government or from corporations. They didn’t like us challenging the military-industrial complex. They are uncomfortable with us calling out the drug war, Big Pharma, militarized policing, the prison-industrial complex, and the system at large.
On October 11, 2018, somebody clicked delete on The Anti-Media Facebook page—severing us from our 2.1 million followers—in a massive purge of accounts and pages that silenced hundreds of American-owned independent media organizations that were dominating their corporate competition.
The reason cited? “Spamming” (?) and something called “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” No one at Facebook would talk to us or explain what we did wrong.
That was it. The end.
As Anti-Media editor-in-chief Carey Wedler put it in an interview with FEE.org:
“Poof. Disappeared. Deleted.”
And then hours later by chance, The Anti-Media was booted from Twitter.
“The news organization I work for was unpublished, along with its more than two million Facebook followers. Hours later, it was also wiped from Twitter. So was my personal Twitter account, along with the accounts of our Twitter handler and our chief creative executive. The double-pronged purge, which was far more extensive on Facebook, created the appearance of at least some level of coordination between the two sites, neither of which had ever suspended or unpublished us before,” Wedler explained.
You see, in November 2016 The Washington Post published a hit piece article featuring the work of a shadowy group called PropOrNot, which had compiled a list of independent media outlets it claimed were part of some kind of “sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.” The Anti-Media was on that blacklist.
We didn’t think much of it at the time and I recall laughing out loud at the silliness of such an accusation. The Anti-Media’s editorial policy specifically disallowed our journalists from using government-funded media outlets like Russia’s RT and Sputnik as a linked source of information.
The Post’s reckless circulation of a PropOrNot blacklist drew widespread condemnation, including from journalists Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, forcing The Washington Post to issue a partial retraction and declare that it “does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
Our blacklisted media organization was disappeared on social media two years later.
Hours after the purge, the PropOrNot group literally gloated on Twitter about Facebook’s removal of The Anti-Media. “Russian propaganda is VERY VERY MAD about their various front outlets & fellow travellers getting suspended by @Facebook &/or @Twitter,” it wrote. The tweet tagged The Anti Media and The Free Thought Project with a Russian flag emoji, next to an emoji of poop.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Curiously, Facebook had announced a partnership with the NATO-linked Atlantic Council five months before the purge, with the purpose of eliminating threats to elections and democracy that have apparently emerged as a result of activity on Americans’ social media. Facebook also became one of the Atlantic Council’s biggest donors around the same time it announced their partnership in May 2018.
Is this why The Anti-Media was targeted?
“If these actions go unchecked, we'll be ushering in a new era of privatized censorship by companies fearing political backlash in an effort to protect the state,” warned Anti-Media founder Nick Bernabe after the dust had settled.
Indeed.
Sadly, the loss of The Anti-Media Facebook page and Twitter (we were already banned by Google) destroyed our business model overnight. Even after letting our team of writers, editors, fact-checkers, web developers, and graphic designers go, we couldn’t sustain operations into 2020 facing such unprecedented censorship.
Until now… Thanks to Substack. We are pleased have you as our reader.
