If you have shared stories about the recent findings of the declassification on the ObamaGate scandal, you may have been “fact-checked.” It’s the kiss of death for social media posts–and it is one way that the “Masters of the Universe” internet titans are controlling the message. Gone are the days of easily sharing a story from a news source with your friends and family. Today, Facebook’s “fact-checkers” will determine whether your message fits their set of facts and beliefs and penalize you if it doesn’t. Many of you have seen social media posts grayed out with a third-party fact-checker message questioning the veracity of the story. That brands you as a purveyor of false information and puts you on the radar of the social media watchdogs.

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Intercessors for America has had several bouts with fact-checking–Facebook doesn’t seem to like the factual stories about Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the false RussiaGate narrative–also now known as ObamaGate. We’ve been fact-checked for that story multiple times as the story has progressed. All from reputable sources such as Sara Carter and John Solomon’s Just the News. In fact, our reach to our Facebook friends has plummeted in recent months. Posts that originally would be seen by hundreds of thousands regularly are now topping out at around 1,000. You can almost guess which posts will be suppressed–anything that is about Facebook censorship, and anything about ObamaGate or Hillary Clinton just doesn’t go anywhere.

Recently IFA engaged the services of a social media marketing organization to help promote and advertise the Voter Prayer Guides in paid advertisements. Some generous donors allotted advertising money to get the Voter Prayer Guides in the hands of more people outside the normal IFA circle. As we went through the process of creating and developing the paid advertising for the non-partisan voter prayer guide, we kept getting messages of denial from Facebook for various reasons–hoops that IFA had to jump through to get the advertising approved. The process took over a month. At every phase, IFA had to provide documentation including notarized identity statements, personal identity checks, and even the removal of “questionable” posts according to fact-checkers. After all of that, our ads began to run with tremendous results and interest–for a while. All of a sudden IFA’s ads were turned off, denied, and an ominous message appeared on our Facebook advertising account (see picture at left)

The message on IFA’s restricted business account page states: “This Page isn’t allowed to advertise because it has repeatedly posted content that has been debunked by third-party fact-checkers. This behavior means the Page hasn’t complied with our Misinformation Advertising Policy, which is a requirement for advertising on Facebook. Its ads have been disabled and it currently can’t create or run new ads.” In fact, when our social media advertising team attempted to find out how the ban could be lifted, their inquiries were met with disabled CHAT and customer service messages. Facebook would not even take their phone calls or inquiries and disabled any means of communication for our account.

We have even had one of our staff who regularly posts to our IFA page have her Facebook page suspended. What will happen next, we don’t know. Will Facebook further suppress our posts and will they suspend our page even for posting? Pray with us about this!

The point in sharing all of this with you is this–a free-flow of news and information is no longer happening on social media and even the internet. For a while, IFA was blessed to fly under the radar of many of the social media platforms, but today is a different day. We need YOU, IFA intercessors to help share the content on our IFA site and social media platforms!  We have created a short video to help direct you on how to effectively share IFA content on your Facebook page. You can watch it here. 

We are also asking you to PRAY. The censorship of news, ideas, and Christian beliefs is at an unfathomable level in our America. Pray for action to be taken to loose the stranglehold these Silicon Valley titans have on free speech in America.

WILL YOU COMMIT TO SHARE IFA’s CONTENT?

(Article by Kris Kubal, Director of Strategic Resources and Engagement at Intercessors for America.)