Anti-Immigration Groups Explain How Facebook Is Actively Suppressing Their Content

"Facebook is intentionally suppressing our traffic and hiding our stories in people's newsfeeds," said Patty McMurray, co-founder of the group 100% Fed Up. "[The censorship] has everything to do with immigration," McMurray said. "When we started covering immigration and began promoting reports from the Refugee Resettlement Watch, all of a sudden our [Facebook] engagement dropped even though our followers were growing by the day. We couldn't figure out why our page was crashing and burning." "Facebook's usual mode of operation is to sandbag the communications of immigration reduction groups in a way that we can't [immediately] detect," said William Gheen, founder of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) grassroots organization. "You can't defend yourself against censorship if you're not even aware of its taking place," he said.

In August, Facebook banned four reports demonstrating the impact mass migration has had on American jobs and wages. The reports, which were based on federal data, were authored by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). “[It’s] disturbing that Facebook, owned by immigration-expansionist Mark Zuckerberg, has banned four reports published by the Center for Immigration Studies pertaining to jobs and immigration,” CIS wrote at the time.

[...]When reporters investigated the censorship, Facebook officials claimed the ban was “an error” and promised to lift it. But the nonpartisan research group remained skeptical about those claims. “Facebook has still not responded directly to the Center for Immigration Studies as to why four of our job studies were marked ‘abusive’ and blocked. They did, however, advise media outlets there was an error in their system,” Marguerite Telford, a spokesperson for CIS, told Breitbart.
Patty McMurray says that since her group began covering immigration on its Facebook page, her group's engagement numbers dropped by around 93 percent — even as her group continued to gain more followers.

"We were seeing engagement levels of 27-32 million people," she said. "We had 150,000 Facebook followers who were very active [and] if we posted something on our page, within an hour it would have 10,000 shares," she said. "Now we have more followers than ever before -- over 400,000 -- but now we're lucky if we can get an engagement level of 2 million people."

"We routinely get complaints and messages from our followers asking us what happened and why they don't see our content in their newsfeed anymore," McMurray said.