Many who frequent our news site may be unaware how successful our videos have been on a variety of platforms, most notably Facebook. Over the last year, Remix News’ video views on that platform grew 2,500 percent, reaching 100 million, up from just 4 million last year. This explosive growth, we assumed, would eventually catch the attention of Facebook’s censors. That time has finally come.
In terms of views and engagement, Remix News was towering over rival news pages with vastly larger staffs and financial resources, including Politico, Euronews, and a host of other top names on Facebook. Now, our growth has come to an abrupt halt after Facebook hit Remix News with a claim that we were “promoting hate groups” three weeks ago and stopped recommending our page to its users, which amounts to what is effectively a shadowban. We held off on publishing this piece as Remix News was an appeal, but it appears that appeal will go unanswered.
Remix News was also additionally accused of sharing “spam” a week ago, a frivolous claim that Facebook does not even give us the option to appeal.
In both cases, it is unclear what posts triggered Facebook to hit us with such a severe restriction, as Facebook states it removed the first post and will not even let us view the second one.
Meta’s strike saw our page, which was averaging 2 million video views a week just last month, drop to now under a thousand.
Remix News is now one of the most censored news websites on the web. We faced a two-year ban on X, formerly Twitter, before Elon Musk took over. We have long been banned from Google Ads, and just this month, Taboola also cut our ad service after about two months. They have subsequently refused to answer our emails inquiring as to the reason. Remix News earned about €200 from Taboola before they cut us — in other words, pocket change for a news website. It appears someone has their eyes on us, and is closely watching any attempt for us to earn ad revenue, which is the lifeblood of most news outlets. We also face what appears to be severe restrictions on Youtube and TikTok.
Although there are other individuals and groups facing similar censorship — and in many cases far more drastic form of censorship — Remix News is one of the few actual news publishers facing this level of censorship. Our publication includes interviews from top European politicians, original journalistic coverage, and is financed in part by the Batthyány Lajos Foundation in Budapest, Hungary.
In short, an attack on Remix News is an attack on journalism and a free press on what is arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world.
On Facebook, Remix News, although a small news outlet, was clearly covering topics that resonated with a global audience, with our videos on Europe’s immigration crisis, in particular, outperforming, with millions of views and hundreds of thousands of forms of engagement. For example, our clips about the Irish protests against mass immigration were especially popular, and our most viewed video on this subject had over 4 million views.
Remix News has also run a number of videos that likely ran afoul of Facebook’s notorious pro-left censors, including videos criticizing the West’s support for the Ukraine war, namely by publishing the speeches of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is perhaps the only anti-war leader in the European Union.
Remix News is hardly the only news outlet that has been severely restricted or outright banned from Facebook. Nevertheless, recent claims that Facebook has let up on moderation and is interested in promoting a platform more open to opposing views is clearly misleading. It is also worth noting that Facebook never allowed us to generate a cent of ad revenue for any video we produced.
In addition, Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that his new Threads platform, a purported alternative to Twitter/X, will allow for free and open debate is questionable in light of Facebook’s history of outright censorship. Conservatives, free thinkers, libertarians, and even those on the left who consider themselves dissidents should beware of any platform under the Meta umbrella.
Many figures have been banned from Facebook and Instagram over the years, including Paul Joseph Watson all the way back in 2019.
As he said back then, Republicans in the U.S. and Trump himself were completely ineffective at reeling in censorship across Big Tech platforms. Four years later, not much has changed. The Polish government has threatened to create a law to protect freedom of speech on social media, but that law has gone nowhere over the years. Hungary has also floated similar proposals, but again, there has been little action on this front.
To Facebook’s credit, the platform basically let our content run truly freely for a year without any real censorship tactics. TikTok, in contrast, gave us a couple of months, saw some of our videos were getting 3-4 million views, and hit us with multiple temporary suspensions; we now have a tight throttle on anything we put out on that platform.
We have no idea what is behind such broad censorship across multiple platforms, but these processes are always opaque, and there are numerous outside pressure groups and NGOs that could very well have pushed for Facebook and TikTok to take action against us.
Remix News produces videos that tell a story about the news in a style popular with other news outlets on Facebook, such as NowThis or DW Stories. However, these two outlets, and many like them, are mainstream left-liberal news outlets, and so, they are allowed to operate without hassle or censorship. Our outlet has limited resources, and yet our videos have a certain level of both video and storytelling production often lacking with media outlets operating outside the mainstream. More importantly, we covered stories that people connect with. Not everyone in Europe votes for left-wing parties that promote never-ending mass immigration and progressive cultural values, and not everyone wants to consume content from left-wing news outlets. At the same time, Facebook appears to have a number of favored outlets on the right that are allowed to operate freely. An outlet such as ours, which was rapidly growing, represents a threat to both the establishment left and the establishment right.
Given our incredible growth, we are convinced that Remix News was on track to become one of the biggest producers of video news, especially in terms of short-form news content, on Facebook — certainly in Europe at the very least. With our mere 170,000 followers, a number that has doubled in just the last year, we were accumulating a massive number of views on the platform.
If you have read this far, you are probably an avid consumer of our content, or at the very least, interested in the topic of censorship. We would ask you to spread the word about Facebook’s draconian attempt to silence a news publisher that was reaching millions of people. If you think that social media should be a place where discourse and ideas run freely, we would appreciate any effort to raise awareness about this new censorship attack on the press.
