[pp.int.general] Facebook censored global Solidarity with #OccupyGezi event

[Daniel Riaño]

Well, we had the same problem with a Facebook page intended to foster
collective awareness towards the possibility of a social distress and
economic calamity derived from a macro project of American corporation Las
Vegas Sands, who wants to build a mega casino city (Eurovegas) in Madrid.
The Eurovegas project tries to collect from investors public and private
the 17K million euros needed to build from scratch in 15 years a whole
mid-sized city (for a floating population of about 200.000 people)
 economically dependent of a series of Las-vegas style casinos, so called
theaters and other business of the money laundering kind. The whole project
(I can write at large about it, but I will spare you the details until you
beg for them) requires big changes in local and national legislation and
the politicians in charge want all of the above without the people of
Madrid to have proper information and without having anything to say about
it.

We pirates of course disagree and want the whole project to be submitted to
a local referendum. You can follow us, read us, "like" us, befriend us and
everything except sleep with us in
http://referendumeurovegas.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/las-cinco-razones-del-pp-para-apoyar-eurovegas/,
in @referEurovegas and in https://www.facebook.com/referendum.eurovegas)

And after this shameless selfpromotion interlude I'll notice that a few
days after opening the FaceBook page, it was closed without a warning, and
every trace of its former existence was apparently deleted from internet.
No previous postings appeared in our "friends" pages, no searches were
returned from Google, etc. The reason was not that FB had anything against
us, nor that we wrote something unappropiate. It was (it turned out) that I
had setup the FB page as a "personal page" and not as a "cause" page,
something seriously frowned upon by FB owners. Well, I am more or less
fluent in twitter and WordPress, and never encountered such problems with
them, but I loathe the ways of FB and never really had the feeling I had
grasped its deep values or its bloody methods, whatever they may be. In
fact, even to this day I can't tell the difference from a personal page, a
cause page a fan page and whatever, although I imagine there may be a lott
of difference in revenue. You may agree with me that FB is the most
obstrusive social media, and as such It must be laoathed, but whatever my
or your woes with FB may be, you can't ignore its power for the advance of
your (or anybody's) cause.

In a few days, FB got in touch with us, ask us to repent and gave us a
solution, wich has worked (kind of) to the date.

Now that you asked, our initiative "Referendum Eurovegas" is going very
well and we have been able to concite around it many disperse movements and
personalities. Curiously enough, most people were previously vigorously for
or against the project, but almost no one had the idea of promoting a local
referendum. Hmmmm, probably this issue deserves a column in the Pirates
Times...

best luck and may you always can find the way to show your best profile in
FaceBook

Daniel

2013/6/8 Zbigniew Łukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com>

> On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 2:25 AM, Yasin Aydin (PP-TR)
> <yasinaydin at korsanparti.org> wrote:
> > Hey, I am in the middle of the events (occupying taksim for 7 days,
> > physically) and following every news directly from my activist friends.
> > I didnt hear about a website censorship, especially facebook or twitter.
> > The government know that if they do such a thing, they will have much
> much
> > bigger pressure from europe and usa.
>
> We don't know who requested that removal.  Maybe it was not really the
> Turkish government, but for example Spanish or Greek or German
> government - nobody wants trouble.  The global mark that the event
> managed to get could make it very powerful and disruptive, something
> that the mainstream media would write about for weeks - someone judged
> that it would be too powerful and too disruptive.
>
> I am sending this not just to talk about this event in particular -
> but rather as an illustration about the tactics of using social media.
>  The virality that Facebook offers is very powerful - but it is
> managed by a party that is not always our friend - we need to learn
> how to use it without becoming too dependent on it.
>
>
> Z.
>
> >
> > ---
> > Yasin Aydin (PP-TR)
> > Board member of Pirate Party Turkey - http://www.korsanparti.org
> > Alternate board member of PPI - http://www.pp-international.net
> >
> > On Jun 7, 2013, at 9:41 PM, Zbigniew Łukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 8:23 PM, Tom Behets <behets at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Don't believe everything you read.
> > Both camps are spreading lies to discredit each other.
> >
> > Hey, put an event on Facebook, get some attention, and remove it.
> > Then make blog post about it getting removed.
> > This will clearly show we live in a dictatorial regime…
> >
> >
> > I don't know - surely this is a possibility but it is going to rather
> > effectively stop the protests - so I don't think it was the organizers
> > themselves to delete it.
> >
> > And answering lilo from the other mail - yes it is a good showcase
> > supporting all the geeky arguments for using your own infrastructure
> > as much as possible.
> >
> > Z.
> > ____________________________________________________
> > Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> > pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> > http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
> >
> >
> >
> > ____________________________________________________
> > Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> > pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> > http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Zbigniew Lukasiak
> http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
> http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>
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