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We respect that Facebook is a private company and free to do as they please. With that being said, we have to call foul where there’s a foul, and there’s been three fouls in the last month, with the last one being extremely significant. Scroll down, enjoy the memes, learn our story over the last month, and finally, read about how you can continue to support us so we don’t have to depend on companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter not blocking us to remain in business.

Strike 1: Was It A Ukrainian in Pelosi’s Office or Sharia Law?

Our first suspension came immediately after posting this post about Sharia Law in the US. Even though it’s largely direct quotes from the Koran and photos of Muslims practicing their faith as dictated by their holy book, we believe that when we posted our link to the site that Facebook it got flagged through one of their scans and automatically suspended us.

We still don’t know what the first suspension was for. It was immediately after posting this post about Sharia Law in the US. Even though it’s largely direct quotes from the Koran and photos of Muslims practicing their faith as dictated by their holy book, we believe that when we posted our link to the site that Facebook it got flagged through one of their scans and automatically suspended us. We immediately appealed and asked for more information and the reply was that the meme below that was posted several days earlier was the reason.

According to Facebook, this innocuous image was flagged as being fake and was the reason for our first one week suspension. All it has is a picture of a young girl shaking hands with Nancy Pelosi, along with the name of the girl and her position as “legislative aide” to Nancy Pelosi. The left upper corner of the image includes a picture of the girl’s mother along with a medal that she reportedly earned named the “Ukraine Order of Merit for Military & Political Activity.”

While we applaud their attempts to minimize fake news, we also want to point out that right leaning websites say that this meme isn’t false and that the young lady posing with Nancy Pelosi does have strong ties through her parents to the Ukranian military. Maybe Facebook should employ non-biased fact checkers? Or maybe Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of fact checking anyone? Or maybe this young lady actually does have ties to foreign governments and the right is correct on this?

Regardless, the meme states the woman’s name as Ivanna Voronovych and has a picture of her mother, and a medal that was awarded to her mother for political activity. The text we posted along with the picture was a simple question comparing how Trump is thoroughly investigated, but nothing is asked about the Democrats – nothing specific stated. Even though there was nothing mentioned on our post, a simple Bing.com search reveals that there’s quite a bit to look it about this woman, including this article which includes Ms. Voronovych with various officials and her mother with what is obviously Ukranian military personnel.

Even the most ardent liberal would concede that it’s at least an interesting meme if they’re being intellectually honest. A fair person would at least consider an investigation into the situation, given the level of investigations being levied on President Trump and the fact that Senator Diane Feinstein evidently had a Chinese spy on her payroll for several years.

Why did we receive this ban? According to Facebook it was for what their fact checkers determined to be fake news. Fact checkers that appear to be inaccurate or biased, at the very least. We’re obviously biased towards ourselves, but from an objective standpoint, this should not have been enough to suspend us for a week.

But, we still don’t think that Facebook was being honest on their reason for our suspension. We think that it was for our Sharia post. We believe that we were flagged by their algorithm for posting about Sharia and asking people to visit our website for more. We believe that when it was manually reviewed someone at Facebook thought, “Well, suspending them for directly quoting the Koran would be admitting that the Koran is a violent and dangerous book, and I can’t do that so let me scroll through and see what I can pull out of my backside.”

For full disclosure and transparency, these are the photographs displayed on our website under the Sharia Post. Please note that none of these images were on the Facebook page. Some of the images are semi-graphic and only hint at what is on the actual page. You can click on any of them for a link to the actual post.

Regardless of the reason, this was our first ban and since we weren’t sure of the reason we made a strong effort to post only things that were PG-13 at worst. No nudity, mild language, and nothing remotely hateful, racist, or misogynistic. We were looking forward to smooth seas ahead but only a few days later…

Strike Two: “Suspicious Activity”

Less than a week later, we were unable to post any new content to our site and received a notification that we were suspended this time for “Suspicious Activity” on our account. This suspension stopped us from adding new content and it also cancelled out all scheduled posts for the affected days as well. We were dead in the water for another week, facing limited traffic and revenue, and right on the heels of our first suspension – this is a big deal for a young business trying to grow.

We all searched our accounts to see what could have raised suspicion and found absolutely nothing different. Even though our personal accounts all had the standard posts for friends and family, comments standard comments on other people’s posts, no purchases or other financial transactions, we still updated our passwords and verified the devices we were logging in from. Our accounts had no signs of being tampered with and we updated our security, so we appealed. We didn’t receive a reply this time, but the suspension was lifted and traffic resumed to near normal levels.

It wasn’t a complete win, however. Our “automatic post to Facebook” feature from our site host was permanently disabled by Facebook. This seemingly minor inconvenience actually prevents us from scheduling posts, driving down overall traffic. Trouble tickets have yielded nothing and we’ve just been working around it.

Dear Facebook, we don’t have alt accounts. This is just a funny meme. Please don’t suspend us again for having alt accounts.

Strike 3: The Mystery Suspension!

On November 13th we received our third suspension in less than a month, this time for a full week, with an automatic lift of the suspension on November 20th.

We appealed multiple times, asking what post specifically was flagged, or which of their rules and guidelines were violated. Facebook admins never replied, unfortunately, so we thought, “Well, just to be safe, let’s just go and just remove a bunch of stuff.” We then began several rounds of removing photos and posts that had anything questionable, removing several pro-life memes, memes talking about the oddity of multiple genders, and anything that could be interpreted as a character attack on liberal politicians. Our Facebook page is as squeaky clean as can be while still retaining some semblance of a humor site.

We did keep memes and posts about biological males competing in women’s sporting events, socialism, and other topics on which there are two sides of the argument. Our stance is that this should be much more than what is required to maintain a page. We figured that if Facebook would like us to remove more we would begrudgingly comply, but at that point we felt that we met or exceeded all of their rules and regulations.

We spent this week beefing up our presence on Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, just waiting for the ban to be lifted. We designed a few more T-shirts on our Shopify account, and worked finding a ton more memes, videos, and other content to share once the suspension was lifted. We redesigned our Videos and Memes pages and some background items on our page. Everything was looking good; we had a sparkling clean Facebook presence and our site and then…

Strike 4: Suspended While Suspended!

Literally three hours before our suspension was scheduled to be lifted we got on Facebook and scheduled some posts to go up. Instead of lifting the suspension as promised, Facebook instead extended it another week resulting in a two week consecutive suspension and we still didn’t know why!

We appealed this suspension extension, asking Facebook to please explain what the issue was. We pointed out that not only did we barely post due to the suspension (what’s the point of posting when no one will see it?), but that we actually REMOVED tons of content. We were thinking that a Facebook administrator would read this and our suspension would be mysteriously lifted like it was during our suspension for “suspicious activity,” but here we are eleven days into a mystery ban writing this post to expose their unfair and un-American practice of censoring people they disagree with.

The Impact

The following graphs are from our Facebook Insights showing how deep their suspensions impacted our traffic and revenue stream. Keep in mind that we’re a small operation, barely getting started. Our idea is great – presenting the Conservative side of whatever topics are popular at the moment in a humorous light.

Our website grew wicked fast; Americans generally lean center-right politically and we were getting millions of views a month from people yearning to get news and memes from a point of view that they agreed with. We were a successful website by any metric. However, after Facebook’s suspensions drowned out traffic, we can’t afford to keep doing what we were doing.

What Do Our Followers Think?

Our memes are being shared thousands of times. We’re receiving thousands of comments on our posts, and we’re seeing our original memes Tweeted by others and on other people’s Pinterest and Instagram feeds. Apparently, our Facebook followers are a lot more conservative than the people who work at Facebook.

Furthermore, here’s a few of the reviews of our website, copied and pasted from our Facebook page:

How You Can Help

Here’s a few simple things you can do to help us keep the website up and running:

Bookmark or Favorite our actual webpage. Add it to your mental list of pages that you peruse while relaxing and browsing the internet. Right now we get most of our traffic from Facebook and while we’re thankful for the opportunity they’ve given us, we’re also wanting to break this dependence on them. We cannot run our business the way we want to with them suspending us for posting things that don’t agree with their liberal agenda. Interact with the products that genuinely interest you on our webpage. If you’ve been thinking of browsing for or purchasing an item and see it on our site, click on it and type “thefunnyconservative.com” if they ask where you heard of them or saw their products. Check out our merchandise store. If you’re in the market for a right wing bumper sticker, t-shirt, coffee mug, or anything else for yourself or as a present, getting it from us will go a long way towards keeping us in business. Share our posts and memes! We’re still a new website and in the process of expanding our core audience. Not only does sharing our content spread the conservative message, but it brings more people to the page, more people to check out our sponsors, more people to purchase a t-shirt or hoodie.

Thanks for reading and for your continued support.

http://www.thefunnyconservative.com

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