Reprinted with permission from TheNewAmerican.com.

A disabled American veteran has become one of the victims of Facebook’s political purge ahead of the mid-term elections. The online social-media platform announced October 11 that it had suspended more than 800 pages and accounts for what it claimed was “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and spamming, with many of the accounts hosting politically conservative content supportive of President Trump.

One of the most high-profile of those impacted by the purge is disabled Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, who runs a number of Facebook pages, including one for Right Wing News and another for Military Grade Coffee, which were both deleted by Facebook for supposedly including “mis-information” in their posts. At the time of its suspension, Right Wing News claimed more than three million Facebook followers.

Kolfage, who lost both legs and his right hand during deployment to Iraq in 2004, took to his website, fight4freespeech.com, to battle what he termed social-media censorship. “I’m not a ‘conservative,’ I’m not a ‘liberal,’” wrote Kolfage in explaining his battle against Facebook. “I’m an American, with deep beliefs in what our country stands for. I proved this by vowing to protect and fighting for America’s greatest tenet: free speech. Many Americans have fought for these political freedoms — freedom of speech — and every American has enjoyed those freedoms — UNTIL TODAY. On October 11, 2018, Facebook shut down thousands of Facebook accounts for their political opinions, saying in effect that they don’t have a ‘legitimate political argument.’”

Kolfage charged Facebook with lying about why his sites were shut down, saying that “they shut down my [Right Wing News] page because it was conservative, powerful, and the elections are in 2 weeks.”

As reported by Breitbart, Kolfage said that Facebook suspended his pages after he had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising on Facebook. “My income as a father and husband is threatened,” he wrote. “This isn’t the right to free speech I gave my legs and arm to defend.... Facebook took down our Facebook page, cutting off all contact we had with the millions of people who signed up to follow us, the millions of people who liked what we were sharing online.”

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Facebook’s purge of more than 500 pages and 250 accounts ahead of midterm elections in the United States represents a massive trend to police social media activity in ways that put freedom of expression at risk. This trend effectively discourage users from engaging in radical politics and may be viewed as part of a counterinsurgency effort by a powerful social media company to assure a passive majority of Americans that they are properly guarding a widely used platform from alleged threats to democracy.