It has become increasingly obvious that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are in fact content editors with political aims, but now a popular website-hosting service, Squarespace, has proven that it too will shut down users who aren’t aligned with a certain leftist political agenda.
In this case it is the agenda of using the COVID-19 outbreak as a political tool to suppress a strong economy and spread uncertainty and chaos going into a presidential election that does not look promising for the Democratic Party.
According to Breitbart, on July 28 Squarespace shut down the website of the group America’s Frontline Doctors after the group held a press conference in Washington D.C., according to Dr. Simone Gold. According to a screenshot circulated by Gold, the hosting and design service shut down the group’s site for “activity that’s false, fraudulent, inaccurate or deceiving.”
A day earlier, a Breitbart News Facebook post including a video of the event was removed by Facebook.
What did Facebook see as so dangerous about the event itself?
Hosted by America’s Frontline Doctors, a group founded by board-certified physician and lawyer Dr. Simone Gold, the event announced a “massive disinformation campaign” about the coronavirus.
“If Americans continue to let so-called experts and media personalities make their decisions, the great American experiment of a Constitutional Republic with Representative Democracy, will cease,” reads the event’s information page.
The livestream of the conference on Periscope, Twitter’s livestreaming platform, had generated 1 million views before it was stricken by the site. Footage on Facebook accumulated over 17 million views within 8 hours and had 185,000 concurrent viewers at the time it streamed. On YouTube, a clip from the event garnered 80,000 views before being banned by the platform for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
Of Squarespace, Gold stated in a recent tweet: “Our website host @Squarespace has just completely and arbitrarily shut down our website, claiming a violation of their terms of service.”
Gold included a screenshot of an email sent by Squarespace in which the hosting provider stated that the group’s site was “in violation of Section 3.1 of our Acceptable Use Policy regarding activity that’s false, fraudulent, inaccurate or deceiving.”
The email specifies that the provider reserves the right to suspend a user’s account at any time for any reason. Since the site was taken down, multiple Twitter users have offered to re-host the group’s website.
