A conservative Australian business owner was temporarily locked out of his account after posting “Free Hong Kong” consecutively for a week straight.
A small business owner has ended up in Facebook’s bad chapters after posting his conservative opinions on his own wall. Now he’s receiving strange emails from Facebook after posting repeatedly posting “Free Hong Kong.”
NEWS: Joss Whedon exposed for being “casually cruel” by former Buffy cast.
A resident living in Ipswich, Queensland, had his account restricted after Facebook alleged that he repeatedly posted false and misleading information regarding the US election. The Ipswichian small business owner responded to a political statement made by an television personality followed and then received an email from Facebook saying that some of his features had been restricted.
“COVID-19 isn’t the Chinese virus,” he posted. “That’s the Chinese flu. The Chinese virus is what has infected Facebook,” the man added.
That comment seemed to put him on Facebook’s radar because nearly every single one of his posts, even personal ones, were reviewed by Facebook’s alleged independent fact-checkers.
The next day he received an email alerting him that his account had been restricted: he could no longer comment on anything on Facebook.
After the restriction was lifted he decided to test the waters some more and, instead of posting and sharing conservative memes and stories, he wrote “Free Hong Kong” every day for one week. One day while he was at work he couldn’t log back into his account. He received an email from Facebook that was in Chinese, presumably a warning about too many login attempts or fraudulent activity.
He was able to log back into his account again, he just needed to enter in his account details again but, regardless, he was still concerned about his personal data.
The Ipswichian doesn’t go on social media much. He only has a few hundred friends on Facebook which entirely consists of friends and family. He’s a father of 5 and a grandfather of 9 and works 7 days a week. The fact that Facebook would take a personal interest in what he is discussing and sharing on his own Facebook wall should be concerning.
It is likely that Chinese bots scour Facebook for problematic anti-CCP posts and attempt to brute-force hack the account of the user who posted the message.
A brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing a combination correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found.
This happened only a week before Facebook issued a nationwide ban on all Australian news content as a retaliation to new government regulations that force social networks to compensate publishers for sharing their content.
It is terrifying to know that Facebook is doing very little to protect its users from these kinds of attacks and instead side with the totalitarian communist party of China. Facebook stores very, very sensitive information about their users including contact information of family and close and personal friends