Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/20/facebook-twitter-kill-55-mil.html
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Facebook says it nixed 610 accounts, 89 Facebook pages, 156 groups, and 72 accounts on Instagram, all of which were linked to BL and Epoch Media Group.
Not quite 55 million.
What I would love is if when facebook deleted groups like this, they alerted the groups’ followers. “HI! We’d like you to know that this group you were following was a foreign propaganda account.” But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that anybody who followed those groups won’t even see THIS news article.
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the Chinese Falun Gong cult
We’re calling it a cult now? Isn’t that just buying into Chinese government propaganda?
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I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 55 of the 63 million Trump voters in 2016 were fake as well.
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Cory Doctorow’s been referring to Falun Gong as a cult since at least May of 2010. He made several references to the group in For The Win.
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They didn’t delete 55mm accounts, that was a reading comprehesnsion / cut and paste fail by Xeni. They deleted “610 accounts, 89 Facebook pages, 156 groups, and 72 Instagram accounts”, which were followed by a total of 55mm users. No details on the quality of those users was given.
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So many of the responses of support on Trump’s twitter posts now look like this:
Scroll back a few days, and you’ll see this bevy of suspended users littering the comments. It felt like it started appearing suddenly for me, and I was wondering if it was just synchronicity. Guess the banhammer was at work.
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I did check to see if this was a trend at BB, but none of the other posts tagged https://boingboing.net/tag/falun-gong use such language.
In fact, Cory himself described it as “an outlawed religious sect” in a 2014 post.
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Isn’t it to the advantage of the Chinese government for Trump to succeed and for his destabilizing influence to persist? I suppose Falun Gong might want to support him to his stance on Chinese tariffs, but on balance I would think he would mostly make things worse for opponents of the Chinese government, especially considering that he doesn’t seem to have any idea what exactly tariffs are supposed to do.
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I wish the message read:
“This post was from a fake account run by a propaganda organization, it has been removed.”
Call out the lies directly when you see them. Label them as what they are: Propaganda.
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Li Hongzhi
https://en.falundafa.org/eng/lectures/1996L.html
Now, skulls, evil-looking characters, goblins, devils, ghosts, and monsters have all been made into toys, and they are sold quite fast. People with no kind thoughts are willing to buy them. What issue does this elucidate? People’s values are declining very badly! In the past, singers would have beautiful voices and were graduates of music schools. The physique and bearing should be as elegant as possible since music is supposed to give people a sense of beauty. Nowadays, there are people, hard to tell whether they are men or women, with long hair, who when screaming hysterically “Ah!” would become singing stars with the help of TV promotion. Everything is being corrupted, and everything of mankind is declining.
The races in the world are not allowed to be mixed up. Now, the races are mixed up and it has brought about an extraordinarily serious problem. Once races are mixed up, one does not have a corresponding relationship with the higher levels, and he has lost the root. Mixed races have lost their roots, as if nobody in the paradise will take care of them. They belong to nowhere, and no places would accept them.
More on Epoch Times:
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Not really, Falun Gong is pretty darn cultish. Doesn’t excuse the Chinese govt’s repression, but they aren’t pure and innocent victims.
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Exactly. The Chinese government is an authoritarian bully that hates a rival to its own cult of personality, but Falun Gong definitely use the sleazy bait-and-switch tactics and false advertising of sleazy cults. For example:
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Falun Gong’s teachings posit that human beings are originally and innately good—even divine—but that they descended into a realm of delusion and suffering after developing selfishness and accruing karma.[27][41][42] The practice holds that reincarnation exists and that different people’s reincarnation processes are overseen by different gods.[43] To re-ascend and return to the “original, true self”, Falun Gong practitioners are supposed to assimilate themselves to the qualities of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance, let go of “attachments and desires” and suffer to repay karma’
Sounds like an Asian version of Catholicism.
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To be clear: the accounts & groups it deleted were the ones linked to and run by Epoch Times and The BL.
Their many accounts were followed by about 55 million Facebook and Twitter users.
They are a qui gong based UFO cult.
“They preached that UFOs had arrived on earth; aliens had taken over human bodies, and were trying to annihilate humanity through the control of TV and radio.”
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