Workers Solidarity Movement

Over the last few days the mainstream media in Ireland has finally woken up to the way money from far right US evangelicals is being used to buy the No vote in the referendum campaign. Here we show you how to see how you are being targeted and discuss what this means for the referendum and any conception of democracy not based on the ‘one dollar, one vote’ favoured by the elite.

Recent changes Facebook has made to Pages & Events have greatly reduced its usefulness for radical political organising. Here I reject the idea that the reason for these changes is political censorship and examine what the actual reasons & effects are.   In doing this I'm building on my article of last week that argues that Facebook should be a collectively owned public utility and not a private company - in part because of the way it has sabotaged its own usefulness in the search for advertising revenue. 

Over the last few months changes made by Facebook have greatly reduced the effectiveness of Events and Pages because it has become much less likely that someone following a page will see posts made by that page. According to Facebook on average only 12% of followers will see a given post. In 2011 Facebook did the same to events, multiple changes in the way events work saw response rates to event invitations decline from around 80% of those invited responding to this figure often being less than 20%.

A Facebook page scrutinizing PSNI harassment and operations has been forced to close down today due to a media frenzy and scaremongering from the police and politicians. The Facebook page Crown Forces Watch has dominated news headlines and radio shows this morning with the Chairman of the Police Federation Terry Spence claiming the site was ‘an attempt to gather information which is likely to be of use to terrorists which I am in no doubt will be used in attempts to target police officers for murder."

The anti-woman, anti-choice group Youth Defence have launched a new advertising campaign which includes targetted Facebook ads ahead of the anticipated ABC decision in the European courts.  In this case three women, known as A, B and C, are challenging Ireland’s ban on abortion in the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that the law jeopardised their health and their well being and that travelling abroad for an abortion placed "enormous physical, emotional and financial burdens" upon them. Because the law created delays and hardships for each woman, it resulted in each of them having a later abortion, creating a greater risk to their health.