HAS FACEBOOK ACCIDENTALLY BANNED ITSELF?

Strange goings on at Facebook. A day or two after a whistle blower emerges the social media giant goes offline, taking Instagram with it. 

Must be some crazy kind of coincidence. 

The whistle blower is Frances Haugen, 37, a disgruntled former product manager on the "civic integrity team," who took part in a bombshell interview, aired on CBS on Sunday (3rd Oct):

In the interview Ms Haugen said she was "exasperated" with the company and had copied a series of internal memos and documents before leaving. These were then leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which has been releasing the material -- sometimes referred to as the Facebook Files -- in batches in recent days. 

Some of the documents revealed a blatant double standard, with celebrities, politicians, and high profile users being allowed to say more of less what they wanted, while normal users are thrown into Facebook jail for the most trivial reasons. It seems that moderation policies are only applied to the proles or people the social media monopoly wanted to shut down.

In fact, this happened to Trad News itself, with our page kicked off the platform for extremely specious reasons.

The leaks also showed that Facebook was also facing a complex lawsuit from a group of its own shareholders. But most damning so far was the revelation that internal research by the company found that Instagram was impacting the mental health of teenagers but did not give a fuck. In fact, Facebook simply hid the findings when they suggested that the platform was a "toxic" place for many youngsters.

Still, bad as this is, it doesn't seem quite enough to justify pulling the switch on the entire operation. Maybe there are worse revelations in the pipeline -- maybe something connected to the previous U.S. Presidential election -- or maybe Facebook was just doing so much banning that it accidentally banned itself. 

Updates coming....