Facebook’s banning of Press TV part of West’s narrative control: Analyst

The Debate program on Facebook's banning of Press TV's page

A British political commentator says Facebook’s move to ban Press TV’s page is part of the general agenda of big Silicon Valley companies to control “adversarial” narratives.

Richard Medhurst, a Vienna-based broadcast journalist, said the permanent ban on Press TV’s Facebook page is “despicable, but not surprising.”

“This is part of the general agenda that these big Silicon Valley companies have, which is executing the agenda of the national security state,” he told Press TV’s Debate program on Monday evening.

“Outlets like Press TV, CGTN, Telesur are constantly harassed and their accounts and pages are shut down, because they can have adversarial points of view. They can have anti-imperialist points of view; opinions that can challenge US hegemony and Israeli occupation of Palestine,” he added.

“These are topics than cannot be touched. They use bogus arguments like ‘Press TV has violated Facebook’s Community Standards, but they don’t provide any examples of that or any justification,” Medhurst, a British-Syrian national, said.

He said it is absolutely disgusting how they can lie and start wars based on complete fabrications. “And they get away with it, they get away with murdering millions of people.”

He also talked about how YouTube has demonetized his channel because of his anti-Israel videos and stances.

Mainstream media must have “narrative control”, because propaganda machine goes hand in hand with the war machine, he noted.

He said Press TV, RT, Sputnik, CGTN, etc. provide a completely fresh and different take and the truth that is not found in mainstream media.

Also participating in the debate was Marwa Osman, a Beirut-based political commentator, who said the Western-sponsored media corporations “target media outlets with anti-imperial and anti-colonial message.”

She said huge media corporations and conglomerates around the world are owned by people who either have Israeli citizenship or are very good friends with the Israelis.

“That is not new. If you go back to what happened in 2008 and 2012 in Gaza, you will find absolutely nothing about it in the US and Western-sponsored mainstream media. The same applies to what happened in 2006 in Lebanon and later on in Syria, and how it started,” she added.

She pointed the situation in Syria before the beginning of the civil war, and said the Western-sponsored social media censor the videos that show how the Syria conflict really started.

Osman said she has been banned from going live on Facebook after taking video of her village, which borders the occupied territories, and talking about the Israeli apartheid.