My Recent Experience with Facebook Suppression of Article Sharing

I recently had an odd experience on Facebook, which I would not call censorship exactly, but it felt more like an attempt to suppress sharing of an article by means of intimidation. I have never had an experience quite like it on Facebook before, and so I would term it atypical.

It all started when one of my friends had this article shared in a group, concerning a new discovery about aluminum in the brains of autistics and how this might implicate vaccines in the etiology of ASD.

https://jbhandleyblog.com/home/2018/4/1/international2018

Because, I found that the article contained a very interesting, reasoned approach to the issue and links to primary sources published by reputable scientific presses, I decided to share it on my Facebook page. Very soon after doing so, I got this message from "the Facebook Help Team".

I had never received a notice like this, and the implication that if they "determined" that an article I shared was false, they might notify me and expect me to take it down was disturbing. Unless the article is defamatory, there is no reason I should not be able to share it. Some articles are satire, some are mistaken, but unless they maliciously target the reputation of another person, we are allowed by law to publish them. Yes, Facebook is a private site and yes, it can make its own rules, but I don't remember anything in the terms of service when I joined about their being the final arbiter on "truth" on any given subject or that "truth" was even a term that applied to anything we post on our own page to share with friends.

However, I forgot about this when one of my friends remarked something about the article being "junk science.:" This person is an academician living abroad, and I know him to usually be very impressed by the prestige of academic publications. So while the article I posted was a mere blog post by J.B. Handley, it relied on serious scientific publication to make its point. One of them was from Elsevier, so I shared that link in the comments.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0946672X17308763

But when I tried to post this link to the article "Aluminium in Brain Tissue in Autism" in Journal of Trace Metals in Medicine and Biology by Matthew Mold, Andrew King and Christopher Exley, it would not post. Instead, I got a message that said this had been determined to be a bad page and that I might lose the right to publish on Facebook if I persisted. This shook me so much, that I neglected to get a screenshot of that message. Instead, I sent the link to my friend who had objected to the blog post as junk science in Facebook messenger. But before I was allowed to send him the link in Facebook messenger, I got this message::

I persisted and sent the link to my friend in Messenger, noting that Elsevier does not usually publish "junk science". I also told my friend the trouble I was having posting this. He said he could see my post in the comments all along. But I couldn't until much later. My friend also replied that the article published by Elsevier was not junk science, but that the conclusion J.B. Handley was drawing from the article was.

In other words, he was suggesting that the Handley blog post was misrepresenting the conclusion of the article by Professor Chris Exley and his colleagues. But here is the conclusion of the scientific article verbatim:

We have made the first measurements of aluminium in brain tissue in ASD and we have shown that the brain aluminium content is extraordinarily high. We have identified aluminium in brain tissue as both extracellular and intracellular with the latter involving both neurones and non-neuronal cells. The presence of aluminium in inflammatory cells in the meninges, vasculature, grey and white matter is a standout observation and could implicate aluminium in the aetiology of ASD.

I don't see how Handley's blog post, which also cites many other scientific sources, can be said to have misrepresented that.  That's exactly what he said in American English, only he spelled "aetiology" as "etiology" and "aluminium" as "aluminum", to make it easier for ordinary Americans to understand.  But beyond the issue of whether Handley's blog was misleading or whether the findings in the articles cited are mistaken, there is for me a much bigger and more important question: What is motivating Facebook to stop me from sharing this?

Professor Chris Exley, one of the authors