The Worcester-based Turtleboy Sports blog is in hot water with Facebook again, and this time the social media giant has apparently wiped out the site’s entire Facebook page over what the company alleges is “bullying.”
Curiously enough, Facebook later clarified that while Turtleboy’s Facebook activity “follows the Facebook Community standards,” the post in question “may be considered insensitive or cruel,” but a check on the site’s Facebook page on Wednesday afternoon shows that it is still deactivated. A backup page listed as Turtleboy Refugees, which features more than 10,000 followers, is still alive, however.
Turtleboy’s current situation tracks comparable treatment that NewBostonPost contributor Kyle Reyes recently experienced and comes months after a NewBostonPost investigation into Facebook’s confusing censorship policies.
Turtleboy Sports, which recently broke the story concerning a Massachusetts state trooper being ordered by superiors to doctor his arrest report of a prominent judge’s daughter, appears to have angered a top member of the Black Lives Matter activist group whom the site outed after apparently noticing that she had set up a GoFundMe account in an effort to buy a car, insurance, and a car seat for her infant child.
The blog’s Facebook page, which boasts more than 100,000 followers, was apparently wiped out of existence shortly after sharing the report concerning activist DiDi Delgado, a Cambridge-based Black Lives Matter organizer, who identifies as “a queer Black womyn, writer, activist, organizer, freelance journalist, and poet.”
Delgado has now apparently taken to thanking her followers for helping to get Turtleboy’s Facebook page “shut down.”
Per Turtleboy’s entry concerning Facebook’s penalty:
“Since we exposed this perpetually unemployed racist “activist” for admitting that she drives around in an uninsured car without a proper car seat for her baby daughter, we’ve received an abnormal amount of messages like this:
The situation involving Turtleboy Sports marks the latest development regarding the conflicts between the social media giant and right-of-center web sites. While Facebook is a private company, the outfit thrives on the free and open exchange of opinions and ideas, but has frequently been criticized by conservatives over an apparent liberal bias.
In June, New Boston Post reported on Turtleboy’s experiences with Facebook moderators. A lengthy investigation determined that the same problems that had plagued Reyes and other conservatives had been affecting Turtleboy — namely, that users upset over various posts have discovered that flooding the company with complaints can trigger an internal review, in which case all it takes for a user to be either suspended or have his or her page wiped out is the ear of a sympathetic Facebook moderator.
A Facebook spokesman who had previously interacted with the New Boston Post as of Wednesday afternoon has not yet responded to an inquiry regarding Turtleboy’s latest troubles.
A representative of the Turtleboy site, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told New Boston Post that the blog is currently considering its legal options.
In a recent post, the blog reported how Delgado is now using her battle with Turtleboy to boost her GoFundMe efforts and declared that “these people don’t get to win.”
“They wanna poke the turtle? Game on.”
Delgado responded in a Facebook post of her own.
“These are white supremacists y’all,” she wrote. “These aren’t victims. They’re oppressors, trying to harm a Black woman.”
