Campus publications protest Meta’s censorship

Social media giant Meta’s takedown of progressive statements and pages are akin to “digital martial law,” campus publications said on Tuesday after the platform deleted some of their contents and tagged them as spam. In separate statements, the College Editors Guild of the Philippines and the University of the Philippines (UP) Solidaridad, both national coalitions of college publications, denounced Meta’s “arbitrary community standards,” which they believed were now being used to censor progressives. Several campus publications, including UP’s Manila Collegian and Sinag, and Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ The Catalyst also saw their coverage of the death of Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison taken down by Meta. Campus journalists see the takedowns as part of efforts to censor political dissent and to reduce progressive views even as disinformation runs amok on the social media platform.

—Krixia Subingsubing