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Friend,
Facebook just did something that should terrify everyone who cares about democracy anywhere in the world: For six straight days, Facebook shut down links to all news stories in Australia, cutting off traffic to nearly every news source in a country of 25 million people.
The biggest newspapers in the country. Australian public broadcasting websites. Corporate media, nonprofit media. All of it, shut down on Facebook for almost a full week. And despite the pandemic, even health-care information sites got caught in the blackout.
It's not only a story we covered in detail, but it also hits close to home--because if this happened to Common Dreams, it would be devastating.
In fact, we got a taste of it last year, when Facebook intentionally suppressed news stories in the U.S. from progressive news outlets like Common Dreams. In September, at the very moment that our readership usually spikes in the run-up to a presidential election, 70% of our traffic from Facebook vanished into thin air—and it still hasn't fully recovered.
And we didn't just lose readers. We rely on donations from readers to pay for everything from our staff to web hosting to the water and electric bills for our office. So when our readership goes down, our donations go down.
Make no mistake: Tech giants like Facebook are an existential threat to Common Dreams and to democracy itself. To insulate ourselves from these attacks, we're counting on you to keep us strong.
Will you make a donation to help make sure we can continue to produce journalism each day that informs, inspires, and ignites change for the common good—no matter what attacks we face from corporate tech giants like Facebook?
No corporation in a functioning democracy should have the power to shut down the basic flow of information and news, but that's where we are. Advocates have been warning about the threat of Facebook's monopoly for years, calling for Facebook to be broken up, just like Big Oil and the other monopolistic trusts of the Gilded Age.
But policy-makers and regulators have shown no willingness to enforce the law, so it's up to us to be prepared for the worst.
Please donate whatever you can and help meet our Winter Fundraising Campaign goal of $75,000 by March 2.
Thank you for your support for our common dreams,
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