Anonymous Bites Back, an all volunteer activist apolitical radio show, has been broadcasting for several years with constant problems fighting back against censorship for the topics discussed. Now, ABB seems to have found an unorthodox solution to their problem.

Originally, episodes received good viewer counts, starting out using Facebook and YouTube as a home to stream the weekly shows.

On Facebook alone the Anonymous Bites Back page quickly grew to 25,000+ viewers per episode. This was mainly due to the huge amount of promotion on different pages and groups by the team and by the viewers themselves. Everyone was working hard on building up the show.

Against the State: An ... Rockwell Jr., Llewelly... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details) Then shit started to hit the fan. Suddenly ABB episodes were “shadow banned” and outright censored. When an episode went live, it started out with a certain amount of viewers. But then the team started to share, and with each share to a page the view count actually started to drop. At some point there were more people replying below the episode than the amount Facebook claimed were watching the live stream. After a while, Anonymous Bites Back realized why the social media site was doing this and how.

The show had become too big and was causing ripple waves on the InQTel-funded platform.

It’s no surprise that Facebook did this to ABB, as the group of activists are who originally came up with the #DeleteFacebook movement.

Facebook works with a “live stream map.” This map shows dots representing all the different live streams in the world. When a stream gets more viewers, the dot becomes larger, making you more visible, giving you more and more exposure. So a popular stream will get a big boost by Facebook, unless you are “deboosted.”

It’s now been revealed that Facebook will “deboost” posts including political targeting users. It’s something that all of us knew, and is more commonly referred to in the industry as “shadow banning.” However, the claim holds more water coming from a former employee than just mere speculation, especially with documents that Project Veritas reported.

Cyber Guerrilla (CGAN) describes what happened to ABB:

They began artificially reducing the live view count, they were actively attempting to reduce the reach of the show. So Anonymous Bites Back realized the establishment social media wanted a war. And the team started to invent solutions. They started out by changing the location of the live stream to a popular location. If something big was happening at that moment, the show would “move” to that location.

This offered a temporary solution, and new viewers did arrive. Also a team was created to increase the sharing, consisting of active supporters and fans, and they were organizing “watch parties” to increase the amount of viewers. It worked, and Anonymous Bites Back was able to restore the numbers. But then Facebook hit them again. This time by limiting accounts of people who would share from the page. The moment you would share from the page more than 3 times, your account would be unable to share anything for 7 days. Sometimes it would lock you out of your account entirely.

Keep in mind that all of this happened on Facebook while the show never received a single infraction. But the team didn’t give up, instead they started to branch out using different services. The team’s focus was then put on to YouTube.

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