Open Letter to the U.S. and Philippines Departments
of Justice
Since 2010,
Veamcast Corp (a Florida C-Corp), has been developing apps and an API for a
video/voice publishing and sharing service. A great deal of the work was done
while Joe Dean, Veamcast’s founder, was living in the Philippines. The Veamcast
apps rely heavily on the use the Facebook API. Veamcast allows its users to
publish, share and communicate, very much in the way the Facebook platform
does. Veamcast passed the Facebook App Review and was granted all the
permissions necessary to implement its functionality. Joe worked with a group
of interns to create sample channels and hone Veamcast’s offering while we
built and tested our platform. Most channels that were created were simple
entertainment based (music and funny/interesting videos). One of the interns
Joe worked with created a Veamcast channel titled "Duterte’s Media"
(favorable to the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte) and Joe created a
Veamcast channel titled "WTF, they all suck" about the state of U.S.
politics. "Duterte’s Media" got a significant amount of traffic
during a short period of time, with most traffic generated through Facebook
groups. To the best of our knowledge, nothing that can be called “abusive” in
any way was posted to any Veamcast channel.
In 2019
Facebook began rejecting all Veamcast requests to publish and removed all of
the thousands of posts that had been published to date. After that, when
attempting to publish anything the Facebook API returned an error with the
phrase "contained content other people had reported as abusive", even
though the content was brand new and could not have been viewed yet. Then the
message changed to "We can't review this website because the content
doesn't meet our Community Standards." but again, it was brand new.
Facebook refused all of the numerous and repeated requests to elaborate (some
can be seen in the documentation below, but hundreds more were not recorded).
Recently the message changed to "(OAuthException #2) Service Temporarily
Available". Veamcast was asked to do various things to remedy the
situation and did them all in a very timely manner but nothing worked. At one
point, Veamcast was asked to resubmit and pass the App Review a second time
which was done and re-approved.
Numerous
attempts were made to resolve the issue. The last one seemed to catch the
attention of a Jacky Le Nghia at Facebook who seemed to be trying to get the
issue addressed but after numerous attempts, he stopped responding in August
2020. Then Joe Dean started circulating first video listed in Appendix which
clearly demonstrates all this. He targeted law firms he suspected Facebook’s
lawyers to be (also trying to get the issue addressed). A few days later, Veamcast
got one more message from Jacky saying it was fixed and to try again. Joe sent
him the failure message again, then the bug was closed and all evidence of it
removed from the Facebook support system. Had Joe not recorded and saved the
support thread, Veamcast would not now have access or proof it existed. It’s an
overt coverup. The issue was not resolved as demonstrated in the second video
posted in the Appendix.
The damages
to Veamcast are real and apparent. Our launch was put on hold indefinitely and
our team were forced into other jobs. Joe had to relocate back to the U.S. All
our users lost their posts and their confidence in us. Our platform needed to
be redesigned without Facebook if we were to do an official launch.
This
behavior by Facebook is anti-competitive, politically biased, deceptive and monopolizing.
It is blatant sabotage of a fledgling competitor. This undisguised censorship
could be for any number of reasons or none at all, it doesn’t matter. Facebook
is clearly guilty.
Facebook
should be banned from publishing anything political from or to their users until
they are fully investigated. This is an election year and they are clearly
abusing the law. They are a threat to freedom and democracy. This cannot be
tolerated.
Facebook
should also be required to provide full disclosure as to the reason they remove
anything from their platform and it should be enforceable through law. If it
is done falsely, they should pay a substantial fine. They should also be
prosecuted civilly.
Social
Media bias is a plague on free speech.