Uprising

by Diamond

  We sure did.

  Once the president won the election and was inaugurated in 2017, we only had our social media accounts to rely on in order to speak our truth. We even updated our camera and lighting so that our production could look more professional. We started calling out the Russia hoax and the surveillance of the Trump campaign. We were onto something, and people were agreeing with our opinions. Silk would do deep research on the topics that we were discussing, and the information was gut-wrenching.

  Yes, I did; and, yes, it was. I couldn’t just do research from one source. I had to go through multiple sources in order to form my opinions about what I thought was the truth. We were able to break down some of the most complicated theories coming from the Left by using good old common sense. Our base grew even faster, and people were awaking from the lie.

  Yes. We told it how we saw it, and it was nothing for us to call it out. Of course, just like we attracted people who loved us and were waking up to the truth, we also attracted a few trolls. They would say some mean-spirited things within the comments sections. They would thumbs-down our videos and type nasty replies to our loyal supporters. We had to literally filter out words and stop people from posting pictures within the comments sections.

  We began to notice how our live broadcast began dragging and messing up to the point that it would make us look distorted. We could be talking, and, out of the blue, we would start getting complaints about the audio sounding choppy.

  At times, we would have over twenty-three thousand people watching at one time, with over five hundred thousand views once our one-hour live broadcast was completed. We averaged anywhere from five million to over eight million views in a week. Our video uploads would go viral within a twenty-four-hour period. As soon as we posted anything on our platform, people would immediately begin viewing our content. Our base had grown to over a million followers, and our brand was getting much bigger.

  Then, on August 9, 2017, we received an email from YouTube with eight of our videos listed, along with this statement: “The following videos are running limited or no ads, due to content that has been identified as not suitable for all advertisers.”

  Mm-hmm; that’s what they said. I had to go in and investigate to see what was going on. Here it was, August 2017, and they were flagging us for videos dating back to August 2015! I dug a little further, and that’s when I realized that over 95 percent of our videos were “demonetized.”

  So let me explain: YouTube originally played ads around our videos, and we had received a percentage of the revenue from each ad played. This is the way people are able to make a real living off of posting their original content. But now YouTube had stopped the ads from playing around a very large number of our videos.

  That’s right. We suffered a great loss because this was part of our income to keep our brand going. Then, on September 7, 2017, I received a phone call from Diamond…

  Yes, I remember. I woke up that morning and discovered that Facebook had actually placed a red notification at the top of our Diamond and Silk page. The notification stated, “Limits have been placed on Diamond and Silk. Your page has been blocked from including advertisements in Facebook videos.” I couldn’t believe it. I felt like someone had kicked me in the gut.

  Mind you, a few months before, Facebook had started letting ads play within our live Facebook videos. Now, all of a sudden, Facebook had demonetized our videos, and they also restricted our reach. There was an option for us to appeal, so you know I did just that: appealed their decision.

  What did we do wrong? We hadn’t been warned about violating any of Facebook’s terms. What was the issue? On October 26, 2017, Facebook shut down all of the posts to our page. No one could see, view, or comment on any of our posts. The chat-support mechanism that allowed me to speak to a live tech-support person was removed, along with the email-support mechanism that allowed me to email Facebook.

  After about ten hours of being down, our posts mysteriously appeared back on the page. When they finally came back online, a number of comments had been removed. Our posts’ views drastically dropped, from reaching thirty thousand views in forty-five minutes to five thousand views in one hour.

  We were getting notifications and messages from people who were no longer able to see our posts on their feed. They were no longer getting notifications when we dropped content. They had to search for our page just to find it.

  People tried to like and follow our page, but Facebook had removed the “like” and “follow” options; people tried to comment on our posts, but Facebook would not let them; people even tried to share our posts and page, but Facebook had removed the “share” button.

  This was very unfair, especially since the people who liked and followed our page really wanted to see our content. I have emails, chat records, and screenshots of all conversations. I even have the lie from October 13, 2017, when Facebook told me that all blocks on my page had been removed.

  No one could give us a reason why limitations had been placed on our Facebook page. We had around 1.2 million followers when they first placed that notice on our page, but hardly anyone was seeing our posts or getting notifications that we had posted any content. Our live views went from over 23,000 viewers down to around 1,200 viewers on a live video. Our views on YouTube went down as well.

  Someone from the Left could actually upload one of our videos, or a video with our faces in it, make derogatory statements about us, and have fewer than 18,000 followers yet garner millions of views. If we uploaded the same video, even with 1.2 million followers, we were lucky if we got 20,000 views in one day.

  For six months, twenty-nine days, five hours, forty minutes, and forty-three seconds, we chatted and emailed Facebook back and forth about the same issue. We were patronized by being told that our issue would be escalated to the Facebook team, the spam team, the technical team, the appeal team, the internal team, and the policy team.

  On January 8, 2018, at 12:57 p.m., we were informed that none of our complaints had ever been sent to any of these teams to begin with. They never started looking into a resolution to any of our issues. It was as if we didn’t matter. Facebook couldn’t have cared less about our complaints. I would send an email or message every hour, on the hour, to all of the Facebook portals. We worked hard to build this page to over a million authentic likes and followers. For it to be deliberately taken away was deplorable. They weren’t going to get rid of us that easily. They messed with the wrong two black women!

  That’s right. We built our platform one follower at a time. Just imagine using the same tools as everyone else, building something that the average person was unable to build, only for the rug to be pulled from under your feet. It was as if these social media platforms wanted us to go away.

  After that, Twitter began “shadow banning” us. Whenever we dropped content, they kept it hidden from a lot of our followers, even though we were able to see it on our platform. It was just another way to limit our reach and censor us.

  It almost reminded me of a modern-day lynching; back in the day, they used nooses, today they’re using algorithms. Our platforms were choked out by biased man-written algorithms. They did not want people to see our content. They literally tried to make it appear like no one wanted to see us.

  Then, on March 14, 2018, at 5:34 p.m., I received an email from a Facebook representative named Jason. He said that he had been able to take a closer look at the page but he could not see any blocks, and he was going to reach out to the appropriate team manager.

  I thanked him and sent him back screenshots of the limitation notice that Facebook had placed at the top of our page, along with the analytical to show how our page had deteriorated. It must have been horrific because he emailed us back and said that he was passing the screenshots over to the technical team.

  No worries. I continued to remain patient because I refused to fold, go cold, and give up.

  Yes. One thing about Silk, she will stay on top of the issue for as long
as it takes. She doesn’t play.

  No, ma’am, I don’t. You see, we had just started the Chit Chat tour (ChitChatTour.com), where we traveled from state to state doing grassroots work. Because social media platforms had started their censorship campaign against us, we had to find another avenue to reach the people. We were advertising the tour dates to our followers, and they were shadow banning and censoring that. I can even remember when we began to mail out postcards. We spent thousands of dollars in postage, and people wouldn’t get their postcards until after the event was over.

  Yep. They tried to stop us at every turn. We used to be able to advertise our store, DiamondandSilkStore.com, but the algorithms must have picked up on key words and shadow banned that too.

  That’s right. To keep this in simple terms, without sounding geeky, algorithms are written as codes. These codes are step-by-step instructions that tell the computer what to do.

  So, on April 5, 2018, at 3:40 p.m., we got a response. I didn’t see it until very late that night, but when I did get to it, I was crushed. My sister had been back and forth with these people for nearly seven months. She was adamant about getting to the bottom of this issue.

  When I woke up the morning of Friday, April 6, 2018, I picked up the phone and called Silk. Y’all, I wanted to scream. Did these MOFOs really send this to us? Oh, Lord, how was I going to break this to Silk? When she picked up the phone, I let her know that Facebook had sent back a reply.

  I asked Diamond what the email said, and this is what she read to me:

  Hi Rochelle, I hope your week has been going well. I wanted to reach out to you because I was able to determine what is going on. The policy team has come to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community. This decision is based on multiple violations of the Community Standards and Content Guidelines for Monetization. This decision is final, and it is not appeal-able in any way.

  I asked her to read it again to make sure I had heard her correctly. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have wax built up in my ears, but for some reason, it felt like my ears were clogged because I couldn’t believe what she was saying. So she read it again.

  I sure did. I read it slower, louder, and, hopefully, clearer.

  Yes, you did, Diamond. I discovered that it wasn’t wax at all. It was the BS that she was reading from that email. So I had her forward it over to me so that I could see it with my own eyes. I was hoping that maybe she had the wrong glasses on at the time she was reading it. Nope. Every word, every insult was there.

  Y’all, I was fuming. If you had put me in the middle of a ten-foot snowstorm, I would have melted all of the snow into running water with enough heat left over to heat every house at the North Pole.

  Gurl, you were hot…

  Yes, I was. That excuse didn’t sit well with me. You mean to tell me that for six months, twenty-nine days, five hours, forty minutes, and forty-three seconds, I went back and forth with these people? After investing my time and energy into following the proper protocol, going through the proper channels, and patiently allowing the process to play out, the only thing they could muster up was that our content and brand were “unsafe to the community”?

  Yes. We didn’t know what to think. How was our brand unsafe? What community were they referring to? It seemed like they were saying that we were a menace to society. In my opinion, a menace to society would be someone selling drugs, committing crimes against innocent people, or hurting a child. We’ve never done any of that, so how were we unsafe? How is this one entity able to dominate and control the entire world by censoring what others can and cannot see? How is our brand unsafe? We are the brand. We are two black chicks down with politics.

  Yes, it was offensive. They took our freedom of speech, limited who could hear our voices on the platform, then labeled us “unsafe.”

  If Facebook doesn’t get it together, they’ll be the face without the book and the book without the pages.

  And if Twitter doesn’t get it together, they’ll be the bird without the tweet and the tweet without the bird.

  What were Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter afraid of? They were petrified that two average black women who decided to think outside of the box had figured out the schemes of the Left. They didn’t want us to reach people. We are a triple threat because we’re black, women, and conservative. We challenge the liberal orthodoxy. We don’t toe the liberal line and ideology.

  President Trump won the election because we the people heard truth—not from the mainstream media, but from social media. Diamond and Silk used this platform to deliver our message about our president, and they didn’t like it. They were acting like the KKK, intimidating black people who wanted prosperity, who got above our predetermined station in life.

  So, that day, I began writing a reply back. But our hands were tied because Facebook had clearly stated that their decision was final and not appealable. I still continued to write. For over six months we dealt with Facebook and this issue in private. I then decided to make a public post and share what had been happening to us, along with a list of questions for Mark Zuckerberg himself.

  Later on that night, I was still working on this post. I wanted to make sure that people understood what we were trying to convey so that no one, not even the fake news media, would get anything twisted.

  We had to fly out early the next morning to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I told Silk to just wait until the next day to publish the post. She said no; she had to get it posted that night. There was something in her gut telling her to do it that night.

  That’s right. Diamond begged me to just go to bed, but I couldn’t. It was a must that I got it posted that night. I told my sister that I would be ready to go the next morning, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep until this was posted. When you get this unexplainable prompting in the pit of your stomach, you have to follow it. So, on Friday, April 6, 2018, at 9:55 p.m., I tweeted this post:

  Diamond and Silk have been corresponding since September 7, 2017, with Facebook (owned by Mark Zuckerberg), about their bias, censorship and discrimination against D&S brand page. Finally, after several emails, chats, phone calls, appeals, beating around the bush, lies, and giving us the runaround, Facebook gave us another bogus reason why millions of people who have liked and/or followed our page no longer receive notification and why our page, posts and video reach was reduced by a very large percentage.

  Here is the reply from Facebook. Thu, Apr 5, 2018, at 3:40 PM: “The policy team has come to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.” Yep, this was FB’s conclusion after 6 months, 29 days, 5 hours, 40 minutes and 43 seconds.

  Oh, and guess what else Facebook said: “This decision is final and it is not appeal-able in any way.” (Note: This is the exact wording that FB emailed to us.)

  So our questions to Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) are:

  1. What is unsafe about two Blk-women supporting the President, Donald J. Trump?

  2. Our FB page has been created since December 2014; when exactly did the content and the brand become unsafe to the community?

  3. When you say “community” are you referring to the millions who liked and followed our page?

  4. What content on our page was in violation?

  5. If our content and brand was so unsafe to the community, why is the option for us to boost our content and spend money with FB to enhance our brand page still available? Maybe FB should give us a refund since FB censored our reach.

  6. Lastly, didn’t FB violate their own policy when FB stopped sending notifications to the millions of people who liked and followed our brand page?

  This is deliberate bias, censorship and discrimination. These tactics are unacceptable, and we want answers!

  ~Diamond and Silk

  I then followed up and posted the same message on Facebook at 10:06 p.m. that same night. I finished packing, then I went to bed.

  The next day when we woke up, the posts on
Facebook and Twitter were both going viral. People were furious to know what Facebook had said about us. We love our fans. You all Facebooked and tweeted Mark Zuckerberg like crazy. You advocated for our voices that were being censored. We had President Trump’s back, and y’all had our backs.

  On April 8, around 5:00 a.m., I woke up to an interview request from Fox & Friends. They wanted to know if we were available to come on their show to discuss the Facebook post. Our assistant set everything up, and we did our hit at 9:30 that morning.

  After that interview, the mainstream media and bloggers started calling the censorship a hoax, like we had made it all up. What the media didn’t know was that we had proof. The next day, while we were flying back home, Laura Ingraham wanted us for an interview, and we granted her and many more people interviews.

  We later found out that Mark Zuckerberg was going to be testifying on Capitol Hill for something that had nothing to do with censorship.

  On Tuesday, April 10, 2018, we were booked with interviews all day. People wanted to know what had happened, and they were outraged that we had been labeled as unsafe to the community. We talked censorship, censorship, censorship.

  Then, while we were at the end of an interview with Larry O’Connor, Diamond received a text message saying that Senator Ted Cruz had just name-dropped us. Say what? We couldn’t scream. We had to act normal and remain attentive, as if nothing was happening. Our hearts were about to burst with joy.

  We couldn’t believe it. It was April 10, 2018, at 4:18 p.m., EST. Senator Ted Cruz spoke about us in Congress, on Capitol Hill, during the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees Joint Hearing, featuring billionaire Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. We weren’t expecting any of this to happen. We could not have been more shocked.

  No, we couldn’t. When I put that post on social media a few days earlier, I was not aware that Mark Zuckerberg was going to be testifying on the Hill that following week. I was following that unexplainable sense that we get when we have to get something done right then and there, or else.