Editor’s note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re re-posting it here in case you missed it.
As reported by The Western Journal, in what many are calling the “Facebook purge,” Facebook announced on Thursday that it removed over 559 political pages and 251 accounts in a clamp down on what the social media company calls “inauthentic behavior” in the lead-up to the midterm elections next month.
Facebook did not release the full list of pages impacted by this action. Upon being asked, Facebook refused to disclose the full list.
The following is a list of 219 pages that are currently unpublished on Facebook. Some of these have been confirmed by the owners as having been unpublished by Facebook as part of Thursday’s mass purge of pages, while others are currently unconfirmed as being part of the purge. However, all of these pages were still indexed by Google on October 12, 2018, which suggests they were recently active and thus removed recently.
This list of pages purged by Facebook contains nearly 61 million followers in total. Fan totals were recorded from the cache stored by Google.
To create this list, The Western Journal started with pages that had been confirmed as unpublished by Facebook, took the domains most often shared by those pages, and used Google search to find additional Facebook pages sharing those same domains. When new unpublished pages were found, the process was repeated until this list was generated.
This list is not complete, as Facebook has publicly stated that they unpublished 559 pages during a large-scale enforcement action on October 11th, 2018. The Western Journal will be updating this article as new unpublished pages are discovered.
If you have been impacted by the Facebook purge or you believe that any of these pages are listed here in error, please use the “submit a correction” link below the article to contact The Western Journal.
The Western Journal has reached out to Facebook to confirm that these pages were part of the purge and will update this article when Facebook responds.
Update 1: Two more pages have been added after sent in by reader, totaling more than 2.2m additional fans. In addition, one duplicate was removed. The total number of pages and fans has been updated above.
Update 2: 18 more pages have been sent in. The total number of pages and fans has been updated above.
For mobile: scroll table to see full list.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
