Story at-a-glance

As of today, Mercola.com will no longer maintain an active Facebook page. The page will remain, but no further posts will be made. Anyone who has been following me on Facebook is urged to sign up as a subscriber to my newsletter instead

Earlier this year I issued a poll to see how you would feel about my leaving Facebook. The results arrived in late March, 2019, with just over 65% agreeing with my decision to withdraw from the platform

July 24, 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced Facebook will pay a $5 billion fine to settle some of the known privacy breaches, including that of Cambridge Analytica

Corporate changes are also required under the FTC order. As CEO, Zuckerberg will be required to provide the FTC with a quarterly statement guaranteeing Facebook’s privacy program complies with the order, and “a false certification could trigger civil or even criminal penalties”

$5 billion is only one month's worth of revenue for Facebook, and its planned integration of Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp will turn it into a global super-monopoly with unprecedented data mining capabilities

As you probably know, Facebook has promised to combat "fake news" on its platform, but its censorship doesn't end at blatantly fake news articles — far from it. Information that is unfavorable to Facebook (or its advertisers) keeps getting censored out as well.

Facebook is also "hiding" content that is critical of vaccines, and has barred "ads that contain "misinformation" about vaccines."3 It's likely only a matter of time before the platform starts censoring other health-related content as well — anything that doesn't parrot the drug industry's propaganda — as is already being done by Google.

In May 2019, Google updated its quality rater guidelines4,5 in such a way that even expert views are now buried if deemed "harmful to the public." Google used to rank pages based on whether an author could prove their expertise based on how many people visited a page or the number of other reputable sites that linked to that page. It no longer works that way. Now, if a page is deemed harmful to the public, it gets the lowest possible rating regardless of expertise.