Conservative Veteran Banned by Facebook: ‘There Was No Real Reason’

A popular Facebook page run by U.S. Air Force combat veteran and triple amputee Brian Kolfage (pictured above right with his family) was recently shut down by the social media giant despite his immense financial investment in it.

Kolfage ran the page Right Wing News, which amassed more than 3.5 million likes and a blue verification check mark; it curated content from various right-wing news sources. To get it there, Kolfage not only invested his time but more than $300,000 in advertising on the site.

Kolfage appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” Thursday night to discuss the situation and told Fox News host Laura Ingraham he still has not been informed of why his page was banned.

“There was no real reason,” he said. “We remained in contact with Facebook for nine months since January, begging them since they rolled out the new rule changes. They would not contact us to give us a meeting to go over these rules. They didn’t want to help us. We were begging them. I sent over 50 emails to our Facebook contact, [Global Politics and Government Outreach Director] Katie Harbath — and she was ignoring it. Any other person or any other company, they would have been helping them.”

“They didn’t want to help us,” he added. “We wanted to understand the rules. We wanted to be a part of Facebook. We always followed the rules. The Facebook page never had an issue. We were never banned from Facebook. We never spread any false news, misinformation, or anything [like that]. The whole reasoning is up in the air; we don’t know why.”

Ingraham noted that her staff also reached out to Facebook for comment on Kolfage’s page, but did not hear back, either.

Kolfage revealed, too, that he was set to meet with Facebook on October 3 to discuss the social media network’s policy changes, but he said it canceled on him two days prior to it.

He also said the following week, his page was deleted.

Right Wing News was not the only page of Kolfage’s that Facebook deleted, either. He also had a business page for his company, Military Grade Coffee; he sells coffee and donates 10 percent of the proceeds to wounded veterans.

“That page had nothing to do with politics, and they pulled it,” he said. “That was my financial support for my family. They’re attacking my family. They’re attacking me and my rights.”

The deletion of Kolfage’s pages is part of a bigger movement on Facebook, which has deleted more than 800 publishers and accounts because they were “flooding users with politically oriented spam.” The timing of the purge is interesting, to say the least, with the U.S. midterm elections coming up on November 6. Kolfage also said his political page was promoting a GoFundMe for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s family about the time he was banned.

In January, Facebook announced a change to its news feed algorithms to reduce the number of posts a user sees. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the site would prioritize “news that is trustworthy, informative, and local.” Back in March, The Western Journal reported that the algorithm change disproportionately impacted popular conservative pages, which saw a 14 percent drop in web traffic via the site.

In the same time frame, liberal pages saw a 2 percent increase.

More information on Kolfage’s situation can be found on his website fight4freespeech.com.

Tom Joyce is a freelance writer from the South Shore of Massachusetts. He covers sports, pop culture, and politics and has contributed to The Federalist, Newsday, and other outlets.