Doug Mastriano spent a day claiming Facebook is censoring him — on Facebook
The Republican candidate for governor complained on Facebook pages that the company is censoring him because of his conservative opinions.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Franklin County Republican running for governor, this week claimed Facebook is censoring him because the company dislikes his conservative opinions.
How do we know? Mastriano told us — on Facebook.
Mastriano on Tuesday called in to Wendy Bell Radio — which is streamed to 304,000 Facebook followers — complaining that the company sent him a message that he was posting too much information from his personal page. He said Facebook then suggested he had been hacked and locked his account.
Never one to pass by a conspiracy theory, Mastriano chalked this up to a “brilliant” scheme to censor him. His proof? The Facebook page he uses for Senate posts, with 203,000 followers, and the page he uses for his campaign, with 98,000 followers, still work just fine.
Mastriano, who made the same claims Tuesday in a video on his Facebook campaign page, suggested the company restricted access to the page where he has the fewest followers because it would draw too much attention to shut down his bigger pages.
“They don’t like our speech,” Mastriano told host Wendy Bell, who has a history of being bounced from Pittsburgh media outlets for controversial comments. “It’s just that they don’t like conservatives. They don’t like that we speak truth.”
» READ MORE: MORE CLOUT: Bobby Henon got some help from his former Council office as he looks for a lighter prison sentence
Mastriano, who did not respond to Clout’s hails, also told Bell he runs 67 other Facebook pages, one for each county in the state, for his campaign. They’re all up and running.
To sum up: Mastriano runs 70 Facebook pages. One of them experienced some sort of issue this week. So the company must be out to get him.
Bell was predictably sympathetic and said she was thinking about shutting down her own Facebook page in outrage.
“This is tyranny!” she declared on a page that is still operating. “This is not America.”
Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.