Whitney Webb ‘Re-personed’ on Facebook

Independent journalist Whitney Webb is no stranger to online censorship.

Besides having covered the subject extensively in her writing for years, she was, in 2021, personally deplatformed by Patreon — her primary source of income at the time — for refusing to censor content on her own website at Patreon’s behest.

Worse yet, the company apparently did not even challenge the factual accuracy of the material in question, such as an in-depth investigative piece about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that they flagged.

Instead, they said that it was verboten because it “might” dissuade her audience from taking “preventative measures to fight” Covid, despite the fact that the AZ jab had already been suspended in multiple countries due to safety concerns. (Additionally, even the WHO’s chief scientist had said that there was insufficient evidence to say that it prevented people from “getting the infection” or transmitting it, as Webb herself pointed out.)

“What Patreon is doing here is taking the position that factually accurate information that is critical of vaccine developers and Big Pharma firms with clear conflicts of interests/horrendous safety track records should be hidden from the public,” Webb wrote at the time. “A truly chilling precedent.”

The Fake Whitney

With that episode behind her, she’s now dealing with another form of big tech chicanery: a fake “Whitney Webb” Facebook account, which the company has been allowing some unknown person(s) to operate with impunity.

“Facebook, which I’ve written [about] in ways I’m sure they don’t like, refuses to remove an account that has been posing as me for years and no matter how many people report it,” Webb wrote in a post on X.

“I can only conclude that the person running the account is a bad actor that Facebook wants there to discredit me.”

“I don’t have a Facebook account,” she added, “so if this or any other account starts saying weird stuff, please know it’s not me.”

The account in question currently has almost 4,800 followers, and it does, indeed, post plenty of “weird stuff” that Webb herself has not and would not say. For instance:

• Praising Elon Musk as a free speech hero and generally lionizing him (Example quote: “@ElonMusk unleashes on the Biden Adminstration…”)
• Cheerleading former MicroStrategy CEO and Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor and calling him a “Gigachad” while urging people to “Just #HODL” and “#BTFD.”
• Contextless interjections like “THIS IS INSANE!!!! Biden has RUINED our economy!”
• A vow to “keep pushing for the Democratic House-passed Fair Pay Act, PRO Act, paid family leave and care economy investments — because when women succeed, America succeeds!” with a pink graphic of Nancy Pelosi and other House Democrats
• Vacuous engagement bait like “Trump supporters are threatening to leave the United States if Trump is convicted. What do you say to them?”, and “Kate Middleton was reportedly spotted for the first time since her surgery. What are your thoughts?”

A number of the posts are simply plagiarized from popular accounts on X. The ones shown below, for instance, were taken from Collin Rugg, Fox Business, Bitcoin Magazine, and Lark Davis, respectively:

Whoever is running this account also copy-pastes the text of real posts that Webb makes on other platforms, which undoubtedly helps maintain the false impression that it’s really her for those who haven’t yet figured it out.

Additionally, and perhaps most revealingly: they periodically engage in what looks like crypto scamming.

For example, on July 17, whoever controls this account had “Whitney” saying that “Buying gold tokens is a must,” and that people should “switch to QFS” before they “lose everything to the imminent bankruptcy lurking.”

“Kindly send a PM for assistance and proper guidance to switch to QFS and secure gold tokens,” the fake Whitney said to its thousands of followers, with no intervention from Facebook.

Similar posts have been made by this imposter over and over for months. Just a few of the most recent examples:

Meanwhile, more and more people continue to find and follow the account, thinking they’re interacting with the real Whitney Webb:

Re-personing

The (type of) situation that Webb is dealing with was discussed by fellow independent journalist James Corbett on an episode of his podcast a couple years ago.

He, too, has dealt with such imposters, and he used his own experience as a case study for how this seems to be a key facet of what he called “the future of censorship.”

“This is MUCH more insidious than just outright banning someone off of social media…”

“This is not a digital DE-personing; this is a digital RE-personing…”

“I think this is an extremely dangerous path to be walking right now, especially since so few people understand they are walking that path…”

Below is an edit of some of the most relevant clips. (He starts out playing a satirical character called “Johnny YouTuber” to help illustrate how this works in practice).

Watch the full, unedited episode of The Corbett Report — originally published in 2022 — for a more in-depth discussion of this issue and how it connects to other trends in the realm of online censorship.