“I contributed to Facebook’s success and growth!” Jason Bassler said with some frustration this morning, a day after the social media giant unpublished the page for a media site he founded, The Free Thought Project. “I decided to create content day after day. Now they piss on us.”

Facebook announced Thursday that it was deleting 559 pages and 251 accounts that it claims were breaking Facebook’s rules against spam and “inauthentic” behavior. The Free Thought Project was one of the demolished pages, along with another of Bassler’s efforts, Police the Police. Both pages that produced content—stories, memes, and videos—that focused on government behavior and were shared widely among fans, particularly libertarians.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, and Oscar Rodriguez, a Facebook product manager, have explained the purge by writing that they don’t think these sites were really trying to engage in political debate but were in fact spam factories trying to make money:

Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Cellofellow (Gadsden_flag.svg) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons