Open Letter to the U.S. and Philippines Departments of Justice

Since 2010, Veamcast Corp (a Florida C-Corp), has been developing apps and an API for a video/voice publishing and sharing service.  A great deal of the work was done while Joe Dean, Veamcast’s founder, was living in the Philippines. The Veamcast apps rely heavily on the use the Facebook API. Veamcast allows its users to publish, share and communicate, very much in the way the Facebook platform does. Veamcast passed the Facebook App Review and was granted all the permissions necessary to implement its functionality.  Joe worked with a group of interns to create sample channels and hone Veamcast’s offering while we built and tested our platform. Most channels that were created were simple entertainment based (music and funny/interesting videos). One of the interns Joe worked with created a Veamcast channel titled "Duterte’s Media" (favorable to the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte) and Joe created a Veamcast channel titled "WTF, they all suck" about the state of U.S. politics. "Duterte’s Media" got a significant amount of traffic during a short period of time, with most traffic generated through Facebook groups.  To the best of our knowledge, nothing that can be called “abusive” in any way was posted to any Veamcast channel.

In 2019 Facebook began rejecting all Veamcast requests to publish and removed all of the thousands of posts that had been published to date.  After that, when attempting to publish anything the Facebook API returned an error with the phrase "contained content other people had reported as abusive", even though the content was brand new and could not have been viewed yet.   Then the message changed to "We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community Standards." but again, it was brand new.  Facebook refused all of the numerous and repeated requests to elaborate (some can be seen in the documentation below, but hundreds more were not recorded).  Recently the message changed to "(OAuthException #2) Service Temporarily Available".   Veamcast was asked to do various things to remedy the situation and did them all in a very timely manner but nothing worked.   At one point, Veamcast was asked to resubmit and pass the App Review a second time which was done and re-approved.

Numerous attempts were made to resolve the issue.  The last one seemed to catch the attention of a Jacky Le Nghia at Facebook who seemed to be trying to get the issue addressed but after numerous attempts, he stopped responding in August 2020.   Then Joe Dean started circulating first video listed in Appendix which clearly demonstrates all this.  He targeted law firms he suspected Facebook’s lawyers to be (also trying to get the issue addressed).  A few days later, Veamcast got one more message from Jacky saying it was fixed and to try again.  Joe sent him the failure message again, then the bug was closed and all evidence of it removed from the Facebook support system.  Had Joe not recorded and saved the support thread, Veamcast would not now have access or proof it existed.  It’s an overt coverup.  The issue was not resolved as demonstrated in the second video posted in the Appendix.

The damages to Veamcast are real and apparent.  Our launch was put on hold indefinitely and our team were forced into other jobs.  Joe had to relocate back to the U.S.  All our users lost their posts and their confidence in us.  Our platform needed to be redesigned without Facebook if we were to do an official launch.

This behavior by Facebook is anti-competitive, politically biased, deceptive and monopolizing. It is blatant sabotage of a fledgling competitor.  This undisguised censorship could be for any number of reasons or none at all, it doesn’t matter.  Facebook is clearly guilty.

Facebook should be banned from publishing anything political from or to their users until they are fully investigated.  This is an election year and they are clearly abusing the law.   They are a threat to freedom and democracy.  This cannot be tolerated.

Facebook should also be required to provide full disclosure as to the reason they remove anything from their platform and it should be enforceable through law.  If it is done falsely, they should pay a substantial fine.  They should also be prosecuted civilly. 

Social Media bias is a plague on free speech.