The page was unpublished "without explanation. Again," one administrator tweeted, indicating that it's not the first time the group has fallen afoul of Facebook's notoriously vague "community standards" or other guidelines.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) August 16, 2018
Journalist Matt Taibbi said he reached out to the social media giant, which promised to "look into the Occupy London situation." He noted that Facebook has "quickly restored pages it says have been taken down by mistake."
Sometimes that's the case. Other times, pages are unpublished for days. Public outcry seems to correlate with Facebook's response time.
"It feels like censorship. For months, we faced removal of posts related to Palestine. Perhaps once every few weeks or so, a post would be taken down, and admins for the page were frozen out of their personal accounts," a spokesperson for the group told The Canary. "Then, today, Facebook unpublished the entire page."
Facebook appears to be unpublishing legitimate pages at a more rapid rate since it joined with Apple and YouTube in removing far-right, conspiracy-oriented media outlet InfoWars from its service.
— Occupy London (@OccupyLondon) August 16, 2018
The social media company removed an event page for a counter-protest against the Unite the Right 2.0 rally that was held in Washington, DC, on Sunday because one of the six administrators on the page allegedly exhibited signs of disingenuous activity.
The company also deleted a livestream of the Unite the Right 2.0 rally, arguing that it was in fact not a livestream. "It was very obvious that their accusation was false," the reporter who filmed the livestream, Ford Fischer, told Sputnik News.
A prisoner advocacy page, a pro-Bolivarian independent media outlet, the Venezuelan news outlet TeleSur English, an online news outlet focusing on Haiti are among the pages unpublished by Facebook since the InfoWars ban.
Facebook is partnering with the neoconservative think tank Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab to crack down on so-called fake news and disingenuous activity on the platform. The Atlantic Council is primarily funded by NATO, Gulf monarchies and defense contractors.
"The shuttering of progressive media amidst the ‘fake news' and Russiagate hysteria is what activists been warning all along — tech companies, working in concert with think tanks stacked with CIA officials and defense contractors, shouldn't have the power to curate our reality to make those already rendered invisible even more obsolete," Abby Martin, host of "The Empire Files" on TeleSur English, told Sputnik News.
