CRIMETH INC
The anarchist public relations project Agency has published an open letter signed by hundreds of publishers, journalists, educators, authors, and activists condemning Facebook’s decision to ban pages associated with anarchism on the basis of a false equivalence between anti-fascist organizing and fascist violence. You can view the statement in full here and sign on via Change.org here. We urge everyone to add their names or the names of their organizations to this list—not because we think Facebook will relent, but to publicize the fact that Facebook has aligned itself with the far-right Trump administration and to catalyze pushback against the company itself.
This decision from Facebook has targeted everyone from hip-hop musicians and journalists to filmmakers and community groups. Nathan Goodman and Kelly Wright, two authors whose pages were banned, have published a response noting the many forms of violent conduct from state and far-right entities that Facebook endorses, by contrast with the forms of speech for which it is banning publishers and individual users.
Many commenters have pointed out Facebook’s intentional effort to conflate groups that organize to carry out racist attacks with adherents of the philosophy of anarchism. As the solidarity statement argues,
Facebook categorizes anarchists with far-right militias that support the Trump administration, linking two groups that are fundamentally dissimilar and opposed… drawing a false equivalence between those who orchestrate white supremacist attacks and those who organize to protect their communities against them.
The statement first appeared signed by hundreds of people, including well-known journalists Abby Martin, Jason Wilson, and Christopher Mathias. Other signatories include novelists Cory Doctorow, Rachel Kushner, and Alain Damasio and a wide range of academics, including Noam Chomsky—programmers, including Twitter founding team member Evan Henshaw-Plath—activists, including Chelsea Manning—musicians, including Andrew Hurley—and the editors of Jacobin, Semiotext(e), and AK Press, among many other publishers. Since then, over a thousand more people have endorsed the statement on Change.org.
This is not the first wave of bans Facebook has perpetrated against pages associated with anarchism. For example, in May, we published a report from a Greek anarchist news publisher that was similarly banned:
In early May, the Facebook page for RadioFragmata was shut down abruptly without reason. We expect nothing else from Facebook, but over 30,000 people followed the page, which served as a far-reaching platform spreading information about the struggle in Greece and abroad. We have organized a new page and continue to maintain a blog and twitter account. We assume Facebook took down our page in response to a request from the state, but Facebook has not given any justification for their action whatsoever.
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