How Real Activists Learned Facebook Was Deleting Their Protest Page for ‘Inauthentic Behavior’

How Real Activists Learned Facebook Was Deleting Their Protest Page for ‘Inauthentic Behavior’

6 years ago
Anonymous $oIHRkISgaL

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3e49j/how-real-activists-learned-facebook-was-deleting-their-protest-page-for-inauthentic-behavior-russia-unite-the-right

On Tuesday, Brendan Orsinger logged onto Facebook only to be surprised by a notification. It simply said a protest page he’d co-managed had been deleted from the platform. Orsinger, a 36-year-old who resides in Washington, DC, was one of many local activists promoting an event to oppose “Unite the Right,” a white supremacist rally that turned fatal in Charlottesville, VA last year, and would be descending on DC next month.

For several months, a coalition of anti-fascist groups, known as Shut It Down DC, had been organizing a nonviolent display against “Unite the Right 2 - DC.” A Facebook event was created for the protest by a page called “Resisters,” which is not part of the coalition, and where Orsinger served as an admin.