Report: Left Wing Activists Claim Facebook ‘Inauthentic Behavior’ Crackdown Is Censoring Them

Left-wing activists say Facebook mistook them for foreign agents during the platform’s crackdown on “inauthentic” accounts and pages yesterday, according to a report by left-wing tech site Gizmodo.

According to Gizmodo, admins of the now-banned “Resisters” page were unable to determine who was responsible for creating the page — Facebook says that the page had connections to previously-banned Russian account — but that it didn’t matter because the page was still a “vital tool.”

Via Gizmodo:

In a Twitter thread Tuesday, Brendan Orsinger, a DC activist who had admin access to “The Resisters” page wrote that Facebook “seems to have mistakenly confused some of us with Russian agents and deleted a legitimate event.” Neither Orsinger nor any of the activists who spoke to Gizmodo seem aware of who is responsible for creating the page. But they also don’t care. It was a vital tool, they said, which allowed them to reach thousands of real people. And ultimately, whoever did create “The Resisters” contributed nothing to the organizing of the real-world events focused on by Facebook.

…

As Facebook tells it, “inauthentic admins” of a Facebook Page called “The Resisters” coordinated with five other “legitimate Pages” to create the now-deleted event. In a blog Tuesday, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, wrote that the “legitimate Pages unwittingly helped build interest in ‘No Unite Right 2 – DC’ and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests.”

Other activists associated with the event attacked the social network for “censorship”, and are determined to go ahead with the event even though Facebook says it was initially created by an inauthentic user.

Other organizers, whom Facebook characterized as having been duped into helping plan the anti-fascist protest, have now started a brand new Facebook page promoting the exact same event—only, at time of writing, it has more than two thousand fewer participants.

In a statement, the organizers called Facebook’s removal of their event “censorship” aimed at hindering a “real movement against white supremacy and fascism.” The organizers added that the only evidence a “bad actor” was involved at all was a single admin on “The Resisters” page, which, they say, did nothing to advance the August protest itself. “Specifically, local organizers put our own messaging, graphics, and videos in it,” they said. “We did not promote anyone’s views except our own. The Resisters had no say in it. Nor did any sort of ‘Russian agent.’”

After over a year of social media companies mistakenly labeling and banning Trump supporters as “bots,” it seems like the shoe is now on the other foot. It also seems that when it happens to them, left-wing activists aren’t so quick to defend social media companies’ right to remove whatever content they please.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.