The Great FB Purge of 2020

A little after 3pm on August 19, 2020, Facebook disabled hundreds of public pages related to a popular conservative conspiracy theory, militias, and leftist organizations. Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club’s page — as well as the accounts of all current and former admins — were disabled in this massive purge. Facbook’s stated reason for the purge was to remove content that, “demonstrated significant risks to public safety.”

Mid-MO JBGC’s page had never been flagged for content that violated Facebook’s community standards, and we believe the main reason for our page being included was because Facebook needed to create the impression of political “balance” when it disabled the pages connected to ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories. But let’s be honest – Facebook and its owners had very little motivation to allow the left to keep criticizing powerful people and institutions on their platform.

There’s absolutely no indication that the disabling of our page or any other page had anything to do with profanity. (This was a hypothesis put forward by another organization in our area.)

Media coverage of the purge has been extremely sparse and focused on the removal of conspiracy theory pages; unsurprisingly, people are pretty OK with the removal of those pages. The fact that both Facebook and the media are so dramatically de-emphasizing the purge of left-leaning voices is extremely concerning. We’re aware that conservatives have been complaining about our existence on Facebook for years, but any equivalence between the American left and unhinged conspiracy theories is frankly offensive.

This club will continue to do our best to report the facts as we understand them, and apply analysis to those facts based on the latest scientific understanding of reality and a healthy dose of logic — we just won’t be doing that on Facebook.

Update:

The Intercept posted an article about the purge by Natasha Lennard today. It provides a lot of extra detail that you’ll want to see.

Facebook’s Ban on Far-Left Pages Is an Extension of Trump Propaganda

It bears repeating, ad nauseam, that the far right has carried out 329 murders in the last three decades; none have been attributed to antifa. Between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. And that’s not even to mention the state-sanctioned, racist killings carried out by the police.