Facebook takes down activist groups' profiles

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Deutsch: [Facebook löscht Profile von Aktivisten | http://www.unwatched.org/EDRigram_9.9_Facebook_loescht_Profile_von_Aktivisten]

Facebook has just deleted about 50 UK activist groups’ profiles and users’
accounts without any notification to the owners of the accounts.

While the reasons are not very clear, a possible explanation being that the
respective groups have technically breached their terms and conditions by
using a “profile” rather than a “page”, there are suspicions that Facebook
might have acted after a law enforcement complaint and the purge could
be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain.
In any case, Facebook’s action is questionable especially as the platform
performed the takedowns without any notification. Facebook exercises a
significant power over political activity and speech.

EDRi-member Open Rights Group asks Facebook to responsibly correct the
situation by contacting the users of the deleted accounts and working with
them to transfer their contacts and other information to the format that
Facebook considers appropriate to reinstate the suspended pages (with the
technical changes such as addition of organisation URLs), to create a
notification system rather than directly deleting accounts and to put in
place a process to migrate from a “profile” to a “page”.

Facebook did react and has lately notified a number of profile owners about
migrating their profile to a page, as it does have such a process.
But the idea is that we should be able to understand the risks of using such
powerful platforms as Facebook and that the lack of alternatives will only
lead to increasing their power and to a gradual limitation of our autonomy
and power. A solution would be to use self-hosted, open source platforms in
order to avoid reliance upon corporate power structures.

A number of people from the groups that had their accounts deleted have just
signed up to the experimental Diaspora, through independent co-operating
“pods” like My Seed.

Diaspora, just like other open source social platforms, is intended as a
network of independent servers, each hosting some users, who can move
between them, and talk to people using other servers. Although only at its
beginnings, this approach may lead to decentralised, privacy-friendly and
censorship resistant platforms.

Corporations may not protect your free speech and privacy (1.05.2011)
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/corporations-may-not-protect-your-free-speech-and-privacy

FaceBook Takedowns
http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/FB_takedowns

Facebook political takedowns: Burying bad news? (29.04.2011)
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/facebook-takedowns:-burying-bad-news

Over 50 political accounts deleted in Facebook purge (29.04.2011)
http://blog.ucloccupation.com/2011/04/29/over-50-political-accounts-deleted-in-facebook-purge/