![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/21/4.jpg\")
\nIn the early hours of Saturday, December 19, one day before their new terms of service took effect, Instagram shut down a page associated with CrimethInc. with no explanation or justification. The account had never been suspended before, nor received so much as a warning. Well over 40,000 people were following it. The issue was not a violation of the terms of service—rather, this is a political measure to suppress the voices of dissidents, expanding Facebook’s August 2020 decision to ban an array of pages associated with anarchist journalists and publishers.
\n\nThis comes at the same time that Instagram is suppressing the voices of sex workers and their supporters, among other groups. These are not isolated incidents, but steps in a systematic crackdown intended to exclude millions of voices from public discourse in order to render the communities that these platforms serve more vulnerable to other forms of repression.
\n\nMeanwhile, Facebook continues to offer a platform to far-right conspiracy theories, militia groups, and fascist organizing. In one of the most glaring examples of this, last August’s militia mobilization in Kenosha, Wisconsin—in which far-right paramilitary Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people and shot a third—was organized over Facebook a few weeks after the company took down the pages of dozens of anti-fascist journalists who would otherwise have reported on it.
\n\nAs we wrote in August:
\n\n\n\n\nFacebook’s decision to ban pages associated with anarchism is a strategic step in a much bigger unfolding conflict. It is analogous to a military knocking out a village’s lines of communication before carrying out a bombing. […] Anarchists are only one out of many groups on the list of targets; many immigrants, Black people and other people of color, Muslims, trans and queer people, and others are experiencing far worse forms of oppression. But this precedent, like all the previous precedents, will only embolden government agencies and fascist groups to carry out more attacks, not all of which will occur online.
\n
Thousands of public figures including Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Cory Doctorow, and Chelsea Manning came together to publish an open letter protesting the banning of anarchist journalists from Facebook and rejecting the company’s false equivalence between right-wing groups that organize violent attacks and anti-fascist groups that report on them. Yet controlling the largest monopoly in the history of interpersonal communication, Facebook has little incentive to be accountable to public opinion. It is especially telling that they are continuing this crackdown as we enter the Biden era, when they have no need to curry favor with the outgoing Trump administration.
\n\n\nProfit-driven social media corporations have never had the best interests of the public at heart. With the exception of Twitter, where we have contacts among the original programmers, we shunned corporate social media platforms for the first two decades of our publishing. Four years ago, in recognition that a new generation was becoming politicized via social media and not wishing to cede the terrain entirely to authoritarians, CrimethInc. accounts appeared on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere. Today, we are rapidly entering a world in which doing without Facebook and Instagram will not be a question of boycotting, but rather the consequence of a widespread crackdown.
\n\nIf nothing else, this means that our efforts to establish other venues of communication will be relevant to many others as well. It’s high time to foster our own resilient communication channels so that relying on corporate platforms will not be our Achilles heel.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/21/3.jpg\")
\nHere’s how to keep up with us despite the Facebook and Instagram bans.
\n\nWhile we ourselves no longer use these platforms, we endorse this Facebook page and this Instagram page as sources providing updates similar to what we used to offer. If you are still able to maintain Facebook and Instagram accounts and you choose to do so, please follow these.
\n\nThere is a brand-new Telegram channel to announce CrimethInc. projects and provide a forum to discuss them.
\n\nAt the turn of the century, CrimethInc. cells established and curated some of the early online spaces for horizontal discussion and coordination, such as the now long defunct forums crimethinc.net and crimethinc.info. As emerging 21st-century megacorporations integrated communications networks into Internet 2.0, designing them to promote competitive individualism, we focused our attention on offline collective collaborations. Today, we are excited to participate in a new experiment in anonymous online discussion, without the pressure to curate a personal brand that other contemporary platforms promote.
\n\nThere is a CrimethInc. account on the decentralized open-source platform Mastodon instance todon.eu, a server run by and for anti-authoritarians. Comrades have recently started another Mastodon “instance” called Kolektiva Social specifically for anarchist groups, projects, and individuals. The different decentralized instances on Mastodon all interact with each other, so there is no problem in signing up on todon.eu and following projects on Kolektiva Social.
\n\nMastodon’s format will be familiar to Twitter users. You can “favorite” or “boost” posts (unfortunately named “toots”), follow accounts, and the like.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/21/2.jpg\")
\nYou can also go “old” school and subscribe to our RSS feed, which will automatically send you our new articles as they appear. All you need is an RSS client, such as NetNewsWire on macOS / iOS.
\n\nThe people behind Wikipedia have formed another alternative to corporate-owned social media. Our account is at https://wt.social/u/crimethinc-ex-workers.
\n\nWe still passionately believe in print media. Books and zines enable the reader to step out of the relentless flow of information to digest an idea or narrative; once a print project enters circulation, no corporation or government can easily suppress it. We aim to start a new initiative providing zines to those who are not able to print them themselves from our online library. If you can help supply us with print materials for this purpose, please contact us. Thank you!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/21/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nThe networks offered by Facebook aren’t new; what’s new is that they seem external to us. We’ve always had social networks, but no one could use them to sell advertisements—nor were they so easy to map. Now they reappear as something we have to consult. People corresponded with old friends, taught themselves skills, and heard about public events long before email, Google, and Twitter. Of course, these technologies are extremely helpful in a world in which few of us are close with our neighbors or spend more than a few years in any location. The forms assumed by technology and daily life influence each other, making it increasingly unthinkable to uncouple them.
\n\n…This isn’t a criticism of technology per se. The point is that it’s not neutral: technology is always shaped by the structures of the society in which it is developed and applied. Most of the technologies familiar to us were shaped by the imperatives of profit and rule, but a society based on other values would surely produce other technologies. As digital technology becomes increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of our society, the important question is not whether to use it, but how to undermine the structures that produced it.
\n
-The Internet as New Enclosure: Digitized Capitalism, the Attention Economy, and the Surveillance State
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/09/10/the-insidious-workings-of-the-political-ratchet-democrats-are-joining-trump-and-dhs-in-demonizing-anti-fascists-heres-why", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/09/10/the-insidious-workings-of-the-political-ratchet-democrats-are-joining-trump-and-dhs-in-demonizing-anti-fascists-heres-why", "title": "The Insidious Workings of the Political Ratchet : Why Democrats Are Joining Trump and DHS in Demonizing Anti-Fascists", "summary": "Democrats are joining Trump and DHS in demonizing anarchists, anti-fascists, and other protesters. Here's why—and what it means for protest movements.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/10/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/10/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-09-10T18:46:52Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:46Z", "tags": [ "Trump", "fascism", "Portland", "anti-fascism", "facebook", "department of homeland security" ], "content_html": "On September 9, the news came out that a whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security had filed a complaint about the department’s Trump-appointed leadership instructing him to downplay the threat represented by white supremacists and play up the dangers posed by anarchists and anti-fascists. Yet it has largely escaped notice how Joe Biden and other Democrats have embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists. It is convenient for centrist Democrats that they can pose as Trump’s moderate critics while appropriating his talking points about protesters, letting him do the dirty work of establishing the narratives that justify state repression.
\n\nIn remarks on July 28, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden grouped “anarchists” with “arsonists,” asserting that “arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted,” endorsing Trump’s repeated allegation that adherence to anarchist ideas is itself some kind of crime on a par with arson. On September 7, when Barbara Barr asked Biden “Do you condemn antifa?” he answered, “Yes, I do,” associating “antifa” with “violence, no matter who it is.” This endorses a narrative Trump has been avidly promoting for years, especially since his May 31 tweet that “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
\n\nTrump and others on the far right have long sought to establish opposition to fascism as sufficient cause to justify state surveillance and intervention. This is one of the steps on the road to totalitarianism. The US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back. As the Democrats follow the Republicans in steadily countenancing more and more authoritarianism, the work that Trump is doing to frame anarchists, anti-fascists, and other protesters as legitimate targets will also be useful to Biden’s party. We need to understand how this works now, lest the continuation of current state repression after a potential Biden victory catch us flat-footed.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1288221642968236032\n\n\n
According to a complaint filed by whistleblower Brian Murphy, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security” Ken Cuccinelli instructed officials at the DHS to alter intelligence reports to reflect Trump’s fear-mongering talking points about anarchist and anti-fascist violence while downplaying the threat that far-right and white nationalists pose to the general population. From the text of the complaint:
\n\n\n\n\nDuring multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and\nimproper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA [sic] and “anarchist” [sic] groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups.
\n
In addition, Cuccinelli instructed Murphy to modify reports about white supremacist organizing in order to make “the threat appear less severe,” and to add “information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups.”
\n\nOne DHS report was edited so that references to white supremacists “presenting the most lethal threat” were replaced with the words “Domestic Violent Extremists,” a catchall term used to create a false equivalence between those who promote and carry out racist attacks and those who organize to defend their communities against them.
\n\nAfter these revelations, when Democrats like Biden and corporations like Facebook continue to frame anarchists and anti-fascists as a threat to the general public, it must be clear to everyone that they are willfully advancing a false narrative Donald Trump concocted to target his enemies.
\n\nIf they continue to promote this narrative, it will be because, like Trump, they wish to preserve the tremendous disparities of capitalism and white supremacy, which anarchists and anti-fascists seek to undo. They too want tyranny—a kinder, gentler, more sustainable tyranny. They just don’t want to be the ones held responsible for escalating it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/10/1.jpg\")
Protesters outside Chad Wolf’s home in Alexandria, Virginia.
\nSince its establishment, the Department of Homeland Security has always targeted protest movements—but much more so, it has played a fundamental role in intensifying Islamophobia and other forms of systemic oppression. From the perspective of those who desire to live in a free and egalitarian society, there is no right way for DHS representatives to assess the terror threats facing the United States. The department itself exists for the sole purpose of carrying out surveillance and directing lethal force against anyone who might threaten the ruling order. The considerable attention Murphy’s complaint has received from self-professed leftists indicates the degree to which many leftists are willing to join centrists in legitimizing representatives of the institutions that the left otherwise ostensibly opposes, so long as those representatives are taking a stand against Trump specifically.
\n\nThis shows us how much ground radicals stand to lose by focusing on Trump alone—one of the insidious tendencies of the aforementioned ratchet effect. Liberal centrists already experienced the disastrous consequences of this approach in the disappointments that awaited the millenarian cult around former FBI director Robert Mueller. Biden is just the latest beneficiary of this tendency to seek a “legitimate” representative of entrenched power to counter Trump’s ascendancy in the name of the law. The problem is that the law is not something above the US government, that Mueller or Biden can use to bring Trump to order; the law only has force by virtue of the same government that Trump already dominates.
\n\nIt’s foolish to argue that in targeting protesters rather than fascists, the DHS is focusing on the wrong threat. The important thing to understand here is that there is a shakeup taking place inside the state institutions of repression—a shakeup aimed at expanding the targets of “anti-terror” operations to include an ever-increasing number of anarchists, anti-fascists, leftists, and other dissidents, especially those from demographics that are already targeted on account of ethnicity, class, and religion. At the same time, the space that is allocated for extra-legal action to defend white supremacy is continuing to expand—witness Trump’s praise of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rather than offering the DHS an opportunity to re-legitimize itself by promising to protect us from white supremacists—which would simply provide another rationale for politicians to allocate resources to the DHS that will inevitably be directed against targeted communities and protest movements—we have to point to the systemic factors that ensure that as long as it exists, DHS will always serve to oppress people and crush movements for freedom and equality.
\n\nDHS has been expanding the scope of its targets while giving white supremacists a free pass since its inception, well before Trump came to power. At the opening of the Obama years, another DHS employee, Daryle Johnson was pushed out of the department for sounding the alarm about far-right activity ahead of a wave of killings. More recently, fusion centers have served to transmit far-right conspiracy theories to local police departments, ensuring that local police prioritize targeting anti-fascists while often working hand in glove with Trump supporters, militias, and other far-right groups. The recent wave of Blue Leaks has only confirmed the degree to which federal officers are embracing far-right priorities in focusing on repressing anarchists and anti-fascists.
\n\nOnce the latest shakeup in the DHS is complete, there will be no more revelations of the sort we see in Murphy’s complaint. Both parties will accept that the department exists to attack anarchists, protesters, and others who oppose fascism and police violence. White supremacists will have acquired even more leeway to organize and carry out attacks without facing pushback from the state.
\n\nAnd this process can take place under Biden as well as under Trump.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/KELLYWEILL/status/1303793442972196868\n\n\n
Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli are both serving unlawfully as a result of Donald Trump’s machinations to avoid the mandated appointment process. Wolf especially is already infamous for drafting a policy to snatch children from their parents at the US border and for sending federal officers from a variety of DHS departments to Portland in an attempt to suppress protests. Many analysts interpret the deployment of federal officers to Portland and elsewhere as a test run to prepare to use federal forces countrywide to impose Trump’s authority should he win, suspend, or steal the 2020 election.
\n\nWolf has staked his career on supporting Trump’s efforts to consolidate power, emphasizing that the wishes of local authorities are utterly beside the point. “President Trump has made it abundantly clear that there will come a point when state and local officials fail to protect its citizens from violence, the federal government will have no choice but to protect our American citizens,” Wolf wrote in a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler on August 31. Wolf emphasized this point again on September 9, asserting that DHS has a “moral and legal duty” to “protect” cities from “rioters.”
\n\nDemocrats and leftists have responded to this escalating situation the same way they have responded to four years of the Trump program: by spreading information, “speaking truth to power,” and the like. None of this has done anything to compel Wolf or Cuccinelli to step down from their posts or to change the trajectory of the DHS or the white supremacists who support Trump. Chiefly, it just gives Democrats an alibi to tell voters that they are not to blame for the authoritarian turn of the state. If Democrats really believed in the rules that forbid Wolf and Cuccinelli to govern DHS, they would do something about it, not register complaints.
\n\nArguably, the only reason left-leaning Democrats have any leverage on the ruling class whatsoever is that the poor, desperate, and politicized are prepared to go to great lengths to interrupt business as usual and make great swaths of the United States ungovernable. Like all reformists, the Democrats derive their leverage on other elements of the ruling class from the unrest that they promise to quell—but in order to maintain that leverage, they have to show that they can quell the unrest without making too many concessions. The ratchet, once again.
\n\nSo perhaps it is naïve to attribute the weakness of the Democrats to naïveté. While Trump encourages his supporters to prepare to help him secure power in a contested election, while the police who support him go on carrying out extrajudicial murders of people of color and the occasional white anti-fascist as well, Democrats are intentionally not seeking to mobilize the kind of force that could prevent Trump from seizing and maintaining power.
\n\nIf Trump does try to hold on to power in defiance of electoral protocol, Democrats are counting on protesters to risk their lives to make this untenable. Anarchists, anti-fascists, and participants in the fiercest aspects of the anti-police uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement are the only social force that could accomplish this. But the Democrats offer no allegiance to the people they expect to risk death on their behalf. Indeed, they are already selling them out ahead of the election.
\n\nIn the long term, centrists like Biden likely aim to establish a new social peace by rallying a critical mass of voters—and capitalists—behind them, then sacrificing Black demonstrators, anarchists, and anti-fascists on the altar of “homeland security” as a concession to placate the far right. Trump’s laughable talking point that Biden represents the “rioters” who compelled our society to grapple with the senseless murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many more Black people barely conceals the fact that the opposite is true: Biden represents another strategy for maintaining the same state of affairs that Trump intends to, the same status quo that resulted in all those murders. This explains Biden’s embrace of Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists and “violence” itself, which is a code word for anything that interrupts the unceasing violence that is necessary to maintain the grievous disparities in privilege, property, and power that characterize our current social order.
\n\nShould Biden win the election, we will have to be prepared to fight just as hard against repression from the Department of Homeland Security and other state agencies as we will have to fight if Trump wins. The only distinction is that under Trump, the repression will be brutal but widely unpopular, whereas under Biden, it will be more discreet but broadly accepted as legitimate.
\n\nThis is why we must not grant a millimeter to Biden’s rhetoric about “violent” anarchists, nor trust that Biden will do anything to rein in DHS. Don’t grease the ratchet. Break it.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1311095095215689728\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/22/open-letter-stand-with-anarchist-publishers-banned-by-facebook-announcing-a-solidarity-statement-from-anarchist-agency", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/22/open-letter-stand-with-anarchist-publishers-banned-by-facebook-announcing-a-solidarity-statement-from-anarchist-agency", "title": "Open Letter: \"Stand with Anarchist Publishers Banned by Facebook\" : Announcing a Solidarity Statement from Anarchist Agency", "summary": "A solidarity statement signed by hundreds of publishers, journalists, educators, authors, and activists condemning the Facebook ban on anarchists.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-08-22T22:36:21Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:46Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", "facebook", "ban" ], "content_html": "
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.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/AnarchistAgency/status/1296957855187308544\n\n\n
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.
\n\nMany 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,
\n\n\n\n\nFacebook 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.
\n
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.
\n\nThis 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:
\n\n\n\n\nIn 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.
\n
This time around—and once more with no warning, justification, or notification—the bans have included MC Sole, Truthout writer Chris Steele, an Anarchists Worldwide archive page, the European news source Enough is Enough, and pages belonging to the John Brown Gun Club, Redneck Revolt, Molotov 5.7, and many other projects, as well as the pages belonging to the administrators, including users from Australia to Turkey. This, in turn, affects other pages run by these administrators; Facebook has banned some of them, while leaving others without administrators, effectively disabling them.
\n\nOther pages have received notices from Facebook, but have not yet been removed.
\n\n\n\n\n“And if you ban us from your clubs, it’s the right time, with the right mind.”
\n\n-Bad Brains, “Banned in DC”
\n
It’s not surprising that Facebook is siding with the Trump administration in the its war against dissent and those who oppose fascism. We have always argued against entrusting unaccountable Silicon Valley corporations with the power to shape public discourse and carry out surveillance to pass on information to the government. We should focus our efforts and resources on building communications infrastructure that is not vulnerable to corporate executives’ desire to pander to the agenda of the Trump administration or any other government.
\n\nAt the same time, Facebook’s decision to ban pages associated with anarchism is a strategic step in a much bigger unfolding conflict. It is analogous to a military knocking out a village’s lines of communication before carrying out a bombing. The Trump administration intends to intensify its attacks against protest movements and they want to minimize our ability to report on these or mobilize against them. Anarchists are only one out of many groups on the list of targets; many immigrants, Black people and other people of color, Muslims, trans and queer people, and others are experiencing far worse forms of oppression. But this precedent, like all the previous precedents, will only embolden government agencies and fascist groups to carry out more attacks, not all of which will occur online.
\n\nThis is why it is essential to respond. We act now, in hopes that we won’t have to mobilize later in worse circumstances. Please circulate the statement published by Agency and stand up against every effort to suppress the voices of those who fight for a world without oppression.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/22/1.jpg\")
\nThe solidarity statement includes a number of statements from individual signatories, excerpted below.
\n\n\n\n\n“In a moment where large numbers of people around the world are coming together to resist police violence and racism, it is particularly bleak that Facebook has chosen to ban some of the most insightful and thoughtful analysis that provides context, history, and additional voice to these events as they unfold. Rather than honestly reckoning with the content and online behaviors they are incentivizing through algorithms designed to maximize advertising returns rather than public good, Facebook has instead decided to blunder through banning some of the most needed voices and outlets focused on creating a more just world for everyone.”
\n
—Moxie Marlinspike
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n“As a nonprofit dedicated to advancing human rights by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity, privacy, and censorship circumvention technologies, we are very concerned about the bans of the affected pages. The bias in this decision shows a disregard for important free speech, and demonstrates how far social media companies still have to go to implement effective content control without violating human rights.”
\n
\n\n\n“Facebook’s actions show how much power tech capitalists have over free speech and should be viewed as an attack on the entire workers’ movement. We stand in solidarity with all those targeted.”
\n
—Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin
\n\n\n\n\n“I have no words for the callousness and cruelty of Facebook’s decision. They did it for political cover so the right-wing media they fear would be less angry about the banning of various militia and QAnon pages. But by banning Crimethinc, It’s Going Down, MC Sole and numerous anti-fascist accounts, Facebook has equated nonviolence with mass murder and dissent with genocide. They announced their willingness to participate with the U.S. government in the purges that are to come.”
\n
—Robert Evans, investigative journalist with Bellingcat and host of the Behind the Bastards podcast on iHeartRadio
\n\n\n\n\n“From the Myanmar genocide scandal to the constant censorship of Kurdish activism, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have proven time again that they are in favor of censorship and state oppression. This recent wave of removal of anti-fascist accounts is just another example of their willingness to shut down anything that isn’t advertiser friendly. It’s no surprise, but due to the sheer grip Facebook has on the internet, their censorship must be called out at every opportunity.”
\n
—Jake Hanrahan, independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. Founder of Popular Front.
\n\n\n\n\n“The ban of ‘Antifacist’ accounts on Facebook is simply driven by political agenda. Mainly that of our current presidential administration and its right-wing following, that are ofttimes of a violent extremist nature themselves. If you truly wish to reduce harm, ban the president’s image, for he spreads false information and abstract hatred with his every statement. These bans are a direct and deliberate assault on the first amendment rights of individuals whose political ideologies don’t fit the current administration’s views.”
\n
—Cory Elia, Managing Editor for Village Portland, podcaster, radio news broadcaster with KBOO Community radio, and board member for PSU’s Student Media Board
\n\n\n\n\n“When neo-Nazis were planning terrorism and violence in Charlottesville, they took to Facebook to organize. There, they were allowed to share posts calling for the raising of an army, the rasing of able-bodied fighters, and the harassment of Black and Jewish people in Charlottesville. When local organizers pushed back to prevent the violence, CrimethInc. was one of the only outlets to publish local concerns accurately and openly. As a survivor of the terrorism and violence, I find it unconscionable that Facebook can take action against one of the few organizations who was willing and able to help my community and me prevent the violence, when Facebook was a passive participant in helping those promote and encourage the terror.”
\n
—Emily Gorcenski, creator of First Vigil and neo-Nazi terror survivor
\n\n\n\n\n“The recent unfair Facebook ban of anarchist publishers and artist is like banning love. These folks are writing about and fighting for a better and just world. One where dignity and autonomy replace state and corporate violence and suffering. We desperately need these dreamers and voices to imagine a way to save the planet and all living beings on it. To silence these voices is coming out supporting the corporate ruling class, and the injustices that continue to grow under these brutal systems.
\n
—carla bergman, anarchist, organizer, and co-author of Joyful Militancy
\n\n\n\n\n“Facebook’s decision to ban anarchist publishers has nothing to do with ‘stopping violence’ and everything to do with silencing those who speak out against a brutal, repressive system that no longer works for 99% of the world. We could point to supporters of violently racist ideology such as Breitbart or Daily Wire, whose advertisement money Facebook welcomes, but the hypocrisy is beyond the point. Anarchists dream of a world where peace and dignity for all is the norm, and no longer something that must be fought for by staring down the barrel of a tear gas launcher. By banning publishers who openly advocate for building a better world without unquestioned power and oppression, Facebook has very much made it clear where they stand on the issue of ‘violence.’”
\n
—Sydney Anarcho-Communists
\n\n\n\n\n“This is the latest wave in oppressive Facebook censorship that has cast a wide net targeting radicals and leftists around the globe. While fascist pages, persons and groups are allowed to openly call for violence, those who stand against fascism and for justice are not only sidelined but silenced. We must amplify these voices now more than ever, but more than that, we must find ways to organize, tell our truths and build without having to rely only on the structures and platforms of the oppressors.”
\n
—Eleanor Goldfield, artist, organizer, journalist, filmmaker
\n\n\n\n\n“We have all known for some time that Facebook does not exist for any reason except to maintain their own profits, which rest squarely on the bedrock of a repressive government doing everything it can to quell dissent. Silencing the voices of anti-fascists and anarchists, who publish news and analysis about people who fight for a better world, comes as no surprise in this context of state and corporate interests colluding to maintain their existing power structures. They actively work to keep us from even communicating about standing up against the countless injustices our world has to offer, and at the same time, continue to promote corporate cheerleading for state sanctioned violence at the hands of the polcie. We stand in solidarity with all those silenced by Facebook, and our resolve is only hardened by this act as we press forward with our struggle for a better world.”
\n
—Black Powder Press
\n\n\n\n\n“Banning antifascists, anarchists and other related dreamers and resisters of fascism and totalitarianism on facebook leads us to only one conclusion – a side is being taken, and it is not the one of freedom and antifascism. Silencing dissent of totalitarians and movements against racists and xenophobes is a slippery slope to siding with those same people and movements. We are living in a moment when sides need to be taken, a time period we have seen before, and siding with the silencing of antifascists and anarchists is to side with totalitarianism and potential fascism.
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—Marina Sitrin, Associate Professor at Binghamton University and author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina.
\n\n\n\n\n“With this wave of bans, facebook has attempted to claim that they are neutral, or centrist in their approach to censoring political speech. What they have actually done is controlled the dialog, towards their own political aims, towards a conservative and capitalist worldview. Under the guise of neutrality they have made it so that anyone wishing to exist in their online space must not oppose fascism and far right violence in any meaningful way. They have thrown the weight of their platform behind the very notion that resisting genocide is violent in nature. What is considered acceptable political dialog in society generally creeps to the right over time. It is not often that we see such a blatant action taken to push the dialog in that direction. These are moments that we cannot allow to pass by silently. Fascism has brought about the most horrific acts of violence the world has ever seen. Opposing fascism is non violence by definition.”
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—Portland Anarchist Road Care
\n\n\n\n\n“At a time when elites in media and academia fret about ‘cancel culture’ and object to principled criticism, facebook is showing the world that the real ‘cancel culture” is corporate control of media platforms. Self defense is not violence. Anarchists are trying defend against us all against fascist violence and the nightmare future it portends. Facebook and other corporate media platforms are complicit in the violence of the fascists that they platform. We shouldn’t let liberals and others vested in the status quo muddle the issue by normalizing false equivlency between fascists and the anarchists and anti-authoritarians resisting them. Down with fascism! Stand with all anti-fascists!”
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—Brendan McQuade, Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision
\n\n\n\n\n“That the U.S. government is working overtime to suppress dissenting voices is nothing new, nor is its dangerous revulsion for anarchists specifically, but each time they attack our community and ideology, more damage is done to the broader struggle against fascism, and for liberation. Facebook’s decision to ban a number of anarchist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist pages has made clear both their bias against the left, and their commitment to furthering the same “both sides” rhetoric that Trump and his lapdogs have used to deflect from their own firm support for violent white supremacist groups. The fact that this ban specifically targeted vital movement publications like It’s Going Down and Crimethinc only underlines the fact that the so-called free press is under attack, and yet the mealy-mouthed centrists and liberals who spend their time hand-wringing over “cancel culture” have said nothing. Those outside of the anarchist and antifascist community ignore this at their peril, because as we know full well, first, they’ll come for the radicals–but they’ll be coming for everyone else next.”
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—Kim Kelly, journalist, author, and A12 Charlottesville attack survivor
\n\n\n\n\n“It has been three years but Facebook has never taken responsibility for the deadly Unite the Right event being planned and propagandized on their platform. It is nothing short of shameful for Facebook to now sit in judgment of the same groups and people who stood up against white supremacist violence that day.”
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—Megan Squire, Professor of Computer Science at Elon University, Sr. Fellow at Center for Analysis of the Radical Right
\n\n\n\n\n“Facebook’s recent decision to ban radical leftist and antifascist groups that call for fighting back against the forces of fascism, genocide, and those that would wipe out our communities, while allowing, and even glorifying state-affiliated and sponsored groups that call for violence as well as right-wing militias is yet another example of tech companies finding it easier to punch down. Facebook’s decision reinforces the dangerous and false rhetoric emanating from right-wing media and politicians that seeks to demonize left-liberation movements at a time when they are being actively targeted and hunted by those in positions of authority. While hardly surprising, this decision by Facebook once again shows a willingness to put profits and access to politicians above scruples or access to diverse viewpoints.”
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—B. Remy Cross
\n\n\n\n\n“Facebook’s decision to ban anti-fascist and anarchist pages at the same time they ban violent Militia’s and QAnon pages is unfortunately unsurprising and all too familiar. This is done as a visual sacrifice in the name of misguided attempts at centrism and being ‘fair.’
\n\n“Anti-fascist and anarchist resources on the internet seek to create community defense against bigoted violence and share information about how communities can take care of problems that governments don’t prioritize as important to address. The problem with this decision is that the very real problems created by violent racist militias and absurd conspiracy theories are actively opposed in cities all around the work by anti-fascists and anarchists. This decision does not help communities become safer, in fact it makes them even more vulnerable. This decision shows Facebook’s lack of a spine and lack of a moral compass. I am proud to stand in solidarity with Anarchist Publishers to condemn this ban; but I am furious that I need to do so.”
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—Jake Johnson, artist, writer, reporter
\n\n\n\n\n“The ban of Crimethinc and other anarchist groups by Facebook is a clear step farther into a fascist American state. The Earth First! Journal stands in firm solidarity with all anarchist groups currently facing repression. Smash the state, for the wild!”
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—The Earth First! Journal
\n\n\n\n\n“Facebook’s ban has nothing to do with stopping violence and everything to do with cracking down on protest movements. The banning of CrimethInc., It’s Going Down, Truthout author Chris Steele, musician MC Sole, and other left media outlets and journalists in the name of opposing violence is disingenuous. Facebook continues to host and profit off of right-wing media outlets like Daily Wire that regularly promote violent racist ideology and conspiracy theories that have catalyzed and influenced violent fascists and white supremacists on the right. This is political censorship, plain and simple.”
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—scott crow, longtime anarchist organizer and author of Black Flags and Windmills
\n\nFacebook has taken down multiple Facebook pages they believe to be connected with crimethinc.com and itsgoingdown.org, among other anarchist and anti-fascist publishing projects,1 officially on the pretext that they “support violence.” This has nothing to do with stopping violence and everything to do with suppressing social movements and the publishers that cover them.
\n\nFor months, Donald Trump has demanded this crackdown in a series of social media posts explicitly blaming anarchists and anti-fascists for the countrywide wave of protests precipitated by persistent police violence in the United States. A decade ago, Facebook representatives proudly touted their role in the Egyptian uprising. Today, their decision to ban publishers who discuss social movement activity shows that they are eager to play a role in ensuring that the only forms of activism that can emerge are the ones that are beneficial to the current authorities.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/nickmartin/status/1296175961260482560\n\n\n
The defining of violence is not neutral. The way Facebook currently defines violence, it is legitimate for police to kill a thousand people per year while evicting, kidnapping, and imprisoning millions—it is legitimate to drop bombs on civilians, so long as the aggressor represents an official government—but it is “violence” to prevent a white supremacist from assaulting a crowd or return a smoking tear gas canister to the police who shot it. Suppressing the voices of those who seek to protect their communities from institutional and white supremacist violence is an intentional decision to normalize violence as long as the ones employing it hold institutional power.
\n\nLumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue. This is the same operation that William Barr performed in creating a Department of Justice task force focused on “anti-government extremists” that targets self-proclaimed fascists and anti-fascists alike. In the case of the Department of Justice, this enables them to point to far-right and militia attacks in order to demand resources with which to crack down on those who are on the front lines of defending communities against such attacks. Barr and other members of Trump’s administration are attempting to do the same thing to Black Lives Matter activists, associating them with neo-Nazis and white nationalists as “racially motivated extremists.”
\n\nAfter a self-described fascist murdered Heather Heyer during the “Unite the Right” mobilization in Charlottesville, tremendous grassroots pressure arose to remove fascists and white supremacists from social media platforms. Now, by contrast, the push is coming from the very top of the hierarchy, at a time when protest movements have been essential to creating a nationwide dialogue about state violence and oppression. This is a counterattack from those in power against websites that published perspectives from those who mobilized against the fascists in Charlottesville. It is not a coincidence that it occurs on the heels of Trump mobilizing federal forces to Portland, Oregon, precipitating weeks of street conflict, and just a matter of days after spokespersons for the extreme right referred specifically to crimethinc.com and itsgoingdown.org in prepared testimony to the Senate.
\n\nWhile far-right groups continue to organize on Facebook and spread dangerous misinformation about COVID-19, Facebook is prioritizing taking cues from the Trump administration to suppress dissent. Make no mistake, if this goes unchallenged, it will not stop here. The more it becomes normalized for governments to crack down on publishers that report on social movements, the further such censorship will penetrate into every sector of society, and the more it will shape what it is possible to think, what it is possible to imagine.
\n\nIf you are concerned about this, please use all the means at your disposal to share this news far and wide. Facebook should not get to determine for you what constitutes responsible speech. Together, in solidarity, we can create a better world, in which no one of good conscience need fear that fascists, governments, or billion-dollar corporations can threaten or silence them.
\n\n\n\n\n“CrimethInc. are the poets and intellectuals of a truly free society, and if anarchist publishing has any common theme, it is to dream of a society in which organized violence and the threat of systematic violence would not exist, where there would never be a situation in which groups of men with sticks and guns and bombs would be able to threaten others. This is not just a legitimate political position, it’s a vital, essential, necessary one. Nothing could conceivably be more violent than to tell us—and particularly our young people—we are forbidden to even dream of a peaceful, caring, world.”
\n\n-David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, responding to the news of the Facebook ban
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![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/19/banned-on-facebook.jpg\")
\nFacebook’s Secret Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations”
\n\nOpen Letter: “Stand with Anarchist Publishers Banned by Facebook”
\n\nAnarchist Activists Say Facebook Banned Them to Placate the Right
\n\nThe Intercept: Facebook’s Ban on Far-Left Pages Is an Extension of Trump Propaganda
\n\nVice: Facebook Is Treating Anti-Fascism the Same as Murder-Linked Conspiracy Groups
\n\nTruthout: Facebook Has Begun Purging Accounts Tied to Anti-Fascist Groups
\n\nThe Eugene Weekly: Banned Media—Anarchist and Antifascist Media Groups Are Being Taken Down by Facebook
\n\nTruth or Fiction: “A Pound of Flesh”—Facebook’s Provides Little Explanation for Anti-Fascist Takedown
\n\nDemocracy Now: Facebook Bans Anti-Fascist and Anarchist Groups Along with QAnon Conspiracy Pages
\n\nSydney Criminal Lawyers: Facebook Censorship—Silencing Anarchist and Anti-Fascist Groups
\n\nRed & Black Notes: Facebook Announce Crackdown against Anarchists
\n\nFreedom News: A Note on Facebook’s Crackdown against US Anarchist Groups
\n\nNeues Deutschland: Facebook sperrt linke Accounts—Das Kollektiv »Crimethinc« klagt über Kriminalisierung
\n\nAnarkism.info: Auktoritär stenkastning i det digitala glashuset
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mcsole/status/1296450732405788673\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/ROAR_Magazine/status/1296491483344838656\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/DavidNeiwert/status/1296212476950769664\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1296163907938091008\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/GrimKim/status/1296536454244573184\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/alibreland/status/1296162193482932229\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1296466133932023808\n\n\n
Some of the other Facebook accounts that were banned today on this same pretext belonged to the musician MC Sole, Truthout writer Chris Steel, and a European news source, Enough is Enough.* ↩
\n![Protesters](\"https://media.washtimes.com/media/image/2020/07/20/APTOPIX_Racial_Injustice_Portland_32735.jpg-fc00b.jpg\"){kind=link}