Facebook removes Patriot Prayer pages in bid to
halt 'violent social militias'
Joey Gibson, founder of group with 45,000 followers
accuses Facebook of double standard
Staff and
agencies
Sat 5 Sep
2020 04.54 BST
Facebook
has taken down the pages of US right-wing group Patriot Prayer and its founder
Joey Gibson, a company spokesman said, as part of efforts to remove “violent
social militias” from the platform.
Patriot
Prayer has hosted dozens of pro-gun, pro-Trump rallies and attendees have
repeatedly clashed with leftwing groups around Portland, Oregon, where one
supporter of the group was killed this week.
The victim,
39-year-old Aaron Danielson, was walking home on Saturday night after a pro-Trump
demonstration in the city when he was shot.
The company
updated its policies last month to ban groups that demonstrate significant
risks to public safety. Its dangerous organisations policy now includes groups
that celebrate violent acts or suggest they will use weapons, even if they are
not directly organising violence.
In a
statement posted on Patriot Prayer’s website, Gibson accused Facebook of a
double standard.
“Antifa
groups murdered my friend while he was walking home, and instead of the
multibillion dollar company banning Portland Antifa pages, they ban Patriot
Prayer, Joey Gibson and several other grandmas that are admins,” he wrote.
Antifa is a
largely unstructured, far-left movement whose followers broadly aim to confront
those they view as authoritarian or racist.
Gibson
espouses non-violence but is accused by anti-fascist groups of provoking
confrontations. After the shooting of Danielson he cautioned supporters not to
seek revenge, but rather “push back politically, spiritually”.
As of
earlier this week, the Patriot Prayer page had nearly 45,000 followers on
Facebook. It was created in 2017.
Facebook
last week removed content associated with the Kenosha Guard, a group that had
posted a “call to arms” in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The company
acted the day after two people were shot and killed at protests in the city,
which broke out in response to the police shooting of a Black man earlier that
week.
Facebook
designated the shooting a “mass shooting” – a ruling that invoked the company’s
ban on praise, support, or representation of a mass shooter or the shooting
itself. And yet those types of posts continued to be spread widely on the
platform despite the ban, according to a Guardian analysis of CrowdTangle data.
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