Hey thanks for circulating this news, Merijn,
Just to add that the groups targeted in the purge have now also set up a
petition site and a blog, and no, these are not on Facebook. It would be
great if nettimers could sign, circulate, and give their support/
suggestions:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/deletion-of-activist-facebook-profiles/
BTW - re the incredulity regarding a FB page against an FB purge: The FB
page was an immediate and I think still logical response given that
everyone who was discovering their pages had been taken down were of
course discovering this on Facebook. For the same reasons these groups
were on there already, it made and makes sense to spread the bad news
via FB.
For me the real issue here is that the UK state - whether by purely
technical means or clandestine agreement with Facebook - shut down over
50 UK sites of political groups that were using FB purely for sharing
public domain news about cuts or announcing social/discussion events,
spreading news about campaigns, occupations, etc.
No one was naive enough to plan anything proscribed by the State through
these pages, though even some official State approved events such as the
Glasgow May Day celebrations had their pages deleted. It's amusing to
see the bigger cops stifling the smaller (the Glasgow police worked with
the Scottish TUC to coordinate this event), but indicates the way things
seem to be headed in the UK as the police go about pre-emptively
arresting activists and raiding squats in the lead up to the wedding and
in the wake of months of social strife in education and beyond.
The pages deleted in the FB purge had been up and growing for months,
helping enable contact between the wider population of university
students, school kids and 6th formers, and other campaigns. Most of
these people would not, initially at least, be on Crabgrass or part of
activist/radical media (if we're still allowed to say that*) milieux. As
such I imagine that FB will remain an important way to communicate with
a wide array of people. But, re alternatives to FB, many of the groups
are already using Crabgrass, etc, for organising beyond the level of
announcements and news etc.
I hope the discussion this purge is generating will hasten exodus from
FB, but I suspect this will depend on development of tools capable of
hosting the large numbers who made use of proprietary networks during
the recent political events in the middle east and beyond. In the
meantime, I hope this campaign will help heighten everyone's sense of
the urgency of that.
Thanks very much,
Ben
*
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110501/00523214103/marketing-company-trademarks-radical-media-threatens-to-sue-real-activists.shtml
On 01/05/2011 21:42, Rob Myers wrote:
On 01/05/11 12:42, merijn oudenampsen wrote:
Join the protest against it... on facebook
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