Citing "violence," Facebook officially has banned anarchist and anti-fascist content, alongside QAnon

They will also be less able to recruit others, though and they are plenty radicalised already. So I think all in all it will be a net positive.

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So they’re not looting?

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Or Gab, or Parler. Or pariah instances of Mastadon no-one wants to federate with. As long as they crawl back under the cobblestones and don’t use mass platforms like FB or Twitter to recruit their stochastic terrorists, it’s a win.

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Is this something you’ve personally witnessed? If not, do you have a source? (Preferably one that doesn’t begin “According to a police report …”)

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No, it’s worse. They were out protecting LGBTQ+ and POC from the fascist attacks that the ayn-caps never seemed to have a problem with.

Someone give me some pearls to clutch.

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For all the evidence he’s interested in providing, one might as well ask if they’re not rolling out a weather-control machine to use against the fascists (considered natural allies by a particularly dim-witted variety of Libertarian).

Or one that isn’t bylined “Andy Ngo”.

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Man, the cognitive dissonance of the side that’s all, “The American military is the strongest force on Earth!” being comfy with the prospect of saying “come at me, bro” to that same military when it comes to guns. It’s almost like it’s all a bunch of empty bravado and dick-waving.

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That explains where the black in the Ayn-cap flag comes from, because it doesn’t come from anarchism.

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These are nice!

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It’s hard to deny that there has been significant amount of violence from self-identified Antifa and BLM groups in Portland, Seattle, and many other locations since the George Floyd protests began. Just look at the guy who got dragged out of his truck and beaten in Portland this week. I realize there were claims that he was trying to run people down, but those claims seem not supported, and even if true, you dno’t handle that with street justice. Either we have to go with “no true Scotsman” arguments or look at reality here.
If FB has a policy against groups engaging in violence, either they need to enforce it on everyone, or they need to put an asterisk on it and say some violent groups are ok depending on their political positions. Which may be the right thing to do but an institution like FB needs that in a written policy, not a tacit understanding, and it seems like people here are advocating that FB should go the tacit understanding route. That doesn’t work in a corporation that needs to defend itself in serious legal battles.

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I believe he wasn’t some random dude they decided to beat down. He apparently had driven into the crowd, which is something that can kill people.

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That was one of the stories about it but that appears not to be the case. Not sure yet, that is still a developing situation. However… come on, there has been plenty of violence at these events, we’ve all seen the videos. Some of it may have been provoked, but not all of it, and street justice and mob justice is still illegal violence, and if FB has a policy against groups promoting violence, they need to either enforce it fairly or make explicit exceptions for some groups. Or have a tacit understanding that some groups are cool. Which seems to be what many people would like to happen, but doesn’t work when someone does a discovery on them and takes a look at their content policy manuals.

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Facebook keeps making terrible decisions that force younger people and progressives off the platform. Their user base then becomes increasingly old and right wing. Facebook tries to appeal to their user base with another terrible decision. More young people and progressives leave the site…

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Also, running over antifa protesters using cars is one of the regular methods of right-wing stochastic terrorists recruited on mainstream social media platforms. But hey, can’t have people acting in self defense against what seems to be one of those attacks, amirite? I mean, the cops are so friendly and helpful to antifa protestors.

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He certainly appears to have had the crowd’s safety foremost among his concerns. Wonder if there’s any video of how he crashed into the motorcycle. It likely wasn’t just sitting out in the middle of the road.

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It seems to be more complicated than that. In the longer video, he may even be a good guy, and the guy who knocked him out may just be an asshole. As usual, it is never as simple as first presented.

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After looking it up, you are partially correct… there was a confrontation, the guy was driving erratically, but did not seem to be targeting anyone, and the guy who beat him was arrested, so it’s not like they got a way with it… Let’s not forget that people have been driving cars into protesters since this all started. Heather Heyer was murdered in this way in Charlottesville. Cars have become weaponized, so you can see how someone might think this is the case here, with someone driving erratically around people obviously associated with the protests.

This seems like the most comprehensive round up of what happened.

It was also well away from main protest area, not in the middle of it.

It is disingenuous to assume that this is the mainstream of the protests, that BLM or “antifa” are violent, especially when compared with the right wing who MOST certainly are responsible for actual murders and violent attacks (Proud Boys specifically attack people regularly. BLM and antifa are not primarily responsible for the violence happening in many of these protests - it is primarily outside agitators, the police, or right wing groups aligned with the police.

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The narrative seems messy. The counterpunch article I posted tries to give a comprehensive timeline of events.

Could be the guy that got arrested joined the protests for the violence or maybe he’d seen too much shit and had gotten fed up? :woman_shrugging:

Either way, none of this indicts the movement.

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Can you provide some proof for that statement? I haven’t seen anything that would support that claim.

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One or two people or lots of people? It would be good to know if this is a single incident or a growing trend. I knew a guy who brought a huge wrench to an outdoor concert, I didn’t label it as wide-spread violence, it was just that one guy that was the problem.

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