On Facebook Banning Pages that Support CrimethInc.com

From CrimethInc

On Facebook Banning Pages that Support CrimethInc.com
And the Digital Censorship to Come

Facebook 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, officially on the pretext that they “support violence.” This has nothing to do with stopping violence and everything to do with cracking down on social movements and everyday people getting organized in their communities.

Facebook has always promoted itself as seeking to assist people in creating networks to meet their needs. Facebook representatives proudly touted their role in the Egyptian uprising. Their decision to ban social movement organizations 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. For 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.

The definition of violence is not neutral. The way Facebook 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 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.

Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the state and especially 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” of all stripes. In the case of the Department of Justice, it 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. They are attempting to do the same thing to Black Lives Matter activists, associating them together with neo-Nazis and white nationalists as “racially motivated extremists.”

After a 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. This time, 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 after Trump mobilized federal forces to Portland, Oregon, precipitating weeks of street conflict. While far-right groups continue to organize on Facebook and millions spread dangerous misinformation about COVID-19, Facebook is actively cooperating with 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 be able to determine which voices social media platforms permit to be heard, 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.

If you are concerned about this, please use all the means at your disposal to get this message out 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 suppress their freedom of expression.

There are 21 Comments

"protest movements have been essential to creating a nationwide dialogue about state violence and oppression"

Lol, why are they so smarmy?

And they title it "On Facebook Banning Pages that Support CrimethInc.com".
Are the other pages and people that got banned merely accessories to CrimethInc? I remember recently that there was an article posted on both CrimethInc and It's Going Down and on IGD it said that they both wrote it together, while CrimethInc post didn't acknowledge IGD participation.

Why not title the article something like "The ongoing attack on anarchism as usual"? They always write like they're stepping on shells, avoiding to say they're anarchists or apologizing for it. Come off sounding like "i'm not an anarchist or anything, but this is an attack on free speech! civil liberties and human rights are at risk!"

Funny to read this alongside this article from IGD https://itsgoingdown.org/message-in-a-molotov-election-trump/ hand-wringing about the minutia of electoral process not being up to par. So instead of opposing elections and democracy (as governments, as what states can be) they play the role of being preoccupied with fair elections, particularly because they might have a better chance of electing democrats. Sure this is not the whole gist of the article, it's okay to be worried about different scenarios that might play out around and after the elections, and there's some of that in the article, but there's always that appeal and genuflection to wider left, even its moderate segment.

Gustavo Rodriguez, in a recent text (The Heuristic Capacity of Anarchy), states: "the website of the anti-Trump libertarian left", clearly alluding to the fact that they are not anarchists but libertarian leftists. And yes, when you visit their page you can see it immediately.
CrimethInc, on the other hand, has long since ceased to be what it was in its beginnings to degenerate into the same thing: the democratic left!

Maybe anarchists shouldn’t be so sad about getting kicked from a website that sells their data to the state and private security firms. Anarchist have organized before Facebook. Why can’t we use our own websites? Is it because we don’t get the reach of the masses?

That's the deal... Those "anarchists" had to wait to get banned from Facebook to consider dropping it? Oh wait, no... they want MORE of it.

Good grief!

hey member when anarchists never expected their enemies to treat them fairly? i member.

zuck's tools will never dismantle zuck's mediated corporate social consumer platform...

diy <--bad brains approved!

step 1: make concessions to the enemy
step 2: demand concessions of the enemy
step 3: whine when the enemy hits you

for what it's worth Insurrection News had a FB following far in excess of both IGD and crimethinc before it was zucced a couple of years back but I don't recall IN making a big fuss about it.

It tends to be the IGD type anarchists who strategically support action against violent speech by people they don't like. This is what happens when you stray from supporting the principle of absolute free speech.

Its Going Down, a group of militant haters who hate everything almost, well 99% of everything, but maybe that's just me, maybe they hate 50% which is still alot.

what Sir Einzige is most likely referring to is the antifa acrivity of deplatforming and doxxing. this has sometimes ended in the accounts of their targets getting suspended, which is the relevant part to this discussion.

“IGD type anarchist” may overlap with another derisive term of strugglismo or strugglistas, used by people who mock the activist orientation, with an emphasis on street demos.

but let us not debase each other with petty insults. as paragons of logic and virtue, we can do better.

imagine putting speech in a special little box and when people say something that makes it clear they’re your enemies, you say “sorry we cant do anything, were free speech absolutists”.

americans are fucking silly.

"The idiot does not “communicate”’,2 writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics. He may speak, sure, but not to convey a certain message. That makes the idiot instantly subversive in our time, where communication counts among the highest goods. Not so much because we value the exchange of information or because we can learn from each other. But rather, because the ever-accelerating, 24/7 communication cycle is what keeps surveillance capitalism going. It feeds the database and helps train algorithms. If everyone were to quit Facebook and Instagram right now, would stop emailing and messaging and throw their smartphones in the ditch – in other words, if all communicative data flows would rigorously come to a halt – then capital would stop flowing too. Capital that is entangled with the interests of those who want to keep an eye on us, whether it’s governments, security services, or companies like Cambridge Analytica, who sell the dream of propaganda with guaranteed return on investments to whatever political ideology that is willing to pay for it. The means: data profiles. The source: ‘total communication’. The goal: ‘total surveillance’, as Han calls it."

https://www.eurozine.com/faire-lidiot/

search engines and the NSA still get the last laugh. Lots of people collecting lots of data...and ISPs still collect someones money, not necessarily yours.

i want to declare and absolutely idiotic check at the knights of the round table.

i dont think they are really trying to "muddy the waters", #hate #violence have been scary buzzwords for a long time, are crimethinc./IGD hateful? Do they support violence? Sometimes, this is basically a 2020 continuation of what Ward Churchill talked about. Liberalism absolutely cannot tolerate things that make people uncomfortable and angry. The right wing ads will never disappear from facebook. Why? Seems kinda obvious to me. #rightwingwokelordpolitics. Im curious as to why its being framed like this when white supremacists have been bellowing about intolerance for...who knows how long? If there is a cancel culture, it is indiscriminatory and absolute.

"Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the state and especially the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue."

The "explicit support [for] the state" would come as news to the Boogaloo who killed those federal cops. I don't know why crimethinc can grasp the differences between fifty different varieties of anarchist, but sees our enemies as a single, unitary, monolithic mass.

Judging within the broadest social wellbeing context, the tech info/data explosion has benefitted the small forgotten majority of proles and allowed for more truth to be exposed and spoken. It has lifted curtains and walls, which to some paranoid binarists may be considered "surveillance", but is really just a tolerable byproduct of transparency in an open society.

Today, faith in computation is ascendant. Our collective belief in the power of information consumes vastly more resources than religious belief, and whether we realise it or not, we spend much of our time labouring to validate its claims.

To exist on the modern Internet is to participate in the expansion and refinement of a planetary-scale data set. To prove you’re not a robot, you help to educate a robot, describing pictorial elements or analysing a thread of hard-to-read text in order to programme a neural network. In turn, by conditioning your behaviour, the network programmes you. New Atheism, like inceldom, had all the benchmarks of a functioning ideology. It offered a totalising ruleset for existence: a series of causal feedback loops and spurious reasonings constructed across an increasingly popular assortment of online spaces. It’s no accident that identity politics seemed to abandon the demand for material improvement in favour of greater representation (most obviously in business, politics and the arts) at a time when millions of new users were signing up to platforms that required demographic identification as a condition of entry. The first step in joining any website of the generation known loosely as Web 2.0 is to click a drop-down box and identify yourself. The second is to develop a profile.

The number of users on Facebook exploded with the introduction of the ‘like’ function: a psychologically irresistible trigger for amplification, absorbed from competitor FriendFeed, which Facebook acquired in 2009. The approval matrix gamified interactivity and rival platforms rushed to develop comparable instruments – the ‘upvote’ associated with imageboards like Reddit or the ‘repost’ functions integral to Tumblr or Twitter. These machines pitted avatars in competition against one another to produce the most attention-‘worthy’ content, anything from a culturally encoded pictograph (a meme) to a personal story of abuse, weaponised for traction in the online space. Targets set by investors in Silicon Valley demanded network effects and greater ‘time on device’, unleashing new forms of violent sentiment in the process. ‘Safety features’ and a ‘terms of service’ rewritten ad nauseum was never more than a distraction from the baked-in priorities of the ‘social’ media business model. When black-boxed algorithms order our feeds, it will always be the loudest, most provocative content that rises to the top.

For those whose media remained unidirectional – like radio, television or print – journalists’ reports from this simulated reality seemed totally unhinged. Whether it was the dogpile misogyny of Gamergate, memorial pages for dead teens being desecrated on Facebook or the doxxing of victims of sexual assault, mainstream news coverage would report outrageous statements or acts they’d ‘uncovered’ online but did much less to investigate the conditions out of which they emerged. As celebrities, politicians, the alt-lite, junior academics and media class careerists engaged in peer-to-peer confrontations and linguistic ‘flame wars’ online, social mobility went into reverse, wages stagnated, productivity and innovation flatlined and life expectancy declined in the West. It’s not that the simulation isn’t ‘real life’ – it definitely is – but it’s a corner of reality defined by specific affordances, incentives and limitations, defined by opaque corporations who use symbols of togetherness (hearts, thumbs up, speech bubbles) and empathetic language (community, friends, sharing) to disguise a momentous recalibration of precisely those things.

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