Facebook has reportedly succeeded in getting a group of its most vocal critics booted offline. As Vice points out, the “Real Facebook Oversight Board” — a group of academics, journalists, lawyers and activists that was formed in response to the social media company’s failure to get its own Oversight Board up and running in time for the election — was forced offline after Facebook wrote to its internet service provider asking for the website to be taken down.
According to a letter shared online by Carole Cadwalladr, one of the founders of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, internet service provider SupportNation said the group’s website was being taken down after Facebook accused it of phishing.
“The most extraordinary thing about this whole affair is how it’s exposed the total Trumpification of Facebook’s corporate comms,” Cadwalladr told Vice. “There is a brazen shamelessness at work here. It’s not just that a company that has used ‘free speech’ as a protective cloak would go after our ISP and drive us off the internet but that its official spokesman responds to such criticism by attacking and trolling journalists.”
Facebook did not officially comment, but Facebook spokesman Andy Stone did reply to Cadwalladr’s tweets from his personal account, writing, “Your fake thing that accuses of fake things was caught in our thing to prevent fake things.”
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