Dozens of activists groups were removed from facebook yesterday because of the royal wedding.
Goldsmiths Fight back and Tower Hamlets Greens, were two among the many politically aligned pages that were reported missing yesterday morning.
Administrators of over 50 groups – including the UCL occupation blog, UK Uncut, Camberwell Anti-cuts and Save NHS – found that their pages had been removed from the social networking site without prior consultation or permission from the founders.
The Goldsmiths Fight Back group begun in November 2010 as part of the occupation of the university library. It has since collected many members, both form the student population and the wider community.
A spokesman for the group said: “We demand the reinstatement of all the political Facebook accounts blocked in the run-up to the royal wedding, and that Facebook release an official apology to all those affected.
In reaction to the forced removal of their legal facebook page, the activist group has launch another page in protest.
Talking to the Guardian yesterday, Guy Aitchison, 26, an administrator for one of the non-functioning pages said: “I woke up this morning to find that a lot of the groups we’d been using for anti-cuts activity had disappeared. The timing of it seems suspicious given a general political crackdown because of the royal wedding.”
“It seems that dozens of other groups have also been affected, including some of the local UK Uncut groups.”
Following the arrest of several people in the run-up to the royal wedding, many people fear that the day was being used by police to crack-down on activists and carry out mass arrests.
