Facebook’s List of Dangerous People and Organizations (Attached) Includes Innocent Public Figures Like Gavin McInnes, Tommy Robinson and Joe Biggs

This week the Intercept reported on Facebook’s list of censored organizations and individuals.

TO WARD OFF accusations that it helps terrorists spread propaganda, Facebook has for many years barred users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence.

The restrictions appear to trace back to 2012, when in the face of growing alarm in Congress and the United Nations about online terrorist recruiting, Facebook added to its Community Standards a ban on “organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity.” This modest rule has since ballooned into what’s known as the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, a sweeping set of restrictions on what Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users can say about an enormous and ever-growing roster of entities deemed beyond the pale.

In recent years, the policy has been used at a more rapid clip, including against the president of the United States, and taken on almost totemic power at the social network, trotted out to reassure the public whenever paroxysms of violence, from genocide in Myanmar to riots on Capitol Hill, are linked to Facebook. Most recently, following a damning series of Wall Street Journal articles showing the company knew it facilitated myriad offline harms, a Facebook vice president cited the policy as evidence of the company’s diligence in an internal memo obtained by the New York Times.

Facebook’s DIO policy has become an unaccountable system that disproportionately punishes certain communities.

But as with other attempts to limit personal freedoms in the name of counterterrorism, Facebook’s DIO policy has become an unaccountable system that disproportionately punishes certain communities, critics say. It is built atop a blacklist of over 4,000 people and groups, including politicians, writers, charities, hospitals, hundreds of music acts, and long-dead historical figures.

A range of legal scholars and civil libertarians have called on the company to publish the list so that users know when they are in danger of having a post deleted or their account suspended for praising someone on it. The company has repeatedly refused to do so, claiming it would endanger employees and permit banned entities to circumvent the policy. Facebook did not provide The Intercept with information about any specific threat to its staff.

Despite Facebook’s claims that disclosing the list would endanger its employees, the company’s hand-picked Oversight Board has formally recommended publishing all of it on multiple occasions, as recently as August, because the information is in the public interest.

Attached below is the list of censored individuals.

Facebook Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List by Jim Hoft on Scribd

Notice the list includes Americans like Gavin McInnes, Tommy Robinson and Joe Biggs.

Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig provided us with additional information on Facebook’s policies.  He also notes that he’s talked about how Gavin McInnes and Tommy Robinson are on this list. Since he worked there, he says it seems like they’ve added hundreds of U.S. based militias to the list.  He also shared Facebook’s policy on the classification process on individuals on the list.  Here is one part of the policy.