Facebook finally bans UK far right activist, 'Tommy Robinson'

It’s not clear what took the company so long to shutter Yaxley-Lennon’s pages given repeated breaches of its community standards.

The move comes two months after Facebook closed pages of another far right activist, James Goddard, also for hate speech violations.

Goddard had been using Facebook’s platform to solicit donations to fund activism which included intimidating politicians and journalists around Westminster — livestreaming the encounters to social media followers.

The activity of Goddard and small group of extreme Brexit supporters led the speaker of the House of Commons to write to the head of the Met Police urging action against the aggressive, threatening and intimidating behaviour”.

Political attention has sharply stepped up around the social impacts of tech platforms and UK ministers are posed to set out a policy plan for regulating social media safety.

Original article
Author: Natasha Lomas

TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

Natasha Lomas has recently written 11 articles on similar topics including :
  1. "The European Union may investigate Facebooks $1BN acquisition of customer service platform Kustomer after concerns were referred to it under EU merger rules". (April 6, 2021)
  2. "Last months ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), ripping up the EU-US Privacy Shield and sewing doubt over alternative mechanisms, has put a cat among the pigeons of international data transfers". (August 26, 2020)
  3. "Irelands data protection watchdog, the DPC, has sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers from the EU to the US, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter and including a confirmation from Facebooks VP of global affairs, Nick Clegg". (September 9, 2020)
  4. "Round of applause for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which fought for two years to obtain details of a closed door meeting between Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg and the UK secretary of state in charge of digital issues at the time, Matt Hancock (now health secretary)". (December 8, 2020)
  5. "Facebook is firing up its lawyers to try to block EU regulators from forcing it to suspend transatlantic data transfers in the wake of a landmark ruling by Europes top court this summer". (September 11, 2020)
  6. "Yet more trouble brewing for Facebook: Australias Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing the tech giant over its use, in 2016 and 2017, of the Onavo VPN app to spy on users for commercial purposes". (December 16, 2020)
  7. "A Facebook -funded body that the tech giant set up to distance itself from tricky and potentially reputation-damaging content moderation decisions has announced the first bundle of cases it will consider". (December 1, 2020)
  8. "Facebook is considering expanding the types of data its users are able to port directly to alternative platforms". (August 21, 2020)
  9. "The UKs competition regulator will make a decision on whether or not Facebooks purchase of Giphy has a realistic prospect of substantially lessening competition by March 25, it said today, as it continues to scrutinize the acquisition". (January 28, 2021)
  10. "A week after Facebook grabbed eyeballs globally by blocking news publishers and turning off news-sharing on its platform in Australia, the countrys parliament has approved legislation that makes it mandatory for platform giants like Facebook and Google to negotiate to remunerate local news p". (February 25, 2021)
  11. "Potential threats to the free flow of GIFs continue to trouble the U.K.s competition watchdog". (April 1, 2021)
Posted on  ,