Londonderry NH on Facebook Shuts Down (two weeks before town elections)
With only weeks to go before residents flock to the polls to pick their local elected representatives for the largest Facebook group featuring Londonderry town interests, it has gone dark. According to Londonderry Underground, it started when the admins appeared to be removing content with prejudice (my word, not theirs).
The Admins of one of the largest, with (14,000 members) Londonderry Facebook pages ‘Londonderry NH’ is now actively censoring candidate posts. Town Elections are less than two weeks away and the Admins are deleting, some but not all, political posts. The Admins are also selectively deleting comments.
The page rules allow political content as long as it doesn’t violate any other rules, but it seems more likely that the moderators or page admins were being a bit loose with their speech control superpowers, and just before town elections.
I was made aware of two posts that were removed claiming they violated the page rules. I posted a question to the Admins of ‘Londonderry NH’ and asked if candidates are no longer allowed to post information. My question was met with a swift response.
A question for the page Admins
Phil Cleobury
Heather Anderson
Town Elections are in two weeks, are candidates no longer allowed to post campaign information? I’ve seen at least two posts removed from this page.The Admins did not respond and answer, instead they removed the post, accused me of violating the rules, and banned me from the page for 24 hours.
Not long after this – the next day, in fact – the moderators shut down the page completely.
Heather Anderson:
The administrators have made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend this Facebook group due to the increasing demands on their personal and volunteer time. Since its creation in 2008, maintaining the group has required significant effort, particularly in upholding the rules, which has unfortunately led to some challenging and confrontational situations.Furthermore, the escalating, unfounded threats directed toward them have become intolerable, making it unsustainable to continue at this time. They sincerely apologize, as this decision is a response to issues caused by a specific group of individuals and is not a reflection on the community as a whole. They are grateful for those who have contributed positively and supported the group.`
Phil and Heather are within their rights to do what they will with a Facebook page or group of their creation, but the timing is similar to GraniteGrok closing comments weeks before any general or midterm election because people are getting a bit spicey.
Why not ban the troublemakers?
It’s not that hard. When white national racists tried to hijack my X feed (because you apparently cannot challenge the establishment if you don’t bash or blame Jews), I blocked them. They can bitch about it all they want someplace else. And while it is not our policy to block anyone, we won’t tolerate threats or intimidation, actual or implied, against any individual or group. Their gig is to hate Jews 24/7/365 (and probably everyone else who is not white), and I’m not sure you can hate them enough.
We didn’t close the whole shop, but if you wanted to prevent open debate rather than ban a few troublemakers, you could use it as an excuse to shutter the forum (until after an upcoming election).
In other words, their excuse sounds like bullshit to me.
If it is in the community’s interests to block a person who asks a benign question about political content and delete that question, how hard is it to ban this “specific group” and its contributions forever and leave the page up for the other 13,985 (ish) others?
There is no good answer unless you are trying to control or stop all debate or someone in town leans on you to do it, even though the page is not run by or affiliated with local government.
Blocking users is easy. Shutting down an entire “community’ page before a local election is suspicious.
