Meta suspended the Crust News page on Facebook on Friday, saying it "may misuse our platform to pretend to be a local or domestic voice" in breach of its rules on inauthentic behaviour.
The notice gave no example of anything we had posted or done, and the page is now listed as "in review". It came a little over a day after we reported that hackers had exposed more than 40,000 DHS staff, including ICE agents, and that the ICE List would add every enforcement officer among them to the public record.
The clause Meta cited is the one it uses against covert influence operations, pages run from one country that pose as locals in another.
Crust News is run by EU citizens, we have said so in print ourselves, and it has been reported by others, including the Guardian. Everything we publish on the United States, on Israel and Palestine and on Europe goes out under our own name. Being outside the United States is not something we hide. It is the reason the ICE List website can exist at all, out of reach of the agency whose officers it records.
The last time we checked, reporting on news around the world was not against Meta's terms and conditions, but they've decided to implement that rule against us.
Meta's attacks on Crust News are not new, in fact, we're so accustomed to it that we regularly explore ways to fight the unfounded punishment.
In January, we became the owner of the only website on the internet that had a URL that would delete itself if you typed it into one of Meta's platforms. As highlighted by Wired, the website in question, our ICE List project, didn't violate a single one of Meta's terms of use.
The investigation by Wired pointed out that we mostly used the agent's own admissions to complete a profile on them, and the reality was, that ICE agents were doxing themselves, our team was just taking note of that.
After widespread media coverage and public backlash, Meta restored the ability to link to the ICE List.
In May, Meta removed our Threads account without notice and restored it the same day after members of the public objected, without ever saying why it had gone or why it came back. Ten days ago we reported how Meta's "mistakes" keep landing on the people organising against Trump and the far right, from the No Kings coalition's Instagram, suspended in the middle of its national day of action, down.
We have appealed. We cannot say why Meta acted now, and Meta has not told us what it found. The current hypothesis is that they targeted our account with the fewest followers, given the prior public backlash to attempts to silence us on other networks.
Crust News is still on crustnews.com, in the app and on our other accounts, we hope Meta reverses their latest silly attempt quickly.
