Facebook Bans Conservative #Walkaway Campaign Group

Facebook Bans Conservative #Walkaway Campaign Group
Brandon Straka, founder of the #WalkAway Campaign, speaks at the CPAC convention in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 28, 2020. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times
Bowen Xiao
Updated:
Brandon Straka, the founder of the #WalkAway movement, announced on Friday that Facebook had removed the group’s page consisting of half a million members and also banned the individual accounts of his team, as well as his own personal account.

“Today my team and I all at the same time got messages notifying us that our accounts were banned and the Walkaway campaign group has been taken down as well—which had 508,000 people in it,” Straka told The Epoch Times.

The hundreds of thousands of written and video testimonials of people telling their stories about leaving the left were now all gone, he said. Straka had no idea why the group and their accounts were disabled.

He said he received an email from Facebook stating that “Your page Walkway Foundation has been removed for violating our terms of use ... pages that are hateful, threatening or obscene are not allowed.”

“All of my employees have been banned,” he said. “All of my volunteers have been banned. Anyone connected with my organization was banned.”

Straka said he and his team are trying to form an emergency plan for the time being—they are creating a group on Clouthub, another social media platform, and they are telling their members to go there for now.

“We’ve contacted our lawyers and we’re going to see what we can do to try to get some action against Facebook for doing this to us,” he said. “And I’m going to try to contact senators and anyone I can to see if we can get some help from the government.”

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment by The Epoch Times.

The removal of the #Walkaway group comes after Twitter and Facebook disabled the account of President Donald Trump after deleting recent posts made by the president, including a video of him calling on protesters who had gathered on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington to go home in peace. Trump later gained access to his Twitter account.

Straka said the removal of the #Walkaway page was absolutely “devastating” as they are a grassroots organization which has now lost the ability to contact their members and also lost the ability to fundraise and promote their events.

The #WalkAway Campaign “encourages and supports those on the Left to walk away from the divisive tenets endorsed and mandated by the Democratic Party of today,” according to their website.

“This is earth shattering to us,” Straka said.

The censorship of conservatives is going to continue in the near future, said Straka, and will likely “get worse.”

“My feeling right now is that this is a very ominous indication of what is to come under a Biden, Harris presidency,” he said. “We as conservatives are about to be completely eradicated on social media and treated as second class citizens.”

Bowen Xiao
Bowen Xiao
Reporter
Bowen Xiao was a New York-based reporter at The Epoch Times. He covers national security, human trafficking and U.S. politics.
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