A White supremacist took credit for getting Dana Lone Hill blocked from Facebook. Image from Colorlines
Reporting for Colorlines, Aura Bogado finds out why some Indian activists and ordinary tribal members keep getting banned on Facebook -- they are being reported by White supremacist groups:
We first talked to Dane Lone Hill in February, after Facebook disabled her account and required the “Pointing With Lips” author to hand over several forms of identification to restore it. Lone Hill told Colorlines that she submitted the requested documents but that her account remained suspended for nearly a week until her story, which she first wrote about in an essay for the Last Real Indians blog, made headlines. (According to the tech news site Venture Beat, Lone Hill has said that the reactivation only happened because Colorlines wrote about her case.) Facebook’s spokesperson insists that the company doesn’t proactively search through user handles to root out violators of the names policy. The problem with user-generated reporting is that is that anyone, even white separatists, can report legitimate accounts as fake. Take the white supremacist group Pioneer Little Europe (PLE). The “leaderless…settler-styled movement or sometimes known as separatism [sic]” PLE grabbed headlines in 2013 when a devotee named Craig Cobb announced his plans to turn the entire town of Leith, N. D. into a settlement of “white nationalists.” PLE has several pages on Facebook. On one, a user called Pale Horse boasts about targeting Dana Lone Hill. Atlee Yarrow, who runs PLE’s website, says he doesn’t administer any of its Facebook pages but does know some of the people who do. In an e-mail to Colorlines, Yarrow, wrote, “[T]he main admin is ‘Pale Horse’ who took his ‘Native’ name during events of Leith, North Dakota.” The name “Pale Horse” likely refers to the color of a white person’s skin, but it may also be a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Bible’s Book of Revelations—one of whom rides in on a pale horse and represents death. PLE’s gloating points to a serious vulnerability in Facebook’s enforcement of its name policy. The same social media network that hosts white supremacist fan pages has required Native American users to prove their identities.Get the Story:
Aura Bogado: How White Separatists Disable Native American Facebook Accounts (Colorlines 3/11) Also Today:
Shane Creepingbear: The Removal of American Indians from Facebook (Last Real Indians 3/10)
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