The founder of a political campaign of disaffected former Democrats revealed the shocking extent of Facebook’s crackdown on the group in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 protest.
Bradon Straka, the founder of the WalkAway campaign, testified during a June 9 Georgia rally convened by former Democrat-turned-Republican State Rep. Mesha Mainor. Straka discussed how in the aftermath of Jan. 6, his group along with all of its administrators were systematically purged by the social media company and had years of content, much of it of sentimental value, scrubbed with no explanation or hope of appeal.
“On the morning of January 8, 2021, every member of my team woke up to find that our Facebook accounts had been deleted,” Straka testified. “Along with them, the WalkAway campaign group, now over half a million members, was gone. The WalkAway Foundation business page was gone.”
According to Straka, Facebook also targeted the personal accounts of people associated with WalkAway including people who simply contracted with WalkAway but were unaffiliated politically.
“And to add to our shock, the personal and business accounts of every administrator for the WalkAway group were permanently deleted,” Straka said. “In other words, even people who were non-political but did online marketing or merch management for a living on social media and, for whom, we just happened to be one of their clients, the fact that their accounts had been added as admins to the WalkAway campaign group resulted in all of them losing their personal and business accounts, preventing them from being able to do business with any other clients using Facebook.”
Georgia Hearing on #WalkAway Banning, Targeting, & Censorship https://t.co/bAvahr55SG
— #WalkAway Campaign (@RealWalkAway) June 14, 2024
To pour salt in the wound, Facebook also deleted all of the content stored on the accounts and provided no opportunity for group members to recover what represented years of hard work. Straka intimated at the hearing that the purged content represented a $500,000 investment by WalkAway and two and a half years of hard work. Also included were many personal memories, such as pictures of Straka and his grandmother, now deceased.
Straka also stated that these actions directly contravened Facebook’s own policies.
“According to Facebook’s terms of service, users owned the content and information we posted on Facebook, and yet, we were given no opportunity to speak to anybody who works at Facebook to request copies of the pictures, videos, posts and data they disabled without any explanation,” Straka related.
Straka ended his testimony with a call for accountability for Big Tech companies, who he argued have a disproportionate influence in 2024 to destroy people’s lives and businesses for seemingly flippant or self-contradictory reasons. He also demanded that the WalkAway account be reinstated and gain restored access to the purged content.
“Facebook, you need to reverse this decision and moving forward, Big Tech companies like Facebook must be made to clearly explain with specificity why accounts are suspended or banned along with providing evidence of the violation,” Straka said. “And every user deserves to have these decisions reviewed and reversed."
This proposal mirrors several other laws that are already in effect. Both Florida and Texas have passed laws directing social media companies to furnish specific reasons for bans and publish the algorithm used to prioritize or demote content. NetChoice, an association of major online businesses, has challenged the constitutionality of the laws in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
