Facebook removed a group of more than 100,000 people Tuesday evening who were organizing a trucker convoy to Washington, D.C., in protest against vaccine and mask mandates.
The group, “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” gained traction following mass protests in the Canadian capital of Ottawa last weekend, where thousands of truckers from across the country drove to protest the Canadian government’s vaccine mandate for truckers crossing its border. The group quickly amassed more than 100,000 members and its organizers were planning a convoy of their own before Facebook shut it down.
US truckers slam Facebook for removing page organizing DC freedom convoy: ‘Censorship at its finest’ https://t.co/Ergl5W1V2S
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 2, 2022
Facebook also shut down the personal accounts of some of the organizers, some of whom are longtime truckers and advocates for the industry who have put together protests and political actions before. A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, told Fox News the group violated its policies surrounding QAnon. Facebook doesn’t allow promotion of the conspiracy theory, which it labeled in 2020 a “violence-inducing conspiracy network.”
Mike Landis, a trucker and one of the group’s organizers, told the Daily Caller that while some fringe posts could slip through the cracks in a group so massive, none of the organizers ever had anything to do with QAnon and that explanation wouldn’t lead to the closing of their personal accounts in addition to the group.
“None of us, on my personal page there’s nothing,” Landis told the Daily Caller. “None of us had any of that stuff. That’s an outright lie … could there have been people that posted something from that in the group possibly? Yeah, because there are so many people posting stuff it was hard to keep up with.”
“So I’m not gonna say that there wasn’t someone that wasn’t even a part of us but just someone that was on the page posted something, that’s possible,” he continued. “But I know as far as myself personally and the other guys, there was nothing.” (RELATED: Justin Trudeau Tests Positive For COVID-19 As Anti-Mandate Protesters Flood Ottawa)
Landis and the other organizers have said the event isn’t exclusively for truckers. They say it’s for all Americans who are opposed to mandates and requirements related to the pandemic. The trucking theme comes not only from inspiration from other protests around the world but due to the organizers’ background doing activism in the industry.
“This isn’t about trucking. It just so happens that we have the biggest vehicles on the road that look ominous coming down the road, so that’s why we’re starting it I guess,” Landis continued. “This is about how this stuff affects everybody, all the American people who just want their freedom and their rights back … we have a lot of support from people outside of the trucking community.”