Interesting development.

There appears to be a purge of political Facebook groups taking place. Profiles are being deleted without warning or explanation. In the last 12 hours, Facebook has deleted around 50 sites. The UCL Occupation account is still up for the moment, but for how long we don’t know. It may well be that these groups are technically in violation of Facebook’s terms of agreement, but the timing – on the royal wedding and May day weekend – is deeply suspicious. We don’t know for certain, but this purge of online organising groups could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain. Either way, it is a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years. Ultimately, the anti-cuts movement in the UK will need to start organising through self-hosted, open source platforms to avoid reliance upon the very corporate power structures we are aiming to challenge.

The post goes on to list the Facebook accounts that have been deleted.

Just as I was reading it, an email arrived from a friend which reported that a local kid

was arrested last night in his home for ‘pre-crime’ i.e. intending to take a loudhailer to London today, and taken to the Police station in Cambridge. He’s now been transferred to the Met, . His video message (Love Police) is silly and at points barking, but must surely be filed under ‘haven’t we got more important / dangerous people whose liberty we should withdraw’.