On Tuesday morning, Facebook deleted 25 accounts and pages (plus seven Instagram accounts) that it says were “involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior,” similar to fake accounts that have been removed in the past for purported connections to Russian organizations.

Facebook does not yet have enough evidence to determine exactly who was behind this round of fake accounts, though says it some of the deleted pages had connections with Russian-linked accounts that were previously disabled.

Among the pages deleted was a popular event page called “No Unite The Right 2 – D.C.,” a counterprotest to the looming white supremacist rally taking place in D.C. on August 12.

The only problem? D.C. organizers say the page was legit, and they’re angry at Facebook for taking it down.

The “No Unite The Right 2 – D.C.” page that Facebook took down. (Photo courtesy of Facebook)

“This was a legitimate Facebook event that was being organized by Washington, D.C. locals,” says Dylan Petrohilos, a former Inauguration rioting case defendant that was involved in organizing the counterprotest.

The coalition behind the event, Petrohilos says, is Shut It Down DC, which sprouted up after Jason Kessler, noted white supremacist and organizer of last year’s Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, announced this year’s D.C. iteration. It involves dozens of local groups, including the D.C. Antifascist Collective, Black Lives Matter D.C., Hoods4Justice, and Smash Racism D.C.

Facebook says the event page was originally created by a page called “Resisters,” which it has also deleted on suspicion of being an inauthentic account.

From Facebook’s news release: “Inauthentic admins of the “Resisters” Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the [counterprotest]. These legitimate Pages unwittingly helped build interest in “No Unite Right 2 – DC” and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests.”

Facebook says that the Resisters page previously had a Russian-linked account as one of its administrators for seven minutes. On another occasion, a Russian-linked account shared a Facebook event hosted by the Resisters page. “These discoveries helped us uncover the other inauthentic accounts we disabled today,” the company says in its release.

Petrohilos agrees that local D.C. groups were not the original hosts of the No Unite The Right event, but he disputes Facebook’s assertion that the Resisters page was the event’s creator. He says it was an organization called Workers Against Racism.

Workers Against Racism told The Daily Beast that they in fact had started their own counterprotests when they were invited to be part of the event organized by Resisters.

“Workers against Racism was made a co-host of a pre-existing event by a page with a multi year post history,” a spokesperson for Workers Against Racism told The Daily Beast. “That page is the one deleted by Facebook, run by an individual who also had their profile removed.”

Shortly after the publication of this story, Shut It Down DC said in a series of tweets that “the event was created by Resisters, but was used for legitimate protest organizing and promotion.”

There’s a precedent for Russian-linked organizations to intervene in U.S. activism. After Philando Castile’s death at the hands of a St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer in 2016, a sketchy Facebook page called “Don’t Shoot” garnered huge interest before real activists—who grew increasingly suspicious of the page, given that they did not know any of the purported organizers—wrested control of the event. CNN later uncovered that the page was run by a group linked to the Russian government.

In Texas, Russian trolls tricked both sides of a protest around a new library in an Islamic center. The digital coordinators of both the protest and the counterprotest were linked to an online hub in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The “No Unite the Right 2” organizers have since created a replacement Facebook event called “Nazis Not Welcome No Unite The Right 2.”

This post has been updated with comment from the Shut It Down D.C. Twitter page and information from Workers Against Racism.

Filed Under: counterprotest, facebook, russians, unite the right,