Facebook has suspended or shut down several politically sensitive fan pages/groups this week

[Excerpts from SCMP article]

"Kelvin Sit Tak-O, who runs a discussion group that opposes the pro-establishment party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), said his group's Facebook page was shut down without notice on Thursday. The group had 84,298 members and was aiming for 100,000.

'Apart from my own group, I've heard that other groups with an anti-DAB message have also been closed. We've written complaint letters, but we've only received standard replies about how [Facebook] is working on this case,' Sit said.

.....

Christina Chan Hau-man, a student protester who waved a Tibetan flag during the torch relay and used Facebook to rally support, had her account closed days before the event. At the time, she said she was told her page had been closed because of 'persistent misuse of the site'.

Politicians yesterday urged Facebook to explain the recent closures, stressing that such discussion on the website encouraged more youth participation in politics."

[My own remarks based on my conversation with Kelvin Sit just now...]

Kelvin told me that although the original page is still down, he relaunched a new page, which has already hit 50,000 members since it launched 3 days ago.

Feeling very passionately about this issue because FREE SPEECH is integrally connected to being an environmental activist, I am urging international media based in HK to cover the story.

I hope you will do the same, as well as retweet and post this information, to increase the visibility of this shut-down, so that it becomes an issue of international notoriety. After all, this is the flipside of the Google China story and Hong Kong is the last bastion of free speech in greater China. (By the way, here is my op-ed letter to the IHT about Google and China which was published in the wake of that imbroglio. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/opinion/16iht-edlet.html

Note that my views are entirely different in this case because Hong Kong is NOT China! No way!)

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