Environmental group accounts suspended from Facebook over the weekend

Facebook suspends environmental group accounts like Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network over the weekend.

These activist groups and some individual accounts that have now mostly been reactivated, were initially suspended for an "intellectual property rights violation".

Those select few that have no had their account reactivated, have had no comment from Facebook.

The affected accounts were all involved in an online event in May 2019, which targeted KKR & Co's backing of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Canada, which campaigners say would cut through the land of the Wet'suwet'en, a First Nations people.

A community member from the Wet'suwet'en, Delee Nikal, said that while videos of "extreme violence, alt-right views" can stay on Facebook, "we are banned and receive threats for permanent removal, for posting an online petition".

This comes just a few days after the platform said it would take a stand against climate change misinformation.

Elizabeth Jardim from Greenpeace USA said: "The recent bans targeting people fighting to save their communities from climate change and the continued exploitation of fossil fuel companies show us that when push comes to shove, Facebook will side with polluters at the cost of their users' trying to organize."

Facebook released a statement saying that the removal of these accounts was a mistake in their system. They said: "They have since been restored and we've lifted any limits imposed on identified profiles."

It was just under a week ago when the social media giant launched its "climate science information center" to tackle misinformation by posting information from trusted scientific sources which have been rated by fact-checkers.

But climate activists question whether this is enough. Two years ago, a video denying human involvement was behind climate change was shared extensively on Facebook and viewed around 5 million times.

Under Facebook's guidelines, content on climate science can be processed as opinion meaning that fact-checkers cannot block it. This has lead to groups such as the CO2 Coalition making claims that CO2 is good for Earth, and despite this being rated as false by fact-checkers, it was still published on Facebook's platforms as opinion.