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Bernie Sanders Facebook Groups With 50,000-Plus Members Deleted From Facebook

By Paula Mooney
Published on: 03:40 PST, Apr 26, 2016

There is controversy brewing over Bernie Sanders and Facebook pages and groups that supported the presidential candidate. The Facebook pages dedicated to Bernie were reportedly being deleted. As reported by Heavy, a bunch of Bernie Sanders Facebook groups and pages were removed from the site, and that fact has Sanders supporters up in arms on Facebook and across other social media sites.

However, according to the Facebook page titled “The People For Bernie Sanders 2016,” in a Facebook post about the Sanders pages, it wasn’t a big conspiracy that deleted Bernie’s Facebook pages but a Facebook error.

“We’re aware many of the pro Bernie groups were removed from Facebook. They’re back. It was a Facebook database error, not a conspiracy or an attack. Stay calm, phonebank or get to a field office to win Tuesday:map.berniesanders.com“

Prior to the Facebook pages reappearing on Facebook, Bernie’s supporters wondered on Monday why all the Sanders Facebook groups were being removed all at once. Conspiracy theorists wondered if a Super PAC working against Sanders was responsible for deleting the pages that supported the candidate on Facebook.

They weren’t small Facebook groups supporting Bernie that were deleted; some of the Sanders Facebook groups contained more than 50,000 members when they disappeared from Facebook. The supposed “synchronized attack” against Sanders Facebook groups seemed to happen when Bernie was speaking at a town hall meeting. The list of removed groups on Facebook included Bernie Sanders Activists, which is currently back on the site with more than 42,000 members.

Other groups on Facebook that had reportedly been deleted were Bernie Believers, which has nearly 3,000 members, but it has since returned. The list of affected Facebook groups includes Bernie Sanders Is My Hero, Bernie or Bust, Bernie Sanders for President, Bernie Sanders – Ideas Welcome, Bernie Sanders Revolutionaries, and Bay Area for Bernie, which enjoys nearly 6,000 members.

While new Bernie Facebook groups were set up to counteract the deletion of some Sanders groups, they ended up not being necessary, since the pages that had been deleted were reinstated. Porn photos were reportedly posted on some of the Bernie Facebook groups by hackers or trolls, which might have led to the removal of the Sanders groups by Facebook until the situation could be brought under control.

Pedophilia allegedly even appeared on some of the Sanders Facebook groups, and as a result, the moderators of the Facebook groups removed the trolls. As reported by Aidan King, it wasn’t merely Bernie’s Facebook groups that were removed.

“All of the groups are back up and it wasn’t just Bernie groups. Facebook hasn’t released a public statement but they had a bug and it closed a ton of Facebook groups. Our supporters are just more vocal so the Internet blew up with ‘Bernie groups being shut down’ rather than ‘Facebook groups are being shut down.'”

Facebook hasn’t issued an official statement regarding the Sanders groups being removed, nor has the computer addressed any other Facebook group’s removal. As reported by the Daily Beast, a Hillary Clinton Super PAC has spent $1 million to make their presence known on social media, so fears were that those types of groups were behind the Sanders Facebook page removals.

Folks who report Facebook pages for violent or pornographic content can have the pages removed. Some people perform this action against groups they don’t like. A screenshot on social media shows a person who did this against a Bernie Facebook page.

“You anonymously reported Bernie Sanders Activists for containing credible threat of violence. We removed the group reported. We reviewed the group you reported for having a credible threat of violence. Since it violated our Community Standards, we removed it. Thanks for your report. We let Bernie Sanders Activists know that their group has been removed, but not who reported it.”

Bernard Sanders can be seen in the above photo from April 6, 1981, as he took the oath of office for mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

[Photo by Donna Light/AP Images]

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