Tommy robinson

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.

Hours after being knocked off Facebook and Instagram last week, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, Patient Zero for Twitter-banning, joined the messaging app Telegram and wasted no time firing off the n-word. To his growing list of followers there, he wrote, ‘Like John Lennon, I take “n*gger” to mean any oppressed person. Today’s n*ggers are me, Laura [Loomer], and Alex Jones,’ adding that his black husband gave him permission to write that. That, of course, would have never been allowed on Facebook or Twitter. But Telegram is the new platform of the damned (Tommy Robinson has over 35,000 followers there).

Does Facebook have a grudge against the right? It’s an accusation that’s been leveled against Mark Zuckerberg before — notably in a Congressional hearing last year — and is rearing its head again, with the suspension of two British right-wing broadcasters, Tommy Robinson and Raheem Kassam. Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, has been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for ‘repeatedly breaching’ their Community Standards by ‘posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims’, according to a Facebook blog post. ‘What they’re saying about me is complete lies,’ Robinson told Cockburn this morning. ‘What they’re saying about “hate” is all lies.