In Banning Extremists, Did Facebook Erase Key Evidence on New Mexico Militia?

As a result of its own crackdown on extremist groups, Facebook says that it is unable to provide data needed by prosecutors blaming a New Mexico militia group for fomenting violence that broke out at a 2020 confrontation with protesters who wanted to topple a conquistador statue in Albuquerque and seeking a civil injunction to bar it from acting as a paramilitary organization at future public demonstrations, reports the Washington Post. Facebook claims that the data that would confirm the identity of page administrators and members of the New Mexico Civil Guard no longer exist because it deleted them after it banned the organization as part of an August 2020 content moderation sweep.

The district attorney of Bernalillo County, where Albuquerque is located, has asked a court in Facebook’s home state of California to force the company to comply with its subpoena for basic account information related to the New Mexico Civil Guard group and its members. Facebook is insisting it doesn’t have the records but is also declining to offer a sworn affidavit that it is incapable of retrieving them. Critics argue that Facebook should know that records related to organizations and people it deems dangerous under its “real-world harm” policies are, almost by definition, likely to be of interest to authorities, and should preserve them accordingly. Advocates caution, however, that asking social networks to permanently store data on deleted accounts would amount to surveillance overreach. Prosecutors are hoping the California court will help them get to the bottom of whether Facebook really deleted all of its data on the New Mexico Civil Guard accounts. Their petition also calls on the court to compel Facebook to disclose internal communications around its decision-making to retain or delete the records in question.