Update: After a storm of user protest, Facebook has restored the Boycott BP page, at least for now. This isn't the first example of political censorship by Facebook, and it won't be the last. People have to be ready to fight back whenever Facebook pulls this crap.

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Facebook gets more and more fascist every day. (From Citizen Vox 6/29/10)

A few hours ago, Facebook censors removed the Boycott BP fan page, which had almost 800,000 members. It’s unclear why Facebook took the boycott page down. The page’s creator Lee Perkins, who goes by the moniker “Bayou Lee,” immediately created a new page, calling it Boycott bp/Arco. Bayou Lee wrote:

I can’t believe they shut us down with no explanation. I could not even say goodbye to my friends. We must have been doing something right.

Bayou Lee’s page was the largest of many Facebook campaigns aimed against BP for its role in causing the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The question many people were asking Monday night was whether this was a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence BP’s biggest critic.

Facebook is refusing to acknowledge their actions, much less defend them.

This should be taken as a challenge to fight even harder against British Petroleum. Facebook may decide to do the bidding of that incredibly evil oil corporation, but we don't have to. Public Citizen has it's own Boycott BP petition which is not on Facebook.

There's another lesson here. Facebook has become too big and powerful. They are becoming another Microsoft. Their monopoly on full featured social networking is a direct violation of antitrust laws.

Antitrust laws were meant to protect the public from the excesses of corporate power run amok. Repeated privacy violations by Facebook are another example of how corporate power corrupts.

It's time to break up Facebook into a group of compatible and separate social networking companies.