Facebook bans American truckers convoy group from platform

On Wednesday, the Convoy to DC 2022 Facebook group serving as a space for truckers to organize a convoy traveling from California to Washington DC in protest of vaccine mandates was banned from the social media platform.

Speaking with Fox & Friends, Jeremy Johnson, the Facebook group's administrator, said that he and fellow trucker Mike Landis had their accounts removed as well.

"They like to silence people that speak the truth," Johnson said of his Facebook ban. He noted that he has been in contact a civil rights attorney to discuss the next steps.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, told Fox News that "We have removed this group for repeatedly violating our policies around QAnon."

In October of 2020, the social media platform company labeled QAnon as a "violence-inducing conspiracy network" and stated that group pages and admins with ties to QAnon would be removed.

When asked about the statement, Brian Brase, co-organizer of the event, disputed the way that Facebook characterized the group.

"I have to laugh about that. Can they contact me or something? Can we talk? That's not true," he said. "And if that was so, they actually had offered the administrators to remove content and then request to review again. They didn’t even give that option when you click back onto the page."

"They literally wiped Mike Landis and Jeremy completely out of the Facebook, they their Facebook profile is gone banned. They can't even they don't even have a profile anymore. So how are you supposed to request to review or remove anything? It's simply not true," he continued.

Landis, who is a trucker involved in the freedom convoy, said that the convoy began to form because "people that are fed up with the government overreach," and praising the Canadian truckers for their actions.

"You know, it's been a long time coming. I feel like Canada set a great precedent on just coming together and easy rolling across the country like that, and coming into, you know, their capital. And I feel like just the presence of that amount of people that show that they are unhappy with what's going on is a good way to hopefully get their attention and I feel like this whole Facebook censorship thing right here that we have going on is obviously starting to get someone's attention," he said.

When questioned about the scale of the convoy, Johnson said that a lot of people have gotten in touch regarding the event.

"We have a lot of people getting in touch with us that they're very interested in being involved in this. It’s not truckers, it's everyday American people. Multicultural, we have a wide range of people. So this is going to get very big, in my opinion. And I don't know I think the government needs to really take a look at what the American people want. And they don't want mandates. They want to see their families," said Johnson.

Brase noted while the event will be big, it will also be a peaceful event, and that it’s not just about truckers, but about Americans.

"But it's not about the truckers, it's about America, it's about our constitutional rights. It's about our human rights. You know, this is on a global scale violation our human rights this is peaceful. This is crossing both aisles," said Brase.

"This is the end of the mandates and we're doing so peacefully," he concluded.