Anti-grooming gang activist and independent journalist Tommy Robinson says was purged from Instagram, and fears parent company Facebook Inc. will erase his presence next.
UPDATE: Robinson’s account has now been restored, with Instagram claiming it was “removed in error”.
“The account @realtommyrobinson was removed in error and has since been reactivated,” a statement from the photo-sharing platform states. The orginal article continues below:
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Robinson, who was recently freed from prison after a conviction for contempt was quashed by the Lord Chief Justice, had already been booted from the Twitter micro-blogging platform earlier in the year for alleged ‘hateful conduct’ — in particular, he has claimed, for a tweet which stated the statistics on the ethnic breakdown of grooming gang rapists (mostly Muslims of South Asian extraction) and their victims (mostly white working-class girls).
Robinson’s removal from Instagram follows the near-simultaneous purge of InfoWars anchor Alex Jones from Apple, YouTube, Spotify, and Facebook — a move Robinson criticised.
“Imagine EE, Three, O2 and Vodafone all got together and started listening to what you were saying in conversations on your mobile phone,” Robinson commented after InfoWars was purged.
“They decided they did not like what you were saying so they all blocked you from their network effectively removing your ability to communicate. If this started happening to people, there would be uproar. Well that is exactly what Facebook, Youtube, Apple and Spotify just did to Alex Jones and Infowars. It does not matter if you agree or Disagree with Alex Jones, this is forcible suppression of opposition voices that predominantly left wing silicon valley do not agree with or ‘fascism’ as it is better known! [sic]”
Robinson fears Facebook — which owns Instagram — will be the next social media platform to purge him, severing his connection to almost 870,000 supporters on the website.
“They have now deleted my Instagram account,” Metro reports him as saying. “Facebook will soon close us down.”
Responding to the news, InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson commented: “Remember the days when they claimed censorship wasn’t politically motivated? Those days are gone.”