Did Facebook squash protest sites to avoid trouble at the Royal wedding?

"The UCL Occupation account is still up for the moment, but for how long we don’t know. It may well be that these groups are technically in violation of Facebook’s terms of agreement, but the timing – on the royal wedding and May day weekend – is deeply suspicious. We don’t know for certain, but this purge of online organising groups could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain. "Either way, it is a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years." The UCL student site listed many of the sites taken down. Facebook is claiming, said the online report, that the pages were taken down purely as a matter of procedure. They say that they routinely scan their site for accounts that do not meet the requirements of their Terms of Service and deactivate them. Many of these pages were apparently set up incorrectly, by using fake names for example, says the UCL writer.

"But the accounts were taken down overnight 28th/29th April just before the Royal wedding took place so sparking a raft of theories that Facebook had colluded with the authorities to prevent their pages being used to co-ordinate some sort of protest during the ceremony." The UCL account was still running on Sunday at 7 p.m., including a note of deleted accounts