S.F. author temporarily banned on Facebook after writing about L.A. protests

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the author’s account was reactivated shortly after the Chronicle first reported about the incident.

Apparently, acknowledging the existence of violence can get you kicked off Facebook — at least temporarily. 

San Francisco author and activist Rebecca Solnit reported her account on Meta’s social media network was suspended in a post to Bluesky on Tuesday, June 10, adding that she was soon told the decision was permanent. 

But less than 24 hours later, the account was reinstated after a Meta spokesperson said the suspension had been made in error.

On Tuesday, Solnit wrote, “Facebook decided to suspend my account because of a piece (below) I wrote Monday about violence which in no way advocates for it (but does point out who is violent in the current ruckus).”

She included a screenshot of Facebook’s explanation of its decision, which reads, “Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity.”

Solnit did not explain how, beyond timing, she believed that the essay in question, “Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence,” written on her independent site Meditations in an Emergency, was the reason for her ouster. 

Solnit said she appealed the suspension. But on Wednesday, June 11, she shared a screenshot of Facebook’s response saying it decided to disable her account: “It still doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity. You cannot request another review of this decision.”

It wasn’t until nearly 30 minutes after the Chronicle first published a story about the incident that a Meta representative referred to a post on the social platform X by Communications Director Andy Stone saying the company had made a mistake with Solnit’s account. 

“This was an error and the account has been restored,” he wrote. 

Solnit’s Facebook page was live again as of Wednesday afternoon.

Still, the incident underscores the difficulty of moderating content on social media. “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is central to our content review process,” Meta’s help page reads, noting that only some of its decisions get reviewed by humans. 

The about-face recalls an exchange last month between Jamie Lee Curtis and Meta in which the Academy Award-winning actor demanded on Instagram that the site pull a deepfake ad that used her image. She was successful, but few other users can marshal 6.1 million followers to their cause.

In the case of Solnit, who has 316,000 Facebook followers, it’s not obvious what policy her post violated. 

“I think maybe it’s begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration,” her piece begins, referring to the clashes in Los Angeles between protesters of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the California National Guard deployed by Trump against city and state officials’ wishes.

“All they can do is punish and incite, and I hope that some of the protesters are telling them they’re violating their mission and maybe the law,” the essay continues. “We are escalating because they are escalating.”

The “Men Explain Things to Me” author goes on to question longtime right-wing and media narratives that stereotype protesters as violent while giving law enforcement a pass for much more harm to people and property. 

“One thing to remember is that they’ll claim we’re violent no matter what; the justification for this ongoing attack on immigrants and people who resemble immigrants in being brown is the idea that America is suffering an invasion and in essence only a certain kind of white person belongs here,” she writes. 

The piece never advocates responding to force in kind, instead arguing for nonviolent defiance. 

“I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn’t mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents,” she writes.

Solnit concludes by enumerating the kinds of violence the Trump administration has perpetrated — against the environment, against the First Amendment, against women, against his personal enemies, against the very notion of truth. 

“It is up to us to defeat that agenda,” she writes.

Solnit noted that she doesn’t think a Meta higher-up has it in for her, despite the popularity of her account. She cited “inane algorithms that often delete posts” as the likeliest explanation. (In April, the Chronicle reported on Meta’s rejection of an ad promoting a Northern California Pride festival.) 

Even so, it’s clear Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cultivated an alliance with the Trump administration, dining with the president at Mar-a-Lago and appointing Trump ally Dana White to his company’s board. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Meta’s Community Standards on its account integrity page state that the company reserves the right to restrict or disable accounts that risk “imminent harm to individual or public safety.” 

Solnit is the author of more than 30 books, including “Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas” and the children’s book “Cinderella Liberator,” which Marin Shakespeare Company is adapting into a musical. She first moved to the Bay Area from her native Connecticut as a child, in 1966.