On Friday April 29th - royal wedding day - Facebook deleted around 50 profiles belonging to political groups, most of them involved in anti-cuts activity. Among the groups affected was Notts Uncut.

Notts Uncut lost their page sometime in the early hours of Friday. One of the groups posted on the page at around midnight, but it was gone when they looked again at around 10am. Apparently they received no notification of the closure, only realising what had happened as news filtered through of other affected groups.

Notts Uncut were told that the profile had been deleted "as it was a breach of facebook's terms and conditions due to being set up in a false name and that facebook profiles were for individuals not groups or organisations." As Jon Worth explains, there are 3 ways to interact on Facebook:

1. With a profile – intended for real people, with a name
2. With a group – a small to medium size group of people discussing something
3. With a page – ‘Like’ something to get news updates from it

The accounts deleted in this instance appear to all have been profiles, that is organisations masquerading as individuals.

Notts Uncut are happy to concede this point, "It was technically in breach of the terms and conditions. However the profile had been in use for months (as had the other 50 ish profiles which were removed) without any issues being raised. It seems that there are many, many facebook profiles which are named for organisations, or in false names, but only the profiles for anti-cuts activist groups were removed."

Open Rights Group (ORG) note that "these deletions do not appear to have happened elsewhere in Europe or the USA." This in association with the fact that it took place on the day of the royal wedding, following an orchestrated campaign of media hysteria about "disruption" to the event and raids on squats across the country the previous day, makes the suspicion that the deletions took place under police pressure unavoidable.

It is worth noting here that none of these groups had activities planned for the royal wedding. As one Notts Uncut activist noted, "most of us have been so busy recently we were looking forward to a well earned rest and were planning to take full advantage of the free day off work."

In practice, the deletions appear to have caused only minimal disruption, although a Notts Uncut activist complained that their "free day off was mostly spent trying to retrieve all of the contacts that had been on the deleted profile and replacing the event information for our next action, which had been lost when the profile was deleted."

In fact, Notts Uncut, have now got the profile back. One activist from the group explained: "Facebook e-mailed me on friday evening to ask if I wanted the profile converted to a group - I said yes, to ensure we got all our contacts back, just logged on and there it is in its familiar old form!" As ORG comment this development (reflected in the experience of a number of other groups) is welcome, but "advance warnings would be more appropriate."

Notts Uncut had a new page up within hours of the deletion and with their old profile now restored, they intend to "continue to use facebook in the short term as it is a great way of reaching large networks of people, however in the longer term we will be considering different methods of communication." They already use a number of other services including Twitter and the UK Uncut and False Economy websites, but value Facebook for its interactivity.

This story underlines that while many activist groups may find Facebook useful for organising they cannot and should not rely on it. In Egypt, the social network was widely used by participants in the revolution there, but Facebook refused to compromise on their position that profiles be registered in the name of real people. The page "We Are All Khaled Said" was set up by Google exec Wael Ghonim to memorialise a businessman killed in police custody and became a focus of the burdgeoning pro-democracy movement. However, Facebook removed the page because its administrator was using a pseudonym to avoid detection. This hardly seems unreasonable given the realities of live in Egypt at the time.

The dangers of being exposed as a dissident in the UK are nowhere near as severe as they were in Egypt under Mubarak, but nevertheless, activists should think carefully about using corporate social networks. Facebook and Twitter et al may be useful, but they are capitalist corporations, ultimately part of the system we should be challenging. Instead we should look to activist alternatives like Indymedia, Be The Media, Crabgrass and many others. These do not yet have the reach of Facebook, but it is up to us to build them.