The Facebook page of Sopiva, the Finnish Association for Conciliatory Journalists was deleted on the 9th of January. Also the private accounts of the six admins of the page were deleted. This happened without any kind of warning, and the only means that was provided for challenging this decision resulted in immediate response “the decision will not be reversed”. 

Among the people whose profiles were deleted are journalists from the biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and a national broadcasting company Yle, researchers from Tampere University and University of Helsinki, and communications professional from the Finnish Association on Media Education. 

Conciliatory journalism is an approach that seeks to support journalists writing about controversial and polarizing social issues. (Read more at  https://www.sopiva.org/english/ )

It has been extremely hard to contact anyone in Facebook but finally we succeeded in that – they are checking our situation now. But we still don’t have any explanation for why this has happened. We have gone through the Community Standards of Facebook and haven’t found anything that our work would have violated. The only possible reason we could think of is a Facebook event about our book club meeting where we are planning to discuss academic research about conspiracy theories.

We expect Facebook to correct this unfortunate mistake and restore both all our private profiles as well as the Sopiva association’s Facebook community. We also expect a clear explanation for why this has happened. When we have more information, we will share it to you on our website www.sopiva.org/english and on our Twitter account www.twitter.com/sopivary. 

For more information, please contact: 

Mikko Hautakangas

mikko.hautakangas@helsinki.fi

+358 40 190 1363

Noora Kettunen

noora@noorakettunen.com