Facebook shuts down 500 Mom Strong for speaking out against Drag Queen Story Hour
Facebook has shut down a social media group organized for mothers who are opposed to drag queen story hours at local libraries.
The social media giant removed the group 500 Mom Strong because it was deemed "transphobic" and in violation of Facebook's "community standards." 500 Mom Strong is based in Spokane, Washington, and was founded by Anna Hall Bohach, an activist who has long argued that drag is a misogynistic display and is tantamount to the grooming of young children.
Bohach told The Christian Post in an email on Thursday that she has been dealing with these kinds of bans for some time now, the latest of which happened Monday, and that Facebook representatives are not answering her questions. Facebook did send her a message saying that her page was removed for violating community standards and that policies were in place "to protect against recidivist behavior and do not allow people to set up new Pages that represent Pages that have already been removed from our platform."
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"When I asked them about the half dozen other fake 500 Mom Strong pages that were put up by drag queens used to parody 500 Mom Strong, I received no answer and the pages are still active. There is also a fake profile, created by drag queens, using my name and information that has been reported multiple times by my friends and me that Facebook refuses to remove. I asked the Facebook representative about it and I still have yet to receive an answer," Bohach said.
Bohach added that she and her like-minded friends are regularly antagonized by the Facebook page 500 Drag Queen Strong — a page set up to counter her efforts — which continues to operate their page with impunity.
"They regularly publish anti-Christian and anti-woman rhetoric that Facebook refuses to take down. They use language such as "c**t" to describe me and other women and call us terrorists for objecting to transgender ideology. They report us to the police [for allegedly] making anti-trans posts. It is beyond ridiculous that our page would be removed when theirs is allowed to stay up."
The June 1 ban was the third time her page was removed.
"The first time it was removed for hate speech because I shared a post that said 'Reminder: Women don't have to be polite to someone who is making them uncomfortable,'" Bohach said.
The second time her page was removed by Facebook occurred after she and another mom posted about a trans-identified male who was kicked out of a bathroom in neighboring Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. After she posted it, her page was unpublished and Facebook sent her a subsequent message saying it did not violate community standards yet it remained unpublished. As of now, following the third ban, she has been unable to make another page using the same name 500 Mom Strong, but she is building a Facebook group that continues to grow.
"We have no plans to slow down or stop our activism," Bohach said.
A company spokesperson for Facebook told LifeSiteNews Wednesday that the third 500 Mom Strong page was “taken down for violating our Community Standards.”
Since many cities have banned gatherings in response to the coronavirus pandemic, libraries are no longer hosting in-person Drag Queen Story Hour events. Instead they've been moved to online social media platforms.
