Federal court allegedly upholds right to publish Facebook anti-cop page

The battle over a controversial Facebook glorifying the killing of police continued Monday, after a federal judge reportedly forced the company to restore it after taking it down.

The page sparked a huge outcry last week when the wife of slain officer Sgt. Mark Renninger discovered it included pictures of her husband’s memorial following the 1999 killing that took his life along with fellow officers Greg Richards, Ronald Owens, and Tina Griswold. The picture included offensive language and targets on the back of Renninger’s pall bearers.

Kim Renninger took to the air and social media in an effort to get the page removed. But despite thousands of people filing complaints including listeners, Facebook refused. The company said it didn’t violate its “community standards.”

The company sent KIRO Radio the following statement last week defending its policy:

“We aim to find the right balance between giving people a place to express themselves and promoting a welcoming and safe environment for our diverse, global community. Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our Community Standards. For this reason, we offer people who use Facebook the ability to customize and control what they see by unfollowing, blocking and hiding the posts, people, Pages and applications they don’t want to see.”

But in an unexplained move, Facebook changed its mind some time over the weekend, and Renninger tells KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don Show she learned Monday it had been removed.

“Sure enough, it’s down,” she says. “I haven’t heard anything from Facebook except that they decided to change their mind and took it down. Other than that, I don’t know,” she says.

Renninger credits the massive outpouring of opposition to the site after her initial plea for help removing it last week.

“There’s tens of thousands of reports that were going through on each picture and also the page itself so there’s no way Facebook could ignore what’s going on.”

But the site was back online Monday afternoon. The anonymous page owner claimed in a post on the site a federal judge in San Antonio issued an emergency federal injunction against Facebook and ordered its reinstatement.

Renninger says she’s hopeful the effort will make Facebook more amenable to having a dialogue with people like her, and change its policies to make it easier to shut down offensive pages.