By Matt Agorist

The alternative media group, Unicorn Riot, found themselves on the receiving end of the iron fist of Facebook censorship this week. During the middle of the group’s live coverage of riot police clashing with protesters at a construction site of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Facebook cut their feed and banned the Livestream link from being shared anywhere on its network.

Unicorn Riot has been on the ground since the protests began, providing an uncensored glimpse into the militarized police state being constructed around the protesters. However, Facebook has now rejected their coverage noting that “our security systems detected to be unsafe.”

According to reports, twenty-two protesters were arrested by police in riot gear, including two Unicorn Riot journalists.

In an emailed statement to the Antimedia, a member of the Unicorn Riot said:

At a critical moment of our coverage of a Dakota Access Pipeline direct action today, Facebook’s automated censorship system blocked our video URL, shortly before two of our journalists were arrested onsite. As we started to cover today’s direct action, our collective members immediately noticed that the full Livestream event URL (https://livestream.com/unicornriot/events/6340986) was being blocked from Facebook. Posts and comments with the URL both immediately triggered popup security alerts. We tried putting the same URL through Bitly shortening and that official Unicorn Riot page post was deleted by Facebook within a few minutes. Finally we went with sharing our ‘Live Channel’ URL on our own website which had the embed included on it.

Blaming “both Facebook and law enforcement” for blocking their media distribution, the collective member vowed, “we will not let them stop our mission to amplify the voices of people who might otherwise go unheard, and broadcast the stories that might otherwise go untold.”

“Also, as one member of the collective, I should point out it is obviously concerning when a large media conglomerate blocks URLs to competing video platforms,” the Unicorn Riot member concluded.