Facebook Purges Marq Speck Due to False QAnon Association (Mostly Reinstated) Occurred on 19 Oct 2020

Facebook banned Marq Andrew Speck, the lead singer of a Christian rock band, after falsely associating him and his pages with QAnon likely due to the fact his nickname is ‘Q.’ Below is an excerpt from a post he made detailing the removal of personal account and eight of his pages that occurred without warning or explanation:

For over 40 years, my family, friends, fans and followers from around the world have known me by my nickname “Q” which is prominent in my personal music logo, merchandise and multiple websites around the Internet.

I have been a Facebook user – both personally and professionally with various music, user groups and business pages – for over a decade.

On Monday, October 19, 2020, I logged on to find that 7 of my 9 Facebook pages had been taken down (“disabled”) and my role as Administrator on my other 2 cancelled. When researching how and why this happened, I received a terse and rather ominous pop-up from Facebook stating:

“Your Facebook account was disabled because it did not follow our Community Standards. This decision can’t be reversed.”

Speck went on to mention the fruitless attempt to get Facebook’s Oversight Board to rectify the situation:

I did try submitting my case to your new Oversight Board (https://www.oversightboard.com/) but it just returned me to the “Disabled/Unable To Review” message. Complete runaround so far.

Speck’s personal account and most of his pages seem to have been reinstated.