A participant of hacktivist collective Anonymous who originally started a campaign against Facebook said an attack set for 5 November was a misunderstanding.
A video statement was posted on YouTube saying that Anonymous will “kill” Facebook on the same day Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the House of Lords in the UK on 1605.
However, a participant of the collective, which Gawker refers to as Speakeasy, posted a statement on Pastebin saying this was not the operation’s original intention.
Speakeasy said there had once been an operation made up of 10-20 members from Anonymous to help bring attention to Facebook’s data policies.
This lead to the idea of making “an ethical, anonymous Facebook alternative,” however, after the release of AnonPlus, this project was shelved.
Operation Facebook was also planning to encourage users to delete their Facebook accounts on 5 November, however, they concluded this was a “bad idea” and decided not to go through with it.
Speakeasy expected the project to die, however, the #opfacebook channel was never removed. The draft warning against Facebook also remained. People began to come across this channel and its sudden growth of activity gained media attention.
Speaking to Gawker, Speakeasy said an attack on Facebook would be “ridiculous.”
“Even if it succeeded, Facebook has a lot of users, and we want to help people, not hurt them,” he said.
However, considering the growing popularity of the channel, the Facebook attack could go ahead without those originally behind it.
