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After being available for months, information about ICE agents is suddenly being blocked today on META-owned platforms Instagram, Facebook and Threads.
“We restrict certain activity to protect our community,” an IG response said Tuesday after an attempt to post ICE List material. “Let us know if you think we made a mistake.” A similar result came on Facebook, and on Threads any ICE List link or paste simply disappeared with “Link Not Allowed” popping up.
The apparent censoring follows the latest fatal shooting in Minneapolis this past weekend of an American citizen by ICE officers with the death of Alex Pretti. A 37-year-old ICU nurse who was trying to stop masked federal agents from assaulting a woman observing them, January 24 killing of Pretti has proven the tipping point for even some Republicans against Trump’s heavy handed tactics. The jamming of access on META to the anti-ICE website also comes as protests and critiques of the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency and its masked officers seems to be repressed on the new-ish US version of TikTok, which has a number of Trump and MAGA supporters among its new minority stake owners.
Having finally sealed an administration brokered deal, TikTok has blamed the whole thing on the bad timing of “a power outage at a US data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate.” Still, outgoing California Governor and likely 2028 POTUS contender Gavin Newsom started a probe on January 26 on whether TikTok is pushing down anti-Trump content.
Of course, this prohibiting of sharing ICE List links and information on the META platforms and feeds certainly appears consistent with Mark Zuckerberg‘s full-on courting and flattering of Donald Trump since the former Apprentice host returned to the White House in January 2025.
As well as paying Trump $25 million last year over a suit from the suspension of his accounts following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, that courting has also seen Zuckerberg put POTUS buddy and UFC boss Dana White on the META board. CEO Zuck has also purged fact-checking on the platforms for “community notes,” and allowed an almost free hand for anyone to say anything they like, regardless if it is true, offensive or even violent.
When asked Tuesday by Deadline if the ban on the ICE List was in effect to appease the authoritarian Trump and his MAGA administration, META spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back.
“No, our Community Standards prohibit the sharing or soliciting of PII,” Stone said. That “PII” is a.k.a. Personally Identifiable Information, a wide-ranging category that META has that includes data about “Government IDs of law enforcement, military or security personnel.”
First launched in June 2025, the European-based ICE List announced earlier this month that a whistleblower in the Department of Homeland Security had provided it with material on 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol staffers. Causing deep concern at the Kristi Noem-led DHS, that material was said to have phone numbers, names, titles and positions, contact info and more. However, analysis by the likes of WIRED has found that much of the data on the ICE List is actually from postings and the like that ICE agents and adjacent officials have themselves put up online or out in the public realm.
To that, the Privacy Violations section of META’s Community Standards policy seems to contradict the claims of PII preservation by META.
The section states: “We remove content that shares, offers, or solicits personally identifiable information or other private information that could lead to physical or financial harm, including financial, residential and medical information, as well as private information obtained from illegal sources. We recognise that private information may become publicly available through news coverage, court filings, press releases or other sources. When that happens, we may allow the information to be posted.”
Reps for ICE List did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the culling of its communications and connections on the META platforms. The blockage seems to have started in the past 72 hours, not long after legal observer Pretti was fatally gunned down in the streets of the Minnesota city on January 23. Inflamming an already burning situation across the nation between federal officers and citizens, documented and undocumented, Pretti’s killing that came less than two weeks after agents shot Renee Good in the face in her car on the streets of Minneapolis.
In a larger context, META’s move comes as jury selection in a lawsuit against the company and Google-owned YouTube began today in downtown LA. In what is the first of several actions against the social media and tech companies by users, the case in LA Superior Court presents great risk for the business model of Zuckerberg and other techlords. First brought before the courts in 2023, the case from now 19-year-old K.G.M. and her family alleges that social media companies know their platforms and algorithms are a poignant source of suicides, depression, sleep disruption, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and anxiety, and don’t do much to fix it.
Earlier Tuesday, like SNAP did last week, the under-new-management (kinda) TikTok reached a confidential settlement with the plaintiffs before court opened.
While the check writing TikTok and SNAP are now out of the fray, META and YouTube came up very short in their efforts late last year to have the case tossed out. Which means, as LASC Judge Carolyn Kuhl determined in October 2025, after rejecting arguments from high priced attorneys that CEOs like Zuckerberg actually had limited knowledge of their own companies, that the META CEO and Instagram’s Adam Mosseri would have to testify in the case.
Among the other lawsuits META is facing is a 2023 action by a Red and Blue state alliance that asserts “Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits.”
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