MySpace bans Atheist and Agnostic Group

reposted from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_and_Agnostic_Group
and
http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2008/01/banned-myspace-deletes-largest-atheist.html
and
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2197,n,n

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MySpace has deleted the world's largest online atheist group. What should be done about it?

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Atheist and Agnostic Group

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Atheist and Agnostic Group, founded on June 13, 2004, was an internet forum with approximately 35,000 members on the social networking site MySpace targeted toward atheists and agnostics. Due to its growing size and prominence as the largest group on MySpace dedicated to the subject of non-theism, the creator of the group was invited as a representative to The New Humanism conference at Harvard University on April 20 to April 22, 2007.^[2]

A campaign by Christians who opposed the group led MySpace to delete it; this deletion was reversed, but two years later, on 1 January 2008, MySpace deleted the group again, and now refuses to undelete it.

The group has experienced several attacks on its infrastructure. On November 23, 2007, the group leader's password was phished, his profile destroyed, and the group taken over and renamed "The Jesus Group". More than half of the regular group members were banned outright, and many of the threads were deleted, including all threads that referred to the hack. This attack ended with the moderator deleting his Myspace profile. Many regulars of the group were banned from membership. On January 1, 2008, the moderator received a message from Myspace stating that the group was scheduled to be removed. Several minutes later, the group was deleted. It is unclear whether Myspace was aware of the incident.