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Syrian activists' Facebook pages said to be shuttered

A handful of profiles and pages on the social network, which have been gathering places for Syrians to discuss their country's civil war, have mysteriously disappeared.

Dara Kerr Former senior reporter
Dara Kerr was a senior reporter for CNET covering the on-demand economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado, went to school in New York City and can never remember how to pronounce gif.
Dara Kerr

Just as Syria recovers from last week's countrywide Internet outage, a number of government opposition groups are reportedly saying that their Facebook pages have been shuttered, according to Al Arabiya.

One of the pages that is no longer available is the profile page of the former brigadier general of the Syrian Republican Guard, Manaf Tlass, who defected from the government last year. According to Al Arabiya, his page was visited by tens of thousands of Syrians to discuss the country's civil war.

Tlass told Al Arabiya that he reached out to Facebook to get his page back online and has not heard back.

Another Facebook page that is no longer available, Akad al-Jabal, also addressed Syria's ongoing conflict and incidents. According to Al Arabiya, the people in charge of this page have also gotten no response from Facebook after their inquiry into why the page was shuttered.

It's not clear if Facebook took down the pages -- or if pro-government hackers or the Syrian government had something to do with the disappearance.

Since the beginning of the Syrian war, pro-government forces have allegedly been involved in hacking into news sources' Twitter feeds and putting surveillance malware on activists' computers.

CNET contacted Facebook for comment. We'll update the story when we get more information.