Facebook initially decided that the post by Anonymous Australia was fine. However, the social media site deleted the post, which sought to criticize the character of Armstrong Renata, after withdrawing its original position on whether it breached its “community standards”. The post in question looked into the alleged character of Renata, one of the two men accused for attacking that led to Cole’s death. Renata and Daniel Maxwell, both 21, were charged with illegal striking causing death when Miller succumbed to head injuries after an alleged one-punch attack in Brisbane’s Chinatown mall early Sunday morning. Bill Potts, President of Queensland’s Law Society president warned that online material “electronic lynch mobs [that] were appealing to prejudice” about Renata’s character could lead to a mistrial because it had the prospect to influence jury members. By Wednesday, the comments thread that accompanied the post had been shared almost 40,000 times, and went hugely viral in Australia. Therefore, the chances that anyone who was interested in the case would have viewed the post anyways before it was pulled out. The group posted on Thursday: “We’ve had our recent post taken down, and we’ve been given yet another formal warning from the high ups of Facebook. “Though we haven’t broken any laws, we’ve apparently offended too many people which is an apparent breach of their guidelines.” Defending its role in public uproar over Miller’s death, Anonymous said that it had “worked together to find a witness who the family had sought out, we have passed around a few fundraisers that have been made, we stood our ground on coward punches and we took a stand for what we believed in.”
