Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 1 of 9

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

US UNCUT LLC, CARL GIBSON,
and MARK PROVOST
Plaintiffs,
Civil Action No. 1:16-cv-368-PB
v.

RYAN CLAYTON, DANIEL GOULDMAN,
MATTHEW HANSON, VERA NEXUM, LLC
and
JOHN DOES Nos. 4 through 10.
Defendants.

DECLARATION OF CARL GIBSON IN SUPPORT OF
PLAINTIFFS’ OBJECTION TO DEFENDANT RYAN CLAYTON’S
MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION
I, Carl Gibson, declare as follows:
1.

I am providing this declaration to respond to certain factual assertion Ryan

Clayton (“Clayton”) makes in the declaration filed in support of his motion for preliminary
injunction. This declaration does not attempt to respond to each and every inaccuracy or untruth
contained in Clayton’s declaration. Rather, I am responding only to those that merit immediate
response for purposes of the competing motions for preliminary injunction.
2.

I am familiar with Facebook accounts and Facebook pages having maintained my

own Facebook account for more than a decade and having worked with social media
professionally since graduating college in 2009.

1

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 2 of 9

3.

Clayton and I each established US Uncut Facebook pages within days of one

another other in February 2011 and we both accumulated followers quickly. In fact, when
Clayton and I agreed to join efforts and combine our US Uncut Facebook pages, the US Uncut
Facebook page I created was gaining followers at a faster rate than the page Clayton created. I
believe this was because the page I started provided useful information on the organization of
protests.
4.

When Clayton and I agreed to merge our US Uncut Facebook pages into one, I

did it with the understanding that Clayton would not “own” the resulting combined page.
Clayton shared this understanding, which is why Clayton, Gifford and I all maintained
administrator rights to the US Uncut Facebook page.
5.

Clayton now claims the US Uncut Facebook page is “his” because “the site was

an extension of my personal Facebook account and personal email account.” (Doc. 17-2,
Clayton Decl. ¶ 41.) This statement is misleading because Clayton omits key facts about how all
Facebook pages are created and administered.
6.

Facebook pages can only be created by those who have Facebook accounts.

Facebook only allows individuals to open accounts on its platform. Entities and organizations
cannot establish accounts on Facebook.
7.

The Facebook user who creates a Facebook page is automatically assigned the

role of a page administrator. A page administrator can control all aspects of the page, including
what may be posted to the page and who may post it.
8.

It is not necessary that the Facebook user who created the page remain the page

administrator. Rather, the initial page administrator can grant other users page administrator
rights, so a Facebook page may have multiple page administrators. Once rights are granted, the

2

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 3 of 9

new page administrator(s) can exercise full control of the page and even revoke the original
administrator’s rights to control the page. This happens all the time and, in fact, I have created a
number of Facebook pages using my Facebook account where I am no longer the page
administrator. In other words, once a Facebook page is created, it can exist independently from
the Facebook account that created it.
9.

This was the situation with the US Uncut Facebook page. Clayton, Gifford and I

each maintained page administrator rights for US Uncut Facebook page and its existence was not
dependent upon any one individual’s Facebook account. While Clayton may have been the one
who used his Facebook account to create the US Uncut Facebook page, it was not an “extension”
of Clayton’s Facebook account or email account such that the page’s existence was somehow
tied to Clayton individually. To the contrary, the page had assumed independence from any
single Facebook user account.
10.

Clayton’s assertions that he “devoted a significant amount of [his] time” to US

Uncut and was “involved in all aspects” of US Uncut from 2011 to June 2014” are gross
distortions of the truth. Clayton’s interest in US Uncut dropped considerably in the fall of 2011
when the Occupy Wall Street movement overtook US Uncut as the leading grassroots
progressive political movement. In fact, at the same time the Occupy movement was gaining
momentum, US Uncut was becoming fractured and stagnant, with infighting and discord among
organizers at the national and local levels.
11.

The stagnation prompted Clayton to write an “open letter” to the

“Braintrust/Faculty/Leadership of US Uncut” on August 3, 2011. In the letter, Clayton identified
US Uncut’s weaknesses as “friction, dysfunctional leadership, debt, inactivity/entropy,
deteriorating membership and lack of an operational framework.”

3

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 4 of 9

12.

Clayton’s open letter fell flat and US Uncut continued to flounder as a protest

movement. As a result, Clayton turned his interest and attention to the Occupy movement.
Clayton encouraged people interested in joining US Uncut to join the Occupy movement instead
and proposed repurposing US Uncut’s website at www.usuncut.org to promote the Occupy
movement. Clayton stopped efforts to obtain grants and donations to sustain US Uncut. The
US Uncut “Braintrust” stopped its weekly calls. By December 2011, Clayton was referring to
the US Uncut movement in the past tense.
13.

To be sure, Clayton was hopeful that US Uncut could be revived as a movement

in the spring of 2012 following the screening of “We’re Not Broke” at the Sundance Film
Festival and the approach of the April 15 tax filing deadline. Clayton even tried organizing
several protests in early 2012 to reignite US Uncut, one of which was at the Sundance Film
Festival itself. None of the protests were successful. They garnered virtually no attendance by
protesters or media attention. After that, US Uncut was defunct as a protest movement.
14.

My work for US Uncut took a different path. In the early days, Clayton, Gifford

and I did many of the same tasks. We each helped organize direct actions, handle media
relations, and update social media accounts, including the Facebook page and web site at
usuncut.org.
15.

Between February and June 2011, Clayton, Gifford and I worked hard to

coordinate and promote direct actions at stores and offices across the United States operated by
some of the largest corporations, including Bank of America, Verizon, BP, FedEx, Target,
General Electric and Apple. The “news and information” US Uncut distributed during this time,
which Clayton mentions in his declaration, consisted of communications about direct actions US
Uncut was organizing and posts that aggregated or rebroadcast news coverage produced by other

4

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 5 of 9

media outlets about US Uncut’s protests and the companies US Uncut targeted. The news US
Uncut was distributing at that time was not created by US Uncut, in contrast to the original
content Mark Provost and I began producing and publishing the following year.
16.

By October 2011, I was the only one regularly posting content to the US Uncut

Facebook page and website. Although Clayton and Gifford continued to have administrator
rights to the Facebook page, their activity was negligible.
17.

My posts to the US Uncut Facebook page between the fall of 2011 and summer of

2012 mostly consisted of links to articles on progressive political and social issues that I had
written for other media outlets. Although the US Uncut political movement was dead, my work
over this time resulted in a relatively modest amount growth of followers to the US Uncut
Facebook page.
18.

I invited Mark Provost to help me with the US Uncut Facebook page in August

2012. Mark and I have backgrounds in journalism and we thought that US Uncut could be
reinvented as an online media hub for an audience with progressive political and social views.
“Memes” were becoming a popular form of expression on the Internet at the time and Mark was
a gifted creator of memes with progressive political and social themes. Mark and I agreed to
shift the content of the US Uncut Facebook page principally to memes.
19.

Between August 2012 and June 2014, Mark Provost and I worked together

creating and posting memes to the US Uncut Facebook page. Our work was rewarded with a
Facebook following that steadily grew. Whereas the US Uncut Facebook page had
approximately 58,000 followers in September 2012, it jumped to nearly 350,000 followers by
June 2014.

5

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 6 of 9

20.

Clayton contributed virtually nothing to the growth of the US Uncut Facebook

page during this time. As I explained before, Clayton’s interest in US Uncut dropped
considerably after the summer of 2011 because the Occupy movement had become the leading
progressive protest movement. Clayton’s skill and background was in political organization and
campaigns and his interest in US Uncut had been as a protest movement. He had little interest in
US Uncut as a content provider to a politically and socially progressive audience, which is what
Mark and I were trying to build.
21.

Clayton’s attitude toward US Uncut did change somewhat in 2013 after he

became the Executive Director for a political action committee called WolfPAC. By that time
Mark and I had grown the US Uncut audience substantially and Clayton saw the US Uncut
audience as an opportunity to promote WolfPAC. Clayton posted to the US Uncut Facebook
page occasionally during this time, perhaps once every other month or once a quarter. The
majority of the posts were to promote WolfPAC.
22.

My recollection is that Clayton’s posts to the US Uncut Facebook page amounted

to less than 10 percent of the total posts. By comparison, I believe Mark Provost was responsible
for 90 percent of all posts to the US Uncut Facebook page during the August 2012 to June 2014
timeframe. I contributed posts as well, but more often I helped Mark to edit and refine his posts
and memes.
23.

Mark Provost and I did not “hatch a scheme” to take control of the US Uncut

Facebook page. We removed Clayton as an administrator in June 2014 because Clayton posted a
meme that was complimentary of a politician who had ties to a Wall Street bank. The meme was
contrary to the spirit of US Uncut and damaging to the brand that Mark and I had cultivated. We
asked Clayton to remove the meme, but he refused. This prompted Mark Provost to remove the

6

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 7 of 9

meme, but Clayton just posted the meme again and ignored our request that he not post it. It was
at that point that we decided to remove Clayton as a page administrator, which prevented
Clayton from posting content to the Facebook page without our prior approval.
24.

It was after June 2014 that US Uncut’s audience exploded. Although we were

having success with memes, Mark and I decided later in 2014 to change the format of US
Uncut’s content and move to news articles. The following year, in July 2015, we established a
new web site at usuncut.com. We used the web site to host the US Uncut articles and posted
links to the articles on the US Uncut Facebook page. It was also in 2015 that Facebook
“verified” the US Uncut Facebook page with a blue badge, which is a symbol Facebook uses to
indicate that Facebook has confirmed a page to be the authentic page of a business.
25.

US Uncut’s audience jumped more than four-fold between June 2014 and August

2016. Whereas the US Uncut Facebook page had grown to around 350,000 followers in June
2014, its audience grew to more than 1.5 million followers by August 2016. Below is a graph
charting the growth of the US Uncut Facebook page from its inception in 2011 through to
August 2016. The blue line indicates the number of Facebook followers. The red line represents
the approximate point in time when Clayton was removed as a page administrator.

7

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 8 of 9

26.

The activity and engagements on US Uncut’s Facebook page in March 2016

placed US Uncut among the top 25 publishers on Facebook worldwide.
27.

I understand Clayton has admitted through his counsel that he, Daniel Gouldman

and Matthew Hanson are members of Vera Nexum, LLC and that Vera Nexum, LLC is the entity
operating the copycat website www.usuncut.news.
28.

Daniel Gouldman and Matthew Hanson also own Addicting Info Enterprises,

LLC, which operates a Facebook page and website that competes against US Uncut. Gouldman
and Hanson also own New Century Times, LLC and Bipartisan Report, LLC, which operate
Facebook pages and websites that compete against US Uncut as well.
29.

Since Clayton’s hijacking of the US Uncut Facebook page on August 3, 2016,

Clayton has posted content that directs Facebook users to the websites controlled by Vera
Nexum, LLC, Addicting Info Enterprises, LLC, New Century Times, LLC and Bipartisan
Report, LLC.

8

 Case 1:16-cv-00368-PB Document 22-1 Filed 10/21/16 Page 9 of 9

30.

Gouldman and Hanson are well aware that Mark Provost and I operate US Uncut

and they know of US Uncut’s popularity as a provider of commentary and news reporting on
progressive issues. In fact, Daniel Gouldman and Mark Provost once discussed a partnership
whereby Addicting Info would provide distribution of US Uncut content. Mark Provost and I
decided against the partnership and instead established the website at www.usuncut.com to
distribute US Uncut’s content.

I DECLARE UNDER THE PAINS AND PENALTIES OF PERJURY THAT THE
FOREGOING IS TRUE AND CORRECT TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE AND
BELIEF.
Dated: October 21, 2016

/s/ Carl Gibson
Carl Gibson

9