The Action for Alice 2020 Facebook page has been suspended for 28 days, but its owner and local businessman Darren Clark said he will launch a new website on Tuesday and will also be taking to other social media platforms, while pointing the blame for the Facebook ban at Fyles Government operatives and the NT Police executive.

Mr Clark helped attract the national and international spotlight on Alice Springs last month through the Action for Alice 2020 Facebook page, and speaking out to the national media, which led to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visiting the troubled town with the promise of $250 million in federal government spending in central Australia to help combat the ongoing crime problems.

It also forced NT Chief Minister Natasha Fyles to bring in new alcohol restrictions for Indigenous communities and town camps that she had previously vowed not to impose.

Mr Clark, whose bakery was broken into for the 42nd time in three years on the weekend, said he had been serving a week’s Facebook ban for posting a video showing people wrestling in the street, which was due to end Saturday, when he was notified by Facebook on Thursday that another video he posted caused a 28-day ban. He said the social media giant soon apologised and restored the video but then on Friday re-issued the 28-day ban.

The video depicted a girl throwing a chair, he said, describing it as “tame” and adding it had been pinned to the top of his page since February 6, the day the new alcohol bans had been announced.

The Office of the Chief Minister did not respond to questions about allegations it worked to have the page suspended.

NT Police media manager Margaret McKeown said NT Police have not campaigned to have the Action for Alice page shutdown.

However, she said it was general practice when police receive complaints from members of the public regarding “cyberbullying, adult cyber abuse, image-based abuse, or illegal and restricted content, they will often be referred to the eSafety Commissioner or the specific social media provider, while specific cyber-crimes will be investigated by the relevant agency”.

The ABC quoted a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s owner, saying its investigation of the page found posts were “correctly removed for violating our bullying and harassment policies”.

“We may place restrictions on pages and admins that repeatedly break our rules. For example, we may temporarily restrict them from posting, commenting, or sending messages,” the spokesperson told the ABC.

Mr Clark said he had previously had a three-day ban a few years ago for a video, and had one video he shared from the Mango Inquirer Facebook page blocked.

But he said that was all the Facebook punishment he had faced in three years of documenting crime in the town, posting videos, photos and information about crime sent to him by community members, a lot of which NT Police had not, but later did not make public through its media unit or social media.

In relation to the ban, the ABC reported Alice Springs town councillor Marli Banks as saying despite issues with the page, banning it was “not the answer”.

“People feel silenced,” she said.

Mr Clark said he had already posted a video to an Action for Alice TikTok account, and hoped to have a website and a Twitter account up by Tuesday afternoon, followed at some point by a YouTube channel.

“Everyone thinks the town has died down and there’s no crime. I can tell you there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that’s going on,” he said.

“We don’t have a local newspaper, we don’t have a local TV station, so 90 per cent of the gear that I put up, no-one would have known about.

“People were suffering. It was hearsay, it was talked about at barbecues, people had had enough.

“I actually gave it a platform for it all to be seen, and so I provided all the evidence and all the proof that these things were happening.

“We’ll broaden this now and we’ll make this a northern Australian site, and we’ll bring the top half of Australia together, and we’ll show the federal government what exactly is going on because they can’t hide it anymore.

His second last post on the site was from February 11: “Out of the $250,000,000 + Not a cent for victims of crime Who is actually fighting for the people of Alice Springs?”

Action for Alice’s uneasy relationship with NT Government, NT Police

In early February, just before the prime minister’s visit, Mr Clark had used a national television interview to say NT Police Minister Kate Worden needed to lose her job.

“Anthony Albanese when he gets off the plane, the first thing he should say to Natasha Fyles is ‘Kate Worden, go’,” he said in an interview with Sky News Australia.

“She has to go and she has to go today.”

A few days later and with a visit to the town from Ms Fyles and her cabinet imminent, Mr Clark again took to national television to say the Chief Minister needed to apologise to the community.

“So Natasha Fyles, the first thing she needs to do today is stand in front of the people of Alice Springs… she needs to apologise to the people of Alice Springs that have been victims of crime, victims of assault for now over four-and-a-half years,” Mr Clarke told Sky News.

“Then she has to apologise to the women that have been brutal brutal victims of domestic violence. And then she has to apologise to the little children that have been neglected and not thought of in this whole process.”

In Late January the NT Independent reported Mr Clark was told by Assistant Police Commissioner Martin Dole that he may have committed a crime for publishing info about an indecent assault in the middle of the afternoon in Alice.

However Mr Clark posted about an alleged indecent assault that occurred in Alice Springs on Monday afternoon, which NT Police confirmed in a media release on Wednesday, with roughly the same information.

Mr Clark did not publish prohibited information and NT Police did not answer questions from the NT Independent, specifically asking them to explain how Mr Clark’s post contravened the Sexual Offences (Evidence And Procedure) Act.

A former NT Police sergeant, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions for speaking out against the top brass, said the legislation clearly showed the Action for Alice post did not constitute a crime and said Mr Dole’s actions could be considered under the Improper Conduct offence section, which states that when deciding whether a person’s conduct warrants a criminal charge, if the person is a public officer, such as a police officer, it needs to be determined whether the person behaved in a way reasonably expected of a police officer.

Last week, the Fyles Government introduced the new alcohol ban legislation for remote communities on urgency to Parliament that will effectively reinstate former federal laws that lapsed last year after previously saying it would not implement the bans.

The Fyles Government was pressured to reinstate the grog bans after weeks of national media coverage and by the federal government, despite Ms Fyles previously calling the bans “race-based policy”.