Mod: America's #1 place for violently overthrowing democracy and fomenting bloody insurrection. It's not just your dog pictures anymore. Facebook groups topped 10,000 daily attacks on election before Jan. 6, analysis shows (Washington Postlink): Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.
The barrage — averaging at least
10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously — turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of
President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the
Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed
Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.
“LOOKS LIKE CIVIL WAR is BECOMING INEVITABLE !!!” read a post a month before the
Capitol assault. “WE CANNOT ALLOW FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS TO STAND ! SILENT NO MORE MAJORITY MUST RISE UP NOW AND DEMAND BATTLEGROUND STATES NOT TO CERTIFY FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS NOW !”
Another post, made 10 days after the 2020 election, bore an avatar of a smiling woman with her arms raised in apparent triumph and read, “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT... FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!”
One post showed a
Civil War-era picture of a gallows with more than two dozen nooses and hooded figures waiting to be hanged. Other posts called for arrests and executions of specific public figures — both
Democrats and
Republicans— depicted as betraying the nation by denying
Trump a second term.
“BILL BARR WE WILL BE COMING FOR YOU,” wrote a group member after Barr announced that the Justice Department had found little evidence to support Trump’s claims of widespread vote-rigging. “WE WILL HAVE CIVIL WAR IN THE STREETS BEFORE BIDEN WILL BE PRES.”
Facebook executives have played down the company’s role in the
Jan. 6 attack and have resisted calls, including from its own
Oversight Board, for a comprehensive internal investigation. The company also has yet to turn over all the information requested by the congressional committee studying the Jan. 6 attack, though it says it is negotiating with the committee.
But the
ProPublica-Post investigation, which analyzed millions of posts between
Election Day and
Jan. 6 and drew on internal company documents and interviews with former employees, provides the clearest evidence yet that
Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of
Jan. 6.
A noticeable drop in policing: On Dec. 2, 2020,
Facebook executives disbanded the
Civic Integrity team and scattered its members to other parts of
Facebook’s overall integrity team, reducing their influence. That resulted in the demise of the
Group Task Force. The company also rolled back several emergency measures put in place leading up to
Election Day to control misbehavior in
Facebook groups.
The ProPublica-Post investigation reveals the result: During the lull in enforcement, hundreds of thousands of posts questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, spread lies about voter fraud and at times called for violence. Meanwhile, the company’s pace of group removals slowed to a crawl, the data analysis shows.
Mod: Lots more at the link.
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