Facebook groups pivot to attacks on Black Lives Matter
By Amanda Seitz
Associated Press
July 5, 2020
CHICAGO -- A loose network of Facebook groups that took root across the
country in April to organize protests over coronavirus stay-at-home
orders has become a hub of misinformation and conspiracies theories that
have pivoted to a variety of new targets. Their latest: Black Lives
Matter and the nationwide protests of racial injustice.
These
groups, which now boast a collective audience of more than 1 million
members, are still thriving after most states started lifting virus
restrictions.
And many have expanded their focus.
One
group transformed itself last month from “Reopen California” to
“California Patriots Pro Law & Order,” with recent posts mocking
Black Lives Matter or changing the slogan to “White Lives Matter."
Members have used profane slurs to refer to Black people and protesters,
calling them “animals,” “racist” and “thugs”— a direct violation of
Facebook’s hate speech standards.
Others
have become gathering grounds for promoting conspiracy theories about
the protests, suggesting protesters were paid to go to demonstrations
and that even the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died
in the custody of Minneapolis police, was staged.
An
Associated Press review of the most recent posts in 40 of these
Facebook groups — most of which were launched by conservative groups or
pro-gun activists — found the conversations largely shifted last month
to attacking the nationwide protests over the killing of Black men and
women after Floyd’s death.
Facebook
users in some of these groups post hundreds of times a day in threads
often seen by members only and shielded from public view.
“Unless
Facebook is actively looking for disinformation in those spaces, they
will go unnoticed for a long time and they will grow,” said Joan
Donovan, the research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. “Over time,
people will drag other people into them and they will continue to
organize.”
Facebook
said it is aware of the collection of reopen groups, and is using
technology as well as relying on users to identify problematic posts.
The company has vowed in the past to look for material that violates its
rules in private groups as well as in public places on its site. But
the platform has not always been able to deliver on that promise.
Shortly
after the groups were formed, they were rife with coronavirus
misinformation and conspiracy theories, including assertions that masks
are “useless,” the U.S. government intends to forcibly vaccinate people
and that COVID-19 is a hoax intended to hurt President Donald Trump’s
re-election chances this fall.
Posts
in these private groups are less likely to be scrutinized by Facebook
or its independent fact-checkers, said Donovan. Facebook enlists media
outlets around the world, including The Associated Press, to fact check
claims on its site. Members in these private groups have created an echo
chamber and tend to agree with the posts, so are therefore less likely
to flag them for Facebook or fact-checkers to review, Donovan added.
At
least one Facebook group, ReOpen PA, asked its 105,000 members to keep
the conversation focused on reopening businesses and schools in
Pennsylvania, and implemented rules to forbid posts about the racial
justice protests as well as conspiracy theories about the efficacy of
masks.
But most others have not moderated their pages as closely.
For
example, some groups in New Jersey, Texas and Ohio have labeled
systemic racism a hoax. A member of the California Facebook group posted
a widely debunked flyer that says “White men, women and children, you
are the enemy," which was falsely attributed to Black Lives Matter.
Another falsely claimed
that a Black man was brandishing a gun outside the St. Louis mansion
where a white couple confronted protesters with firearms. Dozens of
users in several of the groups have pushed an unsubstantiated theory that liberal billionaire George Soros is paying crowds to attend racial justice protests.
Facebook
members in two groups — Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine and
Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine — also regularly refer to
protesters as “animals,” “thugs,” or “paid" looters.
In
the Ohio group, one user wrote on May 31: "The focus is shifted from
the voice of free people rising up against tyranny ... to lawless thugs
from a well known racist group causing violence and upheaval of lives.”
Those
two pages are part of a network of groups in Ohio, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania created by conservative activist
Ben Dorr, who has for years raised money to lobby on hot-button
conservative issues like abortion or gun rights. Their latest cause —
pushing for governors to reopen their states — has attracted hundreds of
thousands of followers in the private Facebook groups they launched.
Private
groups that balloon to that size, with little oversight, are like
“creepy basements” where extremist views and misinformation can lurk,
said disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the
nonpartisan Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
“It’s
sort of a way that the platforms are enabling some of the worst actors
to stay on it,” said Jankowicz. “Rather than being de-platformed — they
can organize.”
No comments:
Post a Comment