Far-Right Militias Are Still Using Facebook to Recruit and Organize

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page

03 April 21

acebook has had far too many opportunities to properly crack down on extremists, and each time they’ve failed. It needs to be broken up yesterday, and Mark Zuckerberg held accountable.

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his show InfoWars have been banned on Facebook for nearly two years. But in the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, content from his websites and associates amassed over 1.1 million interactions across the platform. The posts pushed baseless claims that the election was stolen, promoted the January 6th rally, and used militaristic and violent language throughout — like referring to Washington, D.C. as “occupied enemy territory” and exhorting people to travel there to “take our country back.” Facebook did label a majority of the posts with a fact check label — but some of them were labeled with an unrelated fact check regarding COVID vaccines.

And even after the January 6th insurrection, far-right militias are still using the platform to recruit and organize. These groups and individuals know how to exploit the myriad loopholes in Facebook’s moderation policy, and the rest of us are paying the price.

What do you think?