Facebook groups shift attack to BLM protests
A loose network of Facebook groups that took root in April to organise protests over coronavirus stay-at-home orders has become a hub of misinformation and conspiracy 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 in direct violations 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 organise.”
Shortly after the groups were formed, they were rife with coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories, including assertions that masks are “useless”, the US government intends to forcibly vaccinate people and that Covid-19 is a hoax intended to hurt President Donald Trump’s reelection chances.
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 labelled 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.
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.
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 Centre, a Washington DC, 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 deplatformed — they can organise.”