Pro-Trump Militias Are Threatening the Election—and Meta Lets Them
As paper ballots are lit on fire by vigilantes and Donald Trump threatens to punish the “enemy from within,” Meta is not only allowing extremist groups on its platform but even is auto-generating anti-government militia Facebook groups. According to data compiled by the Tech Transparency Project for WIRED, after January 6, the number of Facebook groups and pages used by the alt-right to organize with each other has only grown. The Tech Transparency Project found more than 200 Facebook pages and nearly 200 anti-government pages that recruit for extremist movements. Nearly two dozen of these pages and groups have been created in the past six months.Meta has not only looked the other way but even used its own technology to auto-generate these groups for militias. Though some chapters of American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) on the platform have been moderated or banned, in May, Facebook automatically created a page for an Arizona chapter of AP3. In June, it did the same for an AP3 “training range” in New Mexico. On the site, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.” “Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project, told WIRED.This isn’t the first time that Meta has been caught auto-generating pages for terrorist or white supremacist groups. In 2020, a whistleblower alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission to the issue.Most recently, groups such as the “Patriot Group” or “The Party of Trump,” the latter of which has 171,000 members, have urged their members to do ballot dropbox “monitoring,” including encouraging Trump supporters to stand guard at ballot boxes with AR-15s. With the election a week away, as Paul asks: “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”
As paper ballots are lit on fire by vigilantes and Donald Trump threatens to punish the “enemy from within,” Meta is not only allowing extremist groups on its platform but even is auto-generating anti-government militia Facebook groups.
According to data compiled by the Tech Transparency Project for WIRED, after January 6, the number of Facebook groups and pages used by the alt-right to organize with each other has only grown. The Tech Transparency Project found more than 200 Facebook pages and nearly 200 anti-government pages that recruit for extremist movements. Nearly two dozen of these pages and groups have been created in the past six months.
Meta has not only looked the other way but even used its own technology to auto-generate these groups for militias. Though some chapters of American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) on the platform have been moderated or banned, in May, Facebook automatically created a page for an Arizona chapter of AP3. In June, it did the same for an AP3 “training range” in New Mexico. On the site, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.”
“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project, told WIRED.
This isn’t the first time that Meta has been caught auto-generating pages for terrorist or white supremacist groups. In 2020, a whistleblower alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission to the issue.
Most recently, groups such as the “Patriot Group” or “The Party of Trump,” the latter of which has 171,000 members, have urged their members to do ballot dropbox “monitoring,” including encouraging Trump supporters to stand guard at ballot boxes with AR-15s.
With the election a week away, as Paul asks: “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”
