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Since President Trump’s comments during last night’s debate we see an uptick on FB in content related to the Proud Boys including memes featuring his “Stand down, stand by” language. At this point, much of this content condemns the PBs & President Trump’s comments about them.
That said, when this is shared to support the Proud Boys, or other banned individuals, we’ve removed it and have already hashed memes to stop other people from continuing to share this content.
As a reminder, FB banned the Proud Boys in Oct 2018 so their accounts & other content praising or supporting them is prohibited. Enforcement in this adversarial space isn’t perfect, but the team has blocked hashtags, hashed images, & removed Accounts, Groups, Pages, Events, etc.
I’m very aware that researchers & journalists still find these folks on platform, but I also see how much is prevented from upload or removed before it’s identified publicly. This work is always ongoing. Check out the CSER for more on this work generally: https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforcement">https://transparency.facebook.com/community...
In 2020, we’ve also conducted 3 strategic network disruptions against the Proud Boys - this is when our internal investigators identify a broader network of accounts and content the network is using, and remove it all at once.
The first SND was in February and our investigation into Proud Boy’s accounts led us to also identify a network tied to Roger Stone violating our policies for CIB - https://about.fb.com/news/2020/07/removing-political-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/">https://about.fb.com/news/2020...
The second SND was in May and June (two steps) when we identified Proud Boys accounts returning to FB and coordinating to attend and bring weapons to protests in the US.
The third SND was last week and targeted accounts returning to FB to promote and coordinate the rally in Portland last weekend.
Their tactics keep changing. The latest: when we remove content promoting their rallies, we see them replace “Proud Boys” with “Trump 2020” and “MAGA” on their content. When we determine this material is designed to support the Proud Boys, we remove it.
I know folks are also curious about the new Militarized Social Movements policy announced on Aug 19. Bottom line: we’ve identified more than 300 groups under this policy and removed more than 6500 Groups/Pages btw 8/19 and 9/15.
Does this mean the problem is solved? No, it does not mean that. There are still gaps and bad actors are always adapting techniques. We find many of these, but researchers and journalists sometimes identify those gaps first. I know you won’t be shy about pointing them out.
Finally, a key point. As a global society we ultimately had some success countering the Islamic State’s digital activity because there was a coalition of 80+ countries working the problem. Digital platforms stepped up, but the success online was a function of broader trends.
Social media companies must improve policies & enforcement re white supremacy & violence. But this problem demands a societal, governmental, and inter-governmental response. Companies should do more, but even perfection from digital platforms won’t solve this problem alone.
There is no one solution that fixes everything. ISIS has taken a beating but is still out there.
It takes a society collectively confronting hate and violence directly to push it back: creating new offramps for those tempted by it, mitigating the social ills that create disillusionment, investigating and punishing crimes when they occur.
Facebook has work to do to keep the platform safe, and get our piece of that wider puzzle right. That work continues and deserves attention; but we need to work together to uplevel the rest of the strategy as well. /End
