Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms
Category: News & Politics
Via: perrie-halpern • 4 years ago • 34 commentsBy: Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Facebook said Tuesday that it is banning all QAnon accounts from its platforms, a significant escalation over its previous actions and one of the broadest rules the social media giant has put in place in its history.
Facebook said the change is an update on the policy it created in August that initially only removed accounts related to the QAnon conspiracy theory that discussed violence, which resulted in the termination of 1,500 pages, groups and profiles.
A company spokesperson said the enforcement, which started Tuesday, will "bring to parity what we've been doing on other pieces of policy with regard to militarized social movements," such as militia and terror groups that repeatedly call for violence.
How to talk to family or friends that went down the QAnon rabbit hole
"Starting today, we will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon. We're starting to enforce this updated policy today and are removing content accordingly, but this work will take time and will continue in the coming days and weeks," Facebook wrote in a press release. "Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports."
The spokesperson said the company believed it needed to limit the "ability of QAnon and Militarized Social Movements to operate and organize on our platform."
QAnon is a conspiracy theory that grew out of the fringes of the internet and posits that high-profile Democrats and Hollywood celebrities are members of a child-eating cabal that is being secretly taken down by President Donald Trump, and that members of this fictitious cabal will soon be marched to their execution. The conspiracy theory relies on posts from Q, an anonymous user of the extremist message board 8kun, which was formerly called 8chan, who has been wrongly predicting the roundup of prominent Democrats since October 2017.
The Facebook spokesperson said the company is "not going after individual posts," but whole accounts that spread the conspiracy theory, which has been tied to acts of violence.
QAnon accounts have become centralized hubs for coordinated disinformation campaigns in the last several weeks. Before last Tuesday's debate, QAnon accounts pushed the conspiracy theory that former Vice President Joe Biden was secretly wearing an earpiece before the debate even began.
In the last week, the QAnon community has pushed the conspiracy theory that Trump is not sick with the coronavirus, but carrying out secret missions in a fictitious war that has been predicted by QAnon followers.
QAnon's Save The Children conspiracy is harming real anti-trafficking organizations
Generally, QAnon accounts are also spreaders of coronavirus disinformation, as many followers do not believe the virus exists or that it's as deadly as scientists say.
"We have to think about the QAnon networks as the rails upon which misinformation is driven," said Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. "Every account, event and page are tracks where disinformation can be spread. so it is imperative that Facebook dismantle their infrastructure. Without Facebook, they are not rendered inert, but it will make it more difficult to quickly spread disinformation."
"Of course, this all could have been done sooner, before Q factions aligned with militia groups and anti-vaxxers, to curtail the spread of medical misinformation and the mobilization of vigilante groups," Donovan said.
With the new and complete ban, Facebook faces new hurdles to identifying accounts and enforcement. Reacting to the partial ban in August, QAnon groups and followers shifted tactics to evade moderation, dropping explicit references to Q, and "camouflaging" QAnon content under hashtags ostensibly about protecting children.
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We can't let crazy people rule the world, or take over social media with insane conspiracy theories. Think of the children.
According the Q, all we do is think of the children, we even wrote a cook book. /s
Cookbook: "How to serve man." by chance?
Babies taste best when slow roasted
Rotisserie or crock pot?
I like to roast them on an open fire with some seasoned hickory
Baby meat is always so tender. Like veal.
Eating baby calves is so wrong!
I agree don't vote for Democrats
I ran into one a few years ago........ Holy crap! Did P.T. Barnum ever underestimate how gullible people can be.
I worked for one for two years. He hid it well but his wife was full on bat shit crazy. Q, flat earth, Hollywood basement moon landing, second shooter, the works. I quit when he invited me to go shoot some of his new guns.
I quit when he invited me to go shoot some of his new guns.
Want to go hunting with Dick Cheney?
The couple we met were big on Trump coordinating with the military to root out "The Deep State", and banged on about it all evening.
My cousins and their kids have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. There is no reasoning with them. Facebook post after post about how Hollywood is after our kids.
My once favorite niece has also fallen head first down the rabbit hole and posts the most idiotic Q shit on FB now.
I haven't met any of them yet, but from the way Mr G talks about one of his brothers, I think he skateboarded down the rabbit hole.
Of course, this may change next week when I go fishing with Mr G's buddies
I banned Facebook years ago for privacy reasons and the thought police are just another reason I’m glad I made that decision. When I want to converse with old friends and family I do it directly without moderation and data mining.
Exactly. A real “friend” is in your phone contacts and isn’t interested in pictures of what you had for lunch.
I've never had a FB account or used it myself, but I am somewhat glad they are at least trying to limit the amount of total horseshit like Qanon on their platform. While it may not effect me personally since I don't participate, there are plenty of people who do and not all of them are rational patriots. This gives dangerous insane conspiracy theories an opportunity to spread their madness which can have real world consequences. I also agree with conversing with friends and family directly and not through an advertising platform designed to both gather your personal data and habits as well as market their fine tuned advertising models catered to each biochemical computers (brains) that plug into it. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
I knew someone that frequently spouted QAnon stuff on FB and his complete profile, including his private photos of he and his wife were wiped, gone, no longer available.
Thank goodness someone is choosing to clean out the barn once in a while. If you don't, a lot of bullshit can pile up.
The bad part is... he's a nice and rather intelligent man. Just completely caught up in conspiracy theories.
One of my clients years ago was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. He was a retired Engineer, super smart and completely convinced that it was all achieved by planted explosives and holograms. His dining room table was covered in coo coo for coco puffs articles, pictures and drawings. Very Carrie Mathison but he was wrong...
Luckily, almost all of my work was outside, working with a crew to rehab the garden his deceases wife had planted on his 1/2 acre fenced property. The only time I interacted with him about his 'thought experiment' I just said 'Wow' and waited for him to sign a check.
This is some of the Q shit my niece posts:
This is her response to a friend's question (I bolded the one sentence):
the internet was created long before he was alive. His best friend was JFK. JFK’s son did not kill himself, they have been planning to take them down their whole lives. You know the entire internet was created by those people, right? All of it. Everything. everything is a lie. From our names to the year to the entire existence we’ve known. Soon there will be a international broadcast, internet will shut down, and when it comes back on in 10ish days (will happen by September 11 but I’m thinking this weekend). The entire political spectrum has already been arrested some executed. Everything you’ve been seeing on tv is CGI or holograms . From here on out, try to use your own thought process instead of looking for the validity (that we so desperately need). It’s a hard concept to grasp, but once you go down that path, you can’t unsee the truth. A change is coming! And it’s going to erase the entire world we know.
This is stuff she has posted:
Wow. Just wow.
Shocked the shit out of me when she started posting this shit, she is an intelligent woman almost 30 years old, has 3 kids. I talked to another family member and I think they did speak to her. For a while she stopped posting this shit but recently started up again.
One other thing, she is all into the save the children/pedophile stuff, but, sometimes posts pictures of her kids not to just friends but to the world.
I never thought it was a wise idea to post photos of your minor children. I have photos of my kids on Face Book when they were younger, but now they adults. I didn't post photos of them when they were minors
Yeah... see, my FB profile is set to private. The only people that can see any of my photos are people on my friends list and those people are people I actually know. I got on my ex-husband's second wife's ass [they're divorced now too] for posting photos of MY daughter [her stepdaughter] on her public profile.
That's some bag of nuts there
Brings to mind the "Red pill vs the Blue pill" from the Matrix, except your niece has developed her own matrix to live in.
Just wow....!
Ever seen "A Beautiful Mind", about John Nash? This reminds me of the scenes where it really begins to become apparent to the movie's audience that Nash is losing his grasp on reality.
A lot of folks, if they watched that movie now, would never realize that there was anything wrong with Nash.
Sadly, that is true.
Another nut case:
QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive