Facebook has reportedly blacklisted more than 78,000 users of its main platform and Instagram for violating the company’s policies against posting content relating to the QAnon conspiracy theory and “militarized” social movements.
Fox Business reports that more than 78,000 profiles on Facebook and Instagram have been removed for violating the company’s policies against posting content related to QAnon conspiracy theories and militarized social movements.
Facebook also removed more than 37,000 Facebook pages, groups, and events related to QAnon and militarized social movements. The company identified more than 890 militarized social movements since August.
A Facebook spokesperson told Fox Business:
We continue to strengthen our enforcement by identifying additional militarized social movements, new terms associated with QAnon and how people attempt to skirt our detection, including focusing more on Facebook profiles used to organize and promote these movements and groups on our platform.
We’ll continue consulting experts to inform our strategy and will identify and remove content accordingly. These groups are constantly working to avoid our enforcement and we’ll continue to study how they evolve in order to keep people safe.
Facebook began removing QAnon content in May according to two employees who spoke to the New York Times. In a statement in August, the company said: “We have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior.”
Facebook stated that an example of “QAnon content that celebrates and supports violence,” would be “content tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the West Coast wildfires were started by certain groups, which diverted attention of local officials from fighting the fires and protecting the public.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com