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Facebook is looking to clean up its platform which has led to the banning of the violent, anti-government “boogaloo” movement. The extremist movement has been designated as a dangerous organization after Facebook has tracked its involvement in the growing protests across the country which has linked members of the movement to attacks in the real world.
The United States has also set up a government task force to combat the extremists. US Attorney General William Barr set up the task force after more information was learned about its activists.
“As part of today’s action, we are designating a violent US-based anti-government network under our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy and disrupting it on our services. As a result, this violent network is banned from having a presence on our platform and we will remove content praising, supporting or representing it,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.
“This network appears to be based across various locations in the US, and the people within it engage with one another on our platform. It is actively promoting violence against civilians, law enforcement and government officials and institutions. Members of this network seek to recruit others within the broader boogaloo movement, sharing the same content online and adopting the same offline appearance as others in the movement to do so.”
As part of the effort to remove the movement from its platform, Facebook has banned more than 300 accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
“In order to make Facebook as inhospitable to this violent US-based anti-government network as possible, we conducted a strategic network disruption of their presence today removing 220 Facebook accounts, 95 Instagram accounts, 28 Pages and 106 groups that currently comprise the network,” Facebook added.
“We have also removed over 400 additional groups and over 100 other Pages for violating our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy as they hosted similar content as the violent network we disrupted but were maintained by accounts outside of it. As part of our designation process, we will now identify where we can strengthen how we enforce our policy against this banned network and spot attempts by the violent US anti-government network to return to our platform.”
The “boogaloo” movement has been linked to violence during protests following the death of George Floyd along with the anticipation that there could be a second American civil war by activists involved in the movement.
