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Facebook has announced a ban of all accounts, groups, and pages tied to far-right conspiracy theory supporters of QAnon.
The ban stretches across all of Facebook’s platforms, including Instagram.
“Starting today, we will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon,” Facebook wrote in a press release.
“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. Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports.”
Social media platforms began cracking down on QAnon accounts over the summer, but with the election nearing the effort to remove the conspiracy theories from various platforms have intensified.
“We’ve been vigilant in enforcing our policy and studying its impact on the platform but we’ve seen several issues that led to today’s update,” Facebook wrote. “For example, while we’ve removed QAnon content that celebrates and supports violence, we’ve seen other QAnon content tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups.
“Additionally, QAnon messaging changes very quickly and we see networks of supporters build an audience with one message and then quickly pivot to another. We aim to combat this more effectively with this update that strengthens and expands our enforcement against the conspiracy theory movement … We expect renewed attempts to evade our detection, both in behavior and content shared on our platform, so we will continue to study the impact of our efforts and be ready to update our policy and enforcement as necessary.”
For those who don’t know, QAnon claims to leak intelligence about a top-secret war between the Trump administration and a group of people who engage in criminal activity led by Hillary Clinton and the far-right’s beloved “Hollywood elite” target. Essentially, QAnon believes that the “deep state” and “global elites” are attempting to undermine the Trump administration and planning a coup/takeover.
QAnon groups have consistently targeted celebrities and other high-profile figures on the platform with wild, unfounded attacks.
