Facebook against conspirators: closes pages, groups and Instagram profiles

Facebook is ready to fight against conspirators and militarized movements that spread fake news and organize fighting actions and meetings

Facebook declares war on conspirators, closing pages, groups and Instagram profiles. The platform has declared it through its blog, confirming the hard line taken since last August 19 after the announcement to block any activity on the social network of QAnon and militarized movements that use the space to organize meetings and actions of struggle.

A little more than a month after the beginning of the maneuver, Facebook said it had closed more than 1500 pages and groups containing discussions related to QAnon and more than 6500 with references to militarized movements. The crackdown, however, becomes tighter now, given the ironclad choice to also remove Facebook groups and pages and Instagram profiles, always closely related to the same movements, even if the presence of violent content has not been detected. In addition to the points of connection of the platform, the social has confirmed that it is also providing for the ban of administrators who deal with the management of Pages and Groups that violate Facebook policies, with the intention of curbing as much as possible the proliferation and creation from scratch of the same aggregators.

Facebook and the fight against plotters

About the latest policy update and the social's efforts against QAnon and militarized movements, Facebook said, "Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports." In addition to the direct engagement and no longer tied only to reports from discerning users, the platform has also decided to block the creation of ads - ads that appear by scrolling through the timeline - that promote all those groups that do not comply with Facebook's current policies against any kind of conspiracy expression.

QAnon and the coded language to escape Facebook

The far-right conspiracy theory of QAnon believes that there is a Deep State, translatable to Italian "strong powers" that plots against U.S. President Donald Trump. Facebook is giving battle to the conspiracy supporters and militarized movements, which, however, find new ploys to escape the constant control of the task force just set up. Among the methods used, those of changing the consonant Q to "Cue" and the use of coded language understandable mainly to members of the movements.

But all this has not gone unnoticed by the eyes of Facebook, as we always read on the blog: "The messaging of QAnon changes very quickly and we see networks of supporters create an audience with a message and then quickly move on to another. We aim to combat this more effectively with this update that strengthens and expands our application against the conspiracy theory movement."