Enlarge / Pro-Trump protesters break windows of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. (credit: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In recent days, Facebook has been waging war on content supportive of last Wednesday’s attack on the US Capitol. Last week, Facebook and Instagram indefinitely suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram. Now Facebook says it is banning posts containing the phrase “stop the steal”—a popular rallying cry for people who think the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
“We removed the original Stop the Steal group in November and have continued to remove Pages, groups and events that violate any of our policies, including calls for violence,” Facebook wrote in a Monday blog post. Facebook says that it has allowed “robust conversations” about the outcome of the 2020 election. However, the company said that it has seen “continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the US presidential election.” Facebook worries that these efforts could “lead to violence.”
The action is not automatic. Around 5pm on Monday, I was able to write a Facebook post that said “Does Facebook let me say ‘stop the steal?'” Facebook says that “it may take some time to scale up our enforcement of this new step.”
Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
