78,000 Facebook profiles have been removed because they posted pro-QAnon content and “militarized social movements.”
In an update on January 19 Facebook said, “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.”
The social media giant is not alone. Twitter and YouTube have been busy removing users and content, particularly related to QAnaon and other associated content.
Twitter said on January 11th, “These accounts were engaged in sharing harmful QAnon-associated content at scale and were primarily dedicated to the propagation of this conspiracy theory across the service.”
The QAnon supporters follow supposed “insiders” within the government. These “insiders” who claim to have secret security clearances, post clues and hints for their followers to unpack and solve. This has lead to QAnon entering the mainstream culture and encouraging many to believe in various conspiracies.
Facebook’s statement was clear on the number of groups they have been tracking and booting off the platform. “From August to November 30, 2020, we removed about 3,200 Pages, 18,800 groups, 100 events, 23,300 Facebook profiles and 7400 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against militarized social movements. At the same time, we also removed about 3,000 Pages, 9,800 groups, 420 events, 16,200 Facebook profiles, and 25,000 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against QAnon.”
