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6 Oct, 9 tweets, 3 min read
BREAKING: Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms

Facebook "will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon" like any other militarized social movement, militia or terror group.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Facebook's QAnon ban is the most sweeping content moderation step I've seen from any social media company so far.

This won't just ban certain posts. Facebook will ban Groups, Pages and Instagram accounts that post about QAnon, a militarized movement.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
QAnon will now be treated like other militias and terror groups that have been tied to real-world violence and repeatedly fantasize about violence and mass slaughter.

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Facebook previously banned QAnon followers that referenced the conspiracy theory's endgame -- the purge or mass execution of Democrats and celebrities. This is a ban on QAnon groups, pages and Instagram accounts writ large.

In recent weeks, QAnon pages had become superspreaders for disinformation around, well, anything.

From false conspiracy theories claiming the president isn't sick to Joe Biden wearing a secret debate wire, QAnon pages served as a hub on Facebook. No more.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
QAnon followers have been awaiting this ban for a while.

Q, their leader, told everyone to "camouflage" themselves digitally before any action like this came down.

Expect more QAnon conspiracies without the explicit branding now.

(Here's that story.)
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
This QAnon Facebook ban is a substantial problem for the conspiracy messaging infrastructure that they spent three full years building.

Q pages, especially on Instagram, were becoming the new ammo dump for far-right talking points. That's now in ruins.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Passing along a note from Facebook: the company delineates between terror groups and other militarized social movements, like QAnon. With terror groups, they retroactively scrub posts (like, say, videos) along with accounts. Just accounts for Q.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
This is the delineation from Facebook between militarized social movements and terror groups, by the way.

I'd rather let them say it than me.

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More from @oneunderscore__

Ben Collins Profile picture
7 Oct
Four years ago today, Pizzagate was born when Wikileaks dropped John Podesta's hacked emails.

Users on 4chan and Reddit said if you replaced the words "pizza" with "little girl" in his emails, suddenly they were eating children.

A year and three weeks later, QAnon was born.
In the last four years, an infrastructure for an alternate reality was built on social networks to frame one political party as Satanic child eaters.

It went unchecked by social networks and winked at by politicians who it didn't yet harm.

Millions joined those communities.
This is important to note: The reason 4chan users were so ready to accept "pizza" meant "little girls" in creating Pizzagate?

In 4chan speak, "cheese pizza" was a backronym for "CP," or child porn, which saturated the site for years.

Read 6 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
30 Sep
"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by" is not disavowing white supremacists.
The president was asked point blank to disavow white supremacists.

Here's what he said:

"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I'll tell you what, somebody's gotta do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem."
Story incoming on this, but The Proud Boys took the president's statement for them to "stand down and stand by" as marching orders.
Read 5 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
25 Sep
New from me: Urging followers to 'camouflage,' QAnon attempts to rebrand

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
'Q' from QAnon told followers last week to stop mentioning Q and QAnon.

Some Q influencers took down their accounts to scrub Q references before re-emerging.

They're afraid of bans with a lot of conspiracies to push before election day.

nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Be careful: The next QAnon conspiracy won't self-identify that way.

Yesterday's story about the George Soros Antifa U-Haul, for one, was pushed by Q himself.

QAnon influencers won't mention the link anymore when posting conspiracies. The brand is toxic.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
15 Sep
Guy who just moved in next door spends, I'm not kidding, at least five hours a day playing ornate trills on his clarinet.

If this isn't some sort of elaborate psyop by an adversarial government, I'll frankly be pretty upset.
He's not even bad, which is somehow worse?
Probably the cruelest trick this guy does is that he rears up like he's going to start Rhapsody in Blue maybe three times an hour and I get excited because, hey, at least I know Rhapsody in Blue, then he just... doesn't play it.
Read 4 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
14 Sep
Quick thread about 4chan and their years-long campaign to tie the LGBTQ community to pedophilia:

Last year, I wrote a story about how 4chan trolls were posing as gay men on Twitter to try to frame the LGBTQ community as trying to normalize pedophilia.
nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…
Far-right sites ran headlines like “Resistance Member Says Pedophilia Is Sexual Orientation, Claims Bigotry” based on a fake Twitter account created by a chan troll.

This is a homophobic trope, an extension of ages-old homophobic slippery slope arguments against LGBT people.
There were real gay men who had their identity stolen for this disinformation campaign. They were deeply kind guys who run a blog highlighting safe places for LGBTQ people to travel.
Read 7 tweets
Ben Collins Profile picture
3 Sep
Some really cool news: @AliVelshi, @BrandyZadrozny and I will be hosting a disinformation special on MSNBC.

Sunday morning at 9 a.m.

We're going to break down, in detail, how the Internet got so broken, how your family members got radicalized so fast, and how we can fix it.
We're really excited about this: a place to take the Internet seriously on TV.

We'll talk about the disinformation pipelines that shape policy, and how it effects people in our lives in the real world — even if they don't use the internet.

I really hope you guys watch it.
Yes! It's really important to show that this stuff impacts a lot of us.

If you have stuff you specifically want us to address, DM us! We want to include you guys.
Read 5 tweets

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