Thread by @CraigSilverman

Our new ProPublica/Wash Post investigation reveals public Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and Jan. 6, with many calling for executions or other political violence. 🧵
propublica.org/article/facebo…

Through interviews, data & internal docs, we reveal how FB/Meta relaxed its oversight of groups after election day, and belatedly rushed to try and police them once the Capitol attack was underway.

But by then, groups had become a hotbed of election misinfo and threats.

The seeds of groups dysfunction were planted when Zuckerberg made them a priority in 2017. Groups became more central to FB’s bottom line, but enforcement efforts were weak, inconsistent and heavily reliant on the work of unpaid group admins.

Groups focused on U.S. politics became so toxic, say former employees, that FB established a groups task force, whose existence was not previously reported, to police them ahead of Election 2020. Soon after the vote, it was disbanded — and enforcement fell off.

“Facebook took its eye off the ball in the interim time between Election Day and Jan. 6,” said a former integrity team employee who worked on the task force. “There was a lot of violating content that did appear on the platform that wouldn’t otherwise have.”

FB spox Drew Pusateri denied that the company had pulled back on efforts to combat violent and false postings about the election after the vote. He said the company is not to blame for Jan. 6.

Facebook has revealed little about the amount of election misinfo & threats on its platform between election day & Jan. 6. Using data from @uscounteraction, we analyzed 18 million posts in 27,000 public FB groups — and IDd 10,000 posts a day attacking the legitimacy of the vote.

@uscounteraction False claims about the election mixed with death threats, violent imagery, and calls for civil war. A sampling of posts from public groups that were later removed from the platform:

One post, featuring an avatar of a woman smiling with arms raised, said: “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!” (I blocked out the face)

One popular meme showed a photo of Trump winking, with the text “Not Only Can Martial Law Guarantee a Trump Victory, It Also Allows Trump To Arrest Anyone He Wants!”

It was posted at least 70 times across public groups, generating more than 2,400 total likes.

In the absence of more disclosure from the company, this story (w/ @craigtimberg @jeffykao @jeremybmerrill) provides the clearest evidence yet that Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of Jan. 6. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…