{"id":21756,"date":"2020-07-06T19:37:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T16:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/facebook-groups-pivot-to-attacks-on-black-lives-matter\/"},"modified":"2020-07-06T19:37:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T16:37:00","slug":"facebook-groups-pivot-to-attacks-on-black-lives-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/facebook-groups-pivot-to-attacks-on-black-lives-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"#Facebook groups pivot to attacks on Black Lives Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Facebook<\/a> groups pivot to attacks on Black Lives Matter<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n CHICAGO \u2014 A loose network of Facebook groups that took root across the country in April to organize protests over coronavirus stay-at-home orders has become a hub of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have pivoted to a variety of new targets. Their latest: Black Lives Matter and the nationwide protests of racial injustice.<\/p>\n

These groups, which now boast a collective audience of more than 1 million members, are still thriving after most states started lifting virus restrictions.<\/p>\n

And many have expanded their focus.<\/p>\n

One group transformed itself last month from \u201cReopen California\u201d to \u201cCalifornia Patriots Pro Law & Order,\u201d with recent posts mocking Black Lives Matter or changing the slogan to \u201cWhite Lives Matter.\u201d Members have used profane slurs to refer to Black people and protesters, calling them \u201canimals,\u201d \u201cracist\u201d and \u201cthugs\u201d\u2014 a direct violation of Facebook\u2019s hate speech standards.<\/p>\n

Others have become gathering grounds for promoting conspiracy theories about the protests, suggesting protesters were paid to go to demonstrations and that even the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police, was staged.<\/p>\n

An Associated Press review of the most recent posts in 40 of these Facebook groups \u2014 most of which were launched by conservative groups or pro-gun activists \u2014 found the conversations largely shifted last month to attacking the nationwide protests over the killing of Black men and women after Floyd\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Facebook users in some of these groups post hundreds of times a day in threads often seen by members only and shielded from public view.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless Facebook is actively looking for disinformation in those spaces, they will go unnoticed for a long time and they will grow,\u201d said Joan Donovan, the research director at the Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. \u201cOver time, people will drag other people into them and they will continue to organize.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook said it is aware of the collection of reopen groups and is using technology<\/a> as well as relying on users to identify problematic posts. The company has vowed in the past to look for material that violates its rules in private groups as well as in public places on its site. But the platform has not always been able to deliver on that promise.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the groups were formed, they were rife with coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories, including assertions that masks are \u201cuseless,\u201d the US government intends to forcibly vaccinate people and that COVID-19 is a hoax intended to hurt President Donald Trump\u2019s re-election chances this fall.<\/p>\n

Posts in these private groups are less likely to be scrutinized by Facebook or its independent fact-checkers, said Donovan. Facebook enlists media outlets around the world, including The Associated Press, to fact check claims on its site. Members in these private groups have created an echo chamber and tend to agree with the posts, so are therefore less likely to flag them for Facebook or fact-checkers to review, Donovan added.<\/p>\n

At least one Facebook group, ReOpen PA, asked its 105,000 members to keep the conversation focused on reopening businesses and schools in Pennsylvania and implemented rules to forbid posts about the racial justice protests as well as conspiracy theories about the efficacy of masks.<\/p>\n

But most others have not moderated their pages as closely.<\/p>\n

For example, some groups in New Jersey, Texas and Ohio have labeled systemic racism a hoax. A member of the California Facebook group posted a widely debunked flyer that says \u201cWhite men, women and children, you are the enemy,\u201d which was falsely attributed to Black Lives Matter. Another falsely claimed that a Black man was brandishing a gun outside the St. Louis mansion where a white couple confronted protesters with firearms. Dozens of users in several of the groups have pushed an unsubstantiated theory that liberal billionaire George Soros is paying crowds to attend racial justice protests.<\/p>\n

Facebook members in two groups \u2014 Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine and Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine \u2014 also regularly refer to protesters as \u201canimals,\u201d \u201cthugs,\u201d or \u201cpaid\u201d looters.<\/p>\n

In the Ohio group, one user wrote on May 31: \u201cThe focus is shifted from the voice of free people rising up against tyranny \u2026 to lawless thugs from a well known racist group causing violence and upheaval of lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those two pages are part of a network of groups in Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania created by conservative activist Ben Dorr, who has for years raised money to lobby on hot-button conservative issues like abortion or gun rights. Their latest cause \u2014 pushing for governors to reopen their states \u2014 has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers in the private Facebook groups they launched.<\/p>\n

Private groups that balloon to that size, with little oversight, are like \u201ccreepy basements\u201d where extremist views and misinformation can lurk, said disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sort of a way that the platforms are enabling some of the worst actors to stay on it,\u201d said Jankowicz. \u201cRather than being de-platformed \u2014 they can organize.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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“#Facebook groups pivot to attacks on Black Lives Matter” CHICAGO \u2014 A loose network of Facebook groups that took root across the country in April to organize protests over coronavirus stay-at-home orders has become a hub of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have pivoted to a variety of new targets. Their latest: Black Lives Matter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33550],"class_list":["post-21756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-facebook-groups-pivot-to-attacks-on-black-lives-matter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}