An internal Facebook report on the social media company's role in enabling the January 6th insurrection has been posted in full online.
"Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News revealed that an internal Facebook report concluded that the company had failed to prevent the "Stop the Steal" movement from using its platform to subvert the election, encourage violence, and help incite the Jan. 6 attempted coup on the US Capitol," BuzzFeed News reported Monday.
"Titled "Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement," the report is one of the most important analyses of how the insurrectionist effort to overturn a free and fair US presidential election spread across the world's largest social network — and how Facebook missed critical warning signs. The report examines how the company was caught flat-footed as the Stop the Steal Facebook group supercharged a movement to undermine democracy, and concludes the company was unprepared to stop people from spreading hate and incitement to violence on its platform," BuzzFeed reported. "The report's authors, who were part of an internal task force studying harmful networks, published the document to Facebook's internal message board last month, making it broadly available to company employees. But after BuzzFeed News revealed the report's existence last week, many employees were restricted from accessing it."
Buzzfeed published the report in full, due to the "newsworthiness and historical significance of the report and it's revelations."
"Hindsight is 20/20, at the time it was very difficult to know whether what we were seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether it was protected free expression by users who were afraid and confused and deserved our empathy. But hindsight being 20/20 makes it all the more important to look back to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol Insurrection," the report explained. "The first Stop the Steal Group emerged on election night. It was flagged for escalation because it contained high levels of hate and violence and incitement (VNI) in the comments. The Group was disabled, and an investigation was kicked off, looking for early signs of coordination and harm across the new Stop the Steal Groups that were quickly sprouting up to replace it. With our early signals, it was unclear that coordination was taking place, or that there was enough harm to constitute designating the term. It wasn't until later that it became clear just how much of a focal point the catchphrase would be, and that they would serve as a rallying point around which a movement of violent election delegitimization could coalesce."
The report named names.
"The terms Stop the Steal and Patriot Party were amplified both on platform and off. Ali Alexander and the Kremer sisters repeated slogans at rallies, and spread them through super Groups like Women4Trump and Latinos for Trump. The Kremer Sisters were admins of both Women4Trump, and the original Stop the Steal Group. After January 6th, Amy Kremer confirmed on platform that she was an organizer for the Stop the Steal rally that precipitated the Capitol Insurrection," the report noted. "Ali Alexander worked on and off platform, using media appearances and celebrity endorsements. We also observed him formally organizing with others to spread the term, including with other users who had ties to militias. He was able to elude detection and enforcement with careful selection of words, and by relying on disappearing stories."
