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(Written by Sheera Frenkel)
The first publish in the new Facebook group that was began Wednesday was innocuous sufficient. “Welcome” to Stop the Steal, it mentioned.
But an hour later, the group uploaded a minute-long video to its Facebook web page with a pointed message. The grainy footage confirmed a crowd exterior a polling station in Detroit, shouting and chanting “stop the count.” Below the video, which was shortly shared practically 2,000 occasions, members of the group commented “Biden is stealing the vote” and “this is unfair.”
The viral video helped flip the Stop the Steal Facebook group into one of the fastest-growing teams in Facebook’s historical past. By Thursday morning, lower than 22 hours after it was began, it had amassed greater than 320,000 customers — at one level gaining 100 new members each 10 seconds. As its momentum grew, it caught the consideration of Facebook executives, who shut down the group hours later for attempting to incite violence.
Even so, the Stop the Steal Facebook group had achieved its work. In its transient life span, it grew to become a hub for folks to falsely declare that the poll rely for the presidential election was being manipulated in opposition to President Donald Trump. New images, movies and testimonials asserting voter fraud had been posted to the group each jiffy. From there, they traveled onto Twitter, YouTube and right-wing websites that cited the unsubstantiated and inaccurate posts as proof of an illegitimate voting course of.
Stop the Steal’s speedy rise and amplifying results additionally confirmed how Facebook teams are a robust instrument for seeding and accelerating on-line actions, together with these stuffed with misinformation. Facebook teams, that are public and will be joined by anybody with a Facebook account, have lengthy been the nerve facilities for fringe actions resembling QAnon and anti-vaccination activists. And whereas Stop the Steal has been deleted, different Facebook teams selling falsehoods about voter fraud have popped up.
“Facebook groups are powerful infrastructure for organizing,” mentioned Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She added that the Stop the Steal Facebook group helped folks coalesce round a baseless perception that the election was being unlawfully taken from Trump.
Tom Reynolds, a Facebook spokesman, mentioned the social community eliminated the Stop the Steal group as half of the “exceptional measures” it was taking up the election. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” he mentioned.
Stop the Steal was born on Facebook on Wednesday at three p.m. Eastern time as the end result of the presidential election remained unsure. About 12 hours earlier, as the vote counts confirmed a decent race between Trump and Joe Biden, Trump had posted with out proof on Facebook and Twitter that “They are trying to STEAL the Election.” Trump has since repeated that assertion brazenly in remarks from the White House and on social media.
The thought of a stolen election shortly unfold amongst Trump’s supp orters, together with to a Facebook consumer named Kylie Jane Kremer. Kremer, 30, a former Tea Party activist, runs a conservative nonprofit referred to as Women for America First. She created the Stop the Steal Facebook group.
In an interview Thursday from a protest in Atlanta, Kremer mentioned she had began the Facebook group after talking with conservative activists and seeing social media posts about voter fraud. She mentioned she wished to assist set up folks throughout the United States on the concern and centralize discussions over protests and rallies.
“I knew other people saw this the same as I did, that there were people out there trying to steal the election from the rightful person,” Kremer mentioned, referring to Trump. “I wanted us to be able to organize to take action.”
Once the Facebook group was reside, she mentioned, it took off. Hundreds of members joined inside the first hour. Then folks started sharing movies — together with the one displaying folks chanting “stop the count” in Detroit — and images, which had been shortly shared to different Facebook pages and teams.
”It was like lightning in a bottle,” Kremer mentioned. “The group grew so fast we were struggling to keep up with the people trying to post.”
Many of the posts shared anecdotal tales claiming voter fraud or intimidation in opposition to Trump’s supporters. One publish asserted that ballot employees counting the ballots had been sporting masks with the Biden marketing campaign’s emblem, whereas one other mentioned that Trump’s supporters had been purposefully given defective ballots that would not be learn by machines.
Many of these posts, photos and movies have been proved false. Some of the photographs and photos had been edited or in any other case manipulated to again the thought of election tampering. Facebook has eliminated or labeled some of these posts, although new ones are showing quicker than the firm’s fact-checkers can take motion on.
Others posted about violence. One member of the Facebook group wrote Wednesday, “This is going to take more than talk to fix.” Underneath that publish, one other member responded with emojis of explosions.
On Thursday morning, the Stop the Steal Facebook group’s progress skyrocketed additional, in accordance with information from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics instrument.
That was when right-wing figures resembling Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump activist, and Amy Kremer, Kremer’s mom and a founder of a group referred to as Women for Trump, started posting about the Facebook group on Twitter. Ali Alexander, a political operative who beforehand glided by the identify Ali Akbar, additionally tweeted dozens of occasions about the Stop the Steal motion to his 140,000 Twitter followers.
Their messages, which had been shared hundreds of occasions, had been a rallying cry for folks to affix the Stop the Steal Facebook group and take motion in native protests in opposition to voter fraud.
“In just it’s first couple hours, more than 100,000 people joined the Women for America First, Stop the Steal Facebook Group,” Posobiec wrote. In feedback under his publish, many individuals cheered the Facebook group’s reputation.
The tweets helped ship extra folks to Stop the Steal. Interactions with the Facebook group soared to 36 posts a minute on Thursday morning, up from roughly one publish a minute, in accordance with CrowdTangle information.
Posobiec, Alexander and Amy Kremer didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
At Facebook, executives had been notified of the group by Facebook moderators as they started flagging posts for potential requires violence and protests to disrupt the vote. The firm additionally obtained calls from journalists about the group and its explosive progress. By midmorning, executives had been discussing whether or not they need to take away Stop the Steal, mentioned one worker concerned in the discussions who was not licensed to talk publicly.
Facebook took down the group on Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern.
Kremer mentioned that she was indignant that Facebook had eliminated her group and that she was in discussions with the firm to reinstate it. She accused Facebook, together with different social media corporations, of censoring the Stop the Steal motion.
“Facebook had other options,” she mentioned. “They were flagging our posts and we could have worked with them. But this is what they do, they censor.”
Still, Kremer mentioned that earlier than the group was taken down, its members had efficiently organized occasions in dozens of cities. She has arrange one other web site about voter fraud and was now directing folks to it, she mentioned.
On Facebook, dozens of new Stop the Steal teams have been created since the firm eliminated Kremer’s group. One had practically 10,000 members. Another had simply over 2,000.
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