QAnon conspiracy theory groups banned entirely by Facebook in crackdown on far-right movement
3 min readFacebook has banned all pages and groups on its platform linked to radical far-right movement QAnon, in the social network’s most significant crack down on the conspiracy group to date.
The latest update is designed to combat the rapid spread of QAnon messaging across Facebook, given supporters’ ability to swiftly build networks from a single message. Admin profiles who manage the pages and groups taken down for violating Facebook’s policy will also be disabled, the company confirmed.
The new policy will be enforced from Wednesday but will “take time and need to continue in the coming days and weeks,” the company said.
Trump and QAnon
QAnon supporters believe a secret society of paedophiles run by high-profile celebrities and government officials is plotting against US President Donald Trump, who they say is leading a covert crack down on the group.
Mr Trump has failed to condemn QAnon. The President instead praised the group earlier this year as “people that love our country“. He said in August: “So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”
The FBI categorised QAnon as “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” in a document made public in August last year, warning that such theories have the potential to drive both groups and individual extremists to carry out “criminal or violent acts”.
Content linked to ‘real world harm’
Facebook announced in August it would remove pages, groups and accounts on sister company Instagram when they were found to discuss violence, but the new update will now see pages, groups and associated Instagram accounts removed irrespective of whether they contain violent content.
While the update prohibits users from posting about QAnon on Facebook in an organised fashion, it does not prevent them from posting about the group on their own personal profiles.
The August measures saw more than 1,500 pages and groups taken offline, but the company later said it believed it needed to strengthen its efforts “when addressing QAnon”.
“We’ve been vigilant in enforcing our policy and studying its impact on the platform but we’ve seen several issues that led to today’s update,” the company said in a statement at the time.
“For example, while we’ve removed QAnon content that celebrates and supports violence, we’ve seen other QAnon content tied to different forms of real-world harm, including recent claims that the [US] west coast wildfires were started by certain groups, which diverted attention of local officials from fighting the fires and protecting the public.”
Rapid spread of conspiracy theories online
Twitter banned thousands of QAnon-linked accounts in July, tweaking its algorithms to prevent the spread of its messages, while TikTok has also blocked hashtags related to the conspiracy group.
QAnon supporters previously attempted to hijack hashtags on Facebook linked to child safety such as #savethechildren to recruit new members, leading the social network to add links to credible child safety resources to appear alongside the associated hashtags.
“Content about QAnon and child safety is eligible for fact-checking through our third-party fact-checking programme,” a Facebook spokesperson said last month.
“Content that is debunked will be reduced in News Feed and filtered from Explore and hashtags on Instagram, will receive a label (so that people who see it, try to share it or already have, will see more context), and it will be rejected as an ad.”
