After Twitter and YouTube, Facebook has also cracked down in recent days against the online network of Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, very influential among part of the Republican electorate thanks to several publications (sites, podcasts, shows … ). In recent days, he has campaigned there to promote the idea that Joe Biden did not win the US election on November 3, that massive frauds had taken place during the vote and his count, which prevented the victory of Donald Trump.
A line similar to that held by Donald Trump himself, whose Twitter account continued to broadcast, on November 9, videos or articles from conservative media supporting the hypothesis of rigged elections.
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“Inauthentic tactics”
To disseminate his theses, Steve Bannon relied on various groups or pages, whose names took up nationalist or conservative slogans. Facebook has deactivated seven, which had gathered 2.45 million subscribers on the social network. The removed pages were called Conservative Values (“Conservative values”) The Undefeated (“The undefeated”) We Build the Wall Inc (“We are building the wall”), Citizens of the American Republic (“Citizens of the American republic”), or Trump at War (“Trump at war”).
The non-governmental organization Avaaz, which specializes in topics related to influence operations and online disinformation, reported all these pages to Facebook on Friday, November 6. “Our team had identified some of these pages earlier this year that shared misinformation about alleged scams. This content potentially reached 10 million views last week alone ”, explained a spokesperson for the NGO to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We removed hotbeds of activity that used inauthentic tactics to artificially amplify their reach”, for his part said a spokesperson for Facebook to justify the deactivation of these pages. The social network says it has applied its rules on abusive, deceptive and spam behavior, which deceive the users of a page or a group about the goals of its activity, or give bad information about the origin or the popularity of content.
“He seeks to spread chaos”
According to American public media NPR, an important Facebook group was also deactivated on this occasion, which had temporarily taken over the slogan “Stop The Steal! “ (“Stop This Theft” of Elections) – he was later renamed to “Gay Communists for Socialism”, in an attempt to escape the Facebook moderation radars against electoral disinformation. The slogan “Stop the Steal” was displayed at the head of a pro-Trump Facebook group which had experienced rapid growth (around 350,000 members in twenty-four hours) before being deactivated by the social network on Thursday 5 November.
“In 2016, Steve Bannon was kept afloat by Facebook’s algorithm and helped define the political debate for millions of Americans. During the past months, pages and groups linked to him have been promoting these ideas of “electoral fraud” ”, Fadi Quran, campaign manager at Avaaz, told AFP. While explaining that the moderation applied was too late: “Now he’s looking to divide America even more and spread chaos in this post-election era, again through Facebook. The platform finally acted after Avaaz intervened, but the question is: why hasn’t the company acted before? “
Steve Bannon’s personal page still active
Steve Bannon’s Facebook page was still available on November 10. But no message has been posted there since November 7, which is explained, according to NPR, by a sanction applied by Facebook against the last messages published by the page.
Among them are posts referring to sites, like Populist Press and America’s Voice Network, where Steve Bannon aired his latest shows. It was in one of these programs that he made comments considered to be calls for murder: he attacked Mr. Fauci, director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases, as well as the boss of the FBI, Christopher Wray, claiming to want “Skewer their heads at the end of pikes” and place them “On either side of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”
After the videos were released, the @WarRoomPandemic Twitter account, named after Mr Bannon’s online show, was suspended on Friday. “Permanently for breaking Twitter rules, in particular our policy on glorifying violence”, explained the social network. YouTube has withdrawn for the same reasons the episode of the channel “Steve Bannon’s War Room “, which is however still active and has more than 200,000 subscribers.
