Tue 12 January 2021:
Facebook said Monday that it will begin removing any content that includes the phrase “stop the steal” from its platforms, a popular refrain among US President Donald Trump’s supporters that falsely alleges widespread voter fraud.
The company two months ago removed the original group of the same name, which fueled voter fraud misinformation after the election.
The new policy will also include content on Facebook subsidiary Instagram, the company said in a statement.
“We removed the original Stop the Steal group in November and have continued to remove Pages, groups and events that violate any of our policies, including calls for violence,” Facebook said.
“We’ve been allowing robust conversations related to the election outcome and that will continue. But with continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the US presidential election that can lead to violence, and use of the term by those involved in Wednesday’s violence in DC, we’re taking this additional step in the lead up to the inauguration,” it added.
The company indefinitely banned President Donald Trump from posting on its platforms four days ago.
The move is part of the company’s protective efforts against violence and misinformation in the lead-up to the presidential inauguration after last week’s events on Capitol Hill, Guy Rosen, the company’s vice president of integrity, and Monika Bickert, its vice president of global policy management, wrote in a company blog post.
“We began preparing for Inauguration Day last year. But our planning took on new urgency after last week’s violence in Washington, D.C., and we are treating the next two weeks as a major civic event,” they wrote.
“We are now removing content containing the phrase ‘stop the steal’ under our Coordinating Harm policy from Facebook and Instagram,” they said.
“In this moment, the risk to our democracy was too big that we felt we had to take the unprecedented step of what is an indefinite ban, and I’m glad we did,” Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Reuters in an interview Monday.
Sandberg said the company has “no plans” to lift the ban.
Just minutes before the Capitol was stormed last Wednesday, Trump implored his supporters to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal,” a reference to his false claims that the Nov. 3 election was stolen from him through widespread voter fraud. He lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden by 7 million votes.
“Our country has had enough, and we will not take it anymore,” Trump told the mass gathering, many of whom likely later flooded the Capitol as lawmakers were certifying Electoral College results. “We will stop the steal.”
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