Social-Media
Facebook bans political propaganda accounts related to Steve Bannon
Facebook also deleted a number of accounts related to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. The pages were deleted after the non-profit organisation Avaaz flagged them as spreading — and artificially amplifying — choice-related disinformation under the Stop Steal tag.
Facebook reported to The New York Times that it disabled several clusters of operation late last week for using inauthentic marketing strategies to intentionally raise how many people viewed their content." These included groups linked to Bannon as well as the Stop the Snatch campaign that prompted Trump followers to join and then changed the title to Gay Communists for Socialism.
Avaaz claims the network had a total of 2.45 million followers and its accounts were connected by admins, including Bannon and Brian Kolfage, his suspected co-conspirator of the fraud scheme.
The pages pushed links to the right-wing aggregation site Populist Press, seemingly avoiding the flags Facebook had put on the initial URLs.
Bannon himself was barred from Twitter last week after he shared a video asking for the murder of immunologist Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray. A copy of the video was also deleted from Facebook.
Facebook has set up war rooms to tackle propaganda and banned a massive Stop the Rob group after the 2020 presidential election. Yet Avaaz expressed disappointment that the site had not deleted the Bannon-linked pages earlier. If we can see this material, a multi-billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of workers focusing on election and misinformation can most definitely do, said campaign director Fadi Quran to Gizmodo. We're tired of doing their work with them.
