Meta has eliminated greater than 450 accounts, pages, and teams linked to the Proud Boys on Facebook and Instagram, 4 years after the far-right extremist group was banned throughout its platforms.
“Our team recently uncovered and took down a network of about 480 Proud Boys accounts, Pages, groups, and events,” Dina Hussein, counterterrorism coverage lead at Meta, tweeted on Thursday.
“We know adversarial groups like this continue changing tactics, trying to evade detection and come back,” Ms Hussein added.
Monika Bickert, Meta’s vp of content material coverage, mentioned the corporate has taken down a complete of round 750 Proud Boys “assets” as a part of the corporate’s strategic community disruptions.
“We will continue to refine our targeted approach to adversarial threats as well as our scaled enforcement,” she mentioned.
The firm mentioned individuals behind the community will not be figuring out themselves as Proud Boys brazenly.
Meta mentioned customers behind these organising efforts are creating entrance teams and utilizing Facebook or Instagram to steer individuals to different, much less moderated platforms.
Ms Hussein mentioned Meta makes use of a method referred to as strategic community disruptions (SND) to take down such organising efforts.
“While there’s no silver bullet here, our approach is impacting these dangerous organisations, and we can see adversaries trying harder to hide their affiliation & change tactics. We’ll continue to stay vigilant and share our findings,” she mentioned.
“We plan on continuing to share more about this tactic and how we use strategic network disruptions to keep our platforms safe,” the Counterterrorism Policy Lead mentioned.
Proud Boys’ former chief and different members of the group had been charged earlier this yr for his or her involvement within the US Capitol riots on 6 January 2021.
While the group has been banned from Facebook, Instagram, and different platforms, members have tried to make use of the platform by bypassing its detection programs.
In the newest crackdown, Meta took down 480 accounts, posts, and teams linked to the extremist community.
“This was a network of pages and groups, Instagram and Facebook accounts, so some of these were accounts, not just pages or groups. But all of them were linked to this network that was the Proud Boys,” Ms Bickert mentioned.
Source: www.unbiased.co.uk