Following the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Facebook vowed to reduce election misinformation and prevent further incitement of violence by removing harmful content and suspending former President Donald Trump. But Media Matters’ latest analysis found that in the year since the January 6 attack, Facebook has not only repeatedly failed to moderate “Stop the Steal” content, baseless claims of election fraud, and other election misinformation, but its algorithm and other features have enabled such content to flourish.
Key findings: Right-leaning pages earned a greater proportion of interactions on election-related posts in the year after the January 6 insurrection than in the year before. In fact, these pages earned over 2 billion interactions or 54% of total interactions on election-related content on nearly 570,000 posts between January 7 and December 31, 2021. There are still at least 484 posts referencing “stop the steal” or “s
Internal Facebook documents show how the pro-Trump Stop the Steal movement proliferated on the world's biggest social network between the presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Internal Facebook documents show how the pro-Trump Stop the Steal movement proliferated on the world's biggest social network between the presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Internal Facebook documents paint a picture of a company that was fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize.