Local News News WORLD – Facebook bans Trump allies ‘STOP THE STEAL’ group Barbados Today Traffic06/11/20200109 views President Trump’s allies have turned to Facebook and other social media sites in an effort to spark nationwide protests against the 2020 election, thrusting some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful organizing tools into a contest over the legitimacy of American democracy. The campaign’s leading voices have relied on a network of new and existing Facebook pages, groups and events — some of which have garnered hundreds of thousands of members — to rally people in public this week around a baseless conspiracy theory that Democratic candidate Joe Biden is attempting to “steal” the election. Some of the efforts promoted in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona specifically target vote-counting centers, threatening disruptions while ballot-tallying is still underway. The online efforts have unfolded not on the Republican Party’s fringes but well within its mainstream. Among the most vocal leaders is Amy Kremer, a former congressional candidate in Georgia and a co-founder and co-chair of Women for Trump. She used a Facebook page called Women for America First, which boasts more than 100,000 followers, to drive users to a newly launched Facebook group called “STOP THE STEAL,” which garnered more than 360,000 members before the company removed it midday Thursday for violating the platform’s rules. We need boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote,” the Facebook page said before it disappeared from view, encouraging people to donate to help pay for “flights and hotels to send people” to battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The “STOP THE STEAL” group also had been listed as a co-host on 12 different Facebook protest events, including a new car “caravan” planned in California. Although some of the events say the goal is to be peaceful, some of the commentary that spilled forth in the “STOP THE STEAL” group veered into planning for armed conflict. “We are on the verge of civil war due to those types of people,” one user wrote. “You cannot reason with them or convince them to stop and reunite as they are dead set on total destruction of our nation. So I ask you, what are you prepared to do?” Another asked, “how do we go about overthrowing the government?” Hundreds of users replied, with one proclaiming, “Civil war!” Another user threatened to “introduce” their liberal friends to their AR-15 rifle, if “I ever see them again.” Accompanying the post was a photo of the weapon. The anti-democratic resentment ultimately resulted in disciplinary action from Facebook, where spokesman Andy Stone pointed to the “exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension.” “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” Stone said in a statement about Facebook’s decision to remove the “STOP THE STEAL” campaign. The company also announced efforts to reduce the distribution of live video related to the election and to make it harder to find terms related to undermining the legitimacy of the ballot count. The company said it would ban hashtags related to the “STOP THE STEAL” campaign, though the success of those efforts remained in doubt: By Thursday evening, at least 60 different “STOP THE STEAL” campaign or related events were being promoted on the platform, according to the left-leaning nonprofit group Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. (Washington Post)