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Report Finds Extremists Did Use Facebook to Plan Capitol Attack (nbcnews.com) 155

Posted by EditorDavid from the social-(media)-unrest dept.
NBC News reports: A number of pro-Trump extremists used Facebook to plan their attack on the U.S. Capitol, a watchdog organization has found, contradicting claims by Facebook's leadership that such planning was largely done on other sites.

Private Facebook groups spent months advising one another about how to "take down" the U.S. government, particularly after Joe Biden was elected president, according to a report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, which tracked several of them. Many of the groups specifically talked about traveling to the Capitol on Jan. 6, the date Congress counted the electoral votes that affirmed Biden's victory."Calls to 'occupy Congress' were rampant on Facebook in the weeks leading up to the deadly Capitol riot, making no secret of the event's aims," the report found... A sample recruitment call by a page called "Florida Patriots" said, "We are actively seeking well armed citizens to join our emergency response unit in all zones."
BuzzFeed News notes the report contradicts earlier remarks from Sheryl Sandberg deflecting blame for the event: Last week, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company had acted appropriately to prevent election misinformation and the incitement of violence, and attempted to pin the blame on smaller websites and apps with less content moderation. "I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate, don't have our standards, and don't have our transparency," Sandberg said in an interview with Reuters.

Facebook spokespeople have since tried to walk this statement back, noting that Sandberg made the point earlier in the interview that the platform played a role in fomenting the unrest.
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Report Finds Extremists Did Use Facebook to Plan Capitol Attack More

Report Finds Extremists Did Use Facebook to Plan Capitol Attack

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  • FB would be obvious choice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @01:47PM (#60982772)

    If I were planning something like this, I would want to use the platform with the widest reach. Especially if I was too overconfident or foolish to worry about secrecy.

    • Re:FB would be obvious choice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @01:50PM (#60982786) Homepage

      Yep, but saying "the platform played a role" isn't the same as saying "the platform was complicit" as NBC seems to be implying.

      • ...the indifference of good men

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Re:FB would be obvious choice (Score:5, Informative)

        by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @01:57PM (#60982804)

        They're complicit through lack of moderation.

        • Re:FB would be obvious choice (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Shark ( 78448 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @02:14PM (#60982844)

          How dare you!? That only applies to competitors!

        • Re:FB would be obvious choice (Score:4, Insightful)

          by EirikFinlay ( 6179140 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @02:27PM (#60982878)

          Why should they even "moderate" what their ADULT userbase is saying? Are they the law? Is your phone company moderating you when you use their lines to talk to someone?

          Lets do this, if you want to have mommy decide what you can or cannot say, make your own social media... i even have a nice name for it: "mommybook"... but let us ADULTS decide what we can say or hear online and elsewhere.

          • Lets do this, if you want to have mommy decide what you can or cannot say, make your own social media... i even have a nice name for it: "mommybook"... but let us ADULTS decide what we can say or hear online and elsewhere.

            But, dude, that's exactly what happened. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al pretty much said that they wanted to create a platform where they decide the content on that platform. So they did. And a whole bunch of ADULTS started using it. And thus, these private platforms were born. What's the problem?

            • What's the problem?

              The problem are people, who never heard of trash talk before, look at social media, and discover it for their first. They see the shit we have to read on a daily basis, and now they think the devil's army is standing at the gates and the apocalypse is here!

              And all because a few idiots actually made their trash talk come true.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by skam240 ( 789197 )

            I don't let people be degenerates in my home whether they are adults or not, why should Facebook let people be degenerates on their product platform?

            And yes, I define what a degenerate is in my home and Facebook does so for their platform. Welcome to the world of individualism and private property!

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Joce640k ( 829181 )

          They're complicit through lack of moderation.

          And if they "moderated" you'd be angry because they were "censoring" people, amiright?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

        > Yep, but saying "the platform played a role" isn't the same as saying "the platform was complicit" as NBC seems to be implying.

        Parler - 48 hours to remove extremist material
        Facebook - 4 months to remove extremist material
        Twitter - 1 year to remove extremist material - they only started purging Antifa accounts this week https://odysee.com/@Memology10... [odysee.com]

        Is big tech more concerned with eliminating extremists or their own competition?

      • Re:FB would be obvious choice (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:04PM (#60982962) Homepage Journal

        There is evidence (leaked from Facebook) that they knew about this weeks before it happened and were taking some action against it. Obviously not enough.

        What I'd really like to know is if they shared any of this with law enforcement. The FBI should have known that it was going to happen and made sure security around the Capitol building was prepared.

        Then again even without Facebook's help you have to wonder why they weren't infiltrating those groups and on top of this stuff anyway.

        • I don't think the FBI needed to be told about this, they already knew.

          (...and when they called the Whitehouse, Mr. President wasn't too bothered by it)

          • I wonder how that investigation of the capitol police who seemingly let them in is going.
            I also wonder if the one who committed harakiri a few days later was involved in that dereliction of duty.
            And if Facebook "banned" Alex Jones, how did I observe elderly relatives watching him there mere days ago? That's some piss-poor censorship for a company whose business is knowing everything about everybody in an automated fashion.

        • Of course every relevant authority knew about it, weeks in advance. I mean, the planning was public enough that they were literally selling "MAGA civil war" hoodies with the date of the event. It was even in mainstream news. As for "infiltration", many people in that crowd were law enforcement officers themselves.

          The reason why the security was "not ready" was that the people in charge of security were (or at least thought they were) on the same side as the insurrectionists.

        • with law enforcement. Maryland offered it's national guard and police force to DC and were turned down by Trump and the GOP leadership (by virtue of them controlling the Senate at the time). Everybody knew trouble was coming, and it's painfully obvious that the capital police were intentionally undermanned so that the Trouble would be worse.

          Some of that is probably people who were in on the coup attempt hoping it would be successful (Josh Hawley, those two nut jobs in the House, etc). For McConnell's pa

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            That being the case it makes Trump even more culpable. When he gave that speech telling them to fight, and to march down to the Capitol building, he had been advised that the situation was volatile and people were planning a violent coup.

  • Equal treatment (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @01:54PM (#60982796)

    Will Apple pull Facebook from the app store because it is "the right thing to do?" What about Google? Will Facebook be banned from the Play Store?
    I hope I'm not alone in hoping for a rules based society where the rules are applied equally. Totalitarian regimes have a pattern of having laws, but applying the laws unequally. It works surprisingly well. These are private companies. They should have clearly written, unambiguous rules. It should be clear to all that the rules are applied consistently. Note: I'm not asking for rules I agree with. If the rule is: "Anyone who expresses support for Donald Trump will be banned after two warnings", I'm fine with that rule. These are private companies. They can do what they want. However, their methods for moderation of content should be 100% transparent. Don't ban one app because protestors used it to organize, and not ban another app used by the same protestors to organize. If the rule is: Any app that allows people to organize an attack on a Federal building will be banned, I'm good with that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      Obviously not, as this is not about stopping extremism, but eliminating competition under pretext of stopping extremism.

      • Oh Puh-leez (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @04:45PM (#60983322)
        the American Right Wing looked the other way for decades as FB bought up all it's competitors. They've supported the gutting of anti-trust regulations since Reagan, all in the name of the "free market". Parler was not nor would it ever be serious competition to Facebook. They had a few million users to Facebook's few billion.

        Your side just fomented a violent coup. We're getting more details about AOC's day on Jan 6th, and they just charged a guy that threatened to kill her. And there's still the matter of that House member tweeting the Speaker's location and the one who gave guided tours a day or two before the attack.

        This is absolutely about curbing violent extremism. Not extremism (FB is fine with that, doom scrollers are great for profits), violent extremism. You went too far, now go get your loonballs under control and maybe we'll let you back into civilized society.

        • You went too far, now go get your loonballs under control and maybe we'll let you back into civilized society.

          He can't/won't.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          According to Ronald Regan, the 11th commandment is "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican".

          This renders Republicans constitutionally incapable of recognising or fixing problems in their own house. It's also why they lost their shit over Hillary calling the small number of nahtzee's and nahtzee-adjacents "deplorables", and why you have repub

          • that the GOP needs to just go away, and in it's place the Democratic party needs to split into it's left and right wings. I'd also like to see voter reform so that the GOP can't keep ruling as a minority party. Again and again they lose the popular vote in the House and for the POTUS and there's 47 million more Americans represented by the 50 Dem Senators than the 50 GOP ones.

            The counter with "you don't have the right to tell the minority what to do" and, well, so then the minority has the right to tell

    • I'm with you on the equal treatment part. And FB is worse than it seems to get credit for. Still FB does make efforts, even if they are too little and too late, always too late is a theme. There are several differences that make it harder to 'deplatform' FB - they have their own infrastructure for the most part, they don't require an app but have a web page too, they have their own bandwidth and IP addresses. FB is much more self-reliant than Parler was ever going to be, its much harder to push over.

    • Re:Equal treatment (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:07PM (#60982982) Homepage Journal

      No, because despite how shit they are at moderating that stuff, Facebook are trying to moderate it. Parler both said it was "committed to free speech" (i.e. no moderation) and that it had a backlog of posts to review tens of thousands deep.

      • But whose ox is being gored?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ASCIIxTended ( 4777373 )

        No, because despite how shit they are at moderating that stuff, Facebook are trying to moderate it. Parler both said it was "committed to free speech" (i.e. no moderation) and that it had a backlog of posts to review tens of thousands deep.

        Parler had always moderated more than FB, Twitter and the rest.

        Nothing will happen to FB, not with the kind of donations they give the Democrats:

        https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Parler both said it was "committed to free speech" (i.e. no moderation) and that it had a backlog of posts to review tens of thousands deep.

        Please. Parler had no problem moderating stuff. They just moderated stuff right-wing people find offensive - they banned and deleted plenty of left-wing posts all the time. And plenty of other strange topics - any talk about weed, for example is not allowed, despite it being legal in many jurisdictions, but even any other talk about it.

        Parley is to free speech as Twitte

    • I came to say the same thing. Parler was the #1 news app when Apple pulled it after January 6th because it was reported Parler was where the capitol protests were discussed. Now that we know it was really facebook, will they pull facebook too?
    • Private businesses can do what they want as long as it is equal treatment. A business can say “no shoes, not shirt, no service”, but if they allow shoeless shirtless white people in but kick out shoeless shirtless black people then they’re still discriminating which is illegal.

      If Google and Apple allow Facebook after kicking Parler off for the exact same offense then they’re targeting them because of who they are, not for what they had done.

    • No (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
      because FB and Twitter have both made good faith efforts to curtail violence on their platform. Parler (I'm assuming that's what you're referring to) was told for over 100 days to do something and didn't (gee, I wonder why....).

      "Equal Treatment" also requires equal circumstances.

      • because FB and Twitter have both made good faith efforts to curtail violence on their platform. Parler (I'm assuming that's what you're referring to) was told for over 100 days to do something and didn't (gee, I wonder why....).

        "Equal Treatment" also requires equal circumstances.

        Parler was making "good faith efforts". Acting in good faith doesn't require instant correction.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gabest ( 852807 )

        No, they did not. They allowed Trump's account for 4 years and only took it down when he was no longer danger to them. That's a very obvious policial bias.

    • Are Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, et. al. a "Public Accommodation" under the meaning of the Civil Rights Act?

      Yes or no, what are the consequences?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by khchung ( 462899 )

      Will Apple pull Facebook from the app store because it is "the right thing to do?" What about Google? Will Facebook be banned from the Play Store?
      I hope I'm not alone in hoping for a rules based society where the rules are applied equally.

      You don't realize that the rule in the US is the "Golden Rule", i.e. whoever holds the gold, rules?

      FB won't be banned so easily from Apple & Google platform because FB got enough gold. Parler was banned so easily because it got no gold.

      It does apply equally to everyone. Anyone who got enough gold gets to rule, too.

    • Facebook should do humanity a favor and take itself down.

    • These are private companies. They can do what they want.

      They can apply the rules in whatever fashion they desire. They can change or unchange the rules at a drop of a hat. Elastic can swear they will always be under the Apache license and change their mind two months later.

      The only thing that can change their behavior is money. If they see more money in banning some apps they will.

    • We do live in a rules based society and private property is a rule. Facebook owns their platform and can do what they like just like you can with anything you own. If you're sore about Facebook then try using one of the many other communication options this world provides you or vote for representatives and get involved in the movement towards breaking up Facebook.

      I mean your post is just full of contradictions. "They can do what they want. However..." and you then go on to talk about how they shouldn't. Ei

  • It's only fair...
  • You mean a Facebook exec may have lied? The shock!!!!

  • Hey ISPs! There's some free virtue for you to grab!

    Not a single person would be sad. (Robots do not yet count.)

  • As Foghorn Leghorn [foghornleghornquotes.com] might put it, that kind of planning... "reminds me of Paul Revere's ride, a little light in the belfry"
    • Yeah, Podium Guy posing maskless with Pelosi's podium as he made off with it. Great plan there!

  • While I'm happy to see truths being uncovered, does this one seem constructed.

    Facebook says "largely done on other sites", and NBC says "A number of people". It is mudslinging with unspecific numbers.

    NBC then goes on how they found people saying they wanted to go to the capitol, and then switches the narrative to people calling for an occupation, without disclosing if or how exactly each group connects. And so NBC makes anyone who went to the capitol automatically into a criminal, including Biden supporters

    • Private Facebook groups spent months advising one another about how to "take down" the U.S. government, particularly after Joe Biden was elected president, according to a report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, which tracked several of them.

      Many of the groups specifically talked about traveling to the Capitol on Jan. 6, the date Congress counted the electoral votes that affirmed Biden's victory.

      That's TFA, where does NBC make sweeping claims about everyone that went to the Capitol that day? Feel free to provide more quotes.

      And "switched the narrative"? It says the groups... the groups referred to in the preceding paragraph. It's connecting the take down the government groups with the date.

      I'm kind of tired of media bashing by people that can't comprehend what they're fucking reading, sorry dude, it's getting to me, it's not like I have a boner for NBC, and news media does have problems, but l2

    • Nobody knows what sites it was "largely done on." There are two components to the insurrection. The spreading of misinformation so effectively that enough people believed it and then the logistics of organizing of the people to participate in the insurrection. The surface evidence seems to be that the misinformation was spread on Parler, but people preferred other communication platforms for the logistics.

      Likely Facebook did *not* do enough about the logistic planning messages. FB was mostly concerned

      • Likely Facebook did *not* do enough about the logistic planning messages.

        Likely? Because you like this to be true?

        What is true and is known by everyone is that people trash talk all the time on the Internet. They put effort into it with photoshop and make videos and what not, just for the fun of it. If we took everything this serious then we would have banned heavy metal music and God knows what a long time ago. You even find trash talk on Minecraft and Soundcloud. If then a Counterstrike player commits a crime, do we there burn the game and every CS forum? No. We are used to tr

        • Likely because they admitted as much in the article. And likely because, for a long time, social media tried to do minimal moderation to avoid appearing biased. They appear biased when they moderate because RWNJs seem to be the largest trouble-makers. And likely because it is what makes business sense. RWNJs talking among themselves doesn't alienate the rest of the platform. RWNJs posting incendiary things and spreading misinformation for all to see would turn FB into a Parler that no sane person would

  • Debunking common FB/Twitter defenses here (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @02:56PM (#60982948)

    I've seen a lot of arguments here and elsewhere about why Facebook and Twitter should get a free pass, and I'm going to debunk each one:

    Parler and Gab allow anything goes.

    Demonstrably not true. They have very tight ToS that unequivocally banned illegal speech and also banned porn in part because they don't have the moderation teams to handle CP and related issues; legal porn is line noise when trying to keep CP off your platform. No porn, people are less likely to take their chances of being especially singled out by the moderators for their wrath.

    In fact, given that they have so many statements and actions I don't think ignorance is an excuse anymore. You're just a liar or a slanderer at this point.

    Parler had no moderation tools in place

    Not true. They had a moderation queue with 26k reports and were growing rapidly, but having a hard time keeping up. Blame the Mercers for this, but Parler did try and had a decent moderation capability built-in.

    I will granted people who say AWS was justified in removing them because it sent them a few hundred posts it considered in violation and they weren't removed promptly; contractually, AWS acting in good faith and Matze was an idiot to not tell moderators "if AWS says it's bad, hide or delete it."

    Gab welcomes extremists who foment violence

    Not true. In fact Gab is one of the worst platforms on the Internet to pull that stunt because the CEO proudly makes a point about how pro-law enforcement he is on turning over evidence to the authorities. If the FBI says "the shooter used your site and here's his account," Gab will deliver everything the dude ever did in a neat box with a ribbon on top. The CEO also frequently calls on people to actively police the platform and turn over such people to Gab support so he can ban them and refer them to law enforcement.

    Facebook and Twitter actively moderate unlike [insert competitor]

    Twitter frequently tolerates gross violations of its policies. This has been documented in the mainstream media on many occasions. One of the most recent examples was systematically banning anyone talking about the Biden laptop under their "hacked data" rules, which is hilarious since Twitter openly allows hackers to operate and share links to data dumps from law enforcement, the military, private sector, etc.

    I'm not saying those people should be banned, but the hypocrisy is public record. This is precisely the sort of selective moderation that Parler was accused of doing with violent rhetoric.

    Parler should have done more about the riot

    Bitch please, they couldn't even set up a data pipeline to scrub Exif data. Look at how they handled verified users' IDs. You're talking about an early stage, scrappy startup with people of middling talent trying to scale up and all of the other problems. There was no malice on Parler's part. The CEO has been on record saying he passionately hates QAnon among other things.

    Bottom line: the people bending over backwards to carve out excuses for Twitter and Facebook are pro-establishment shills who like the fact that these companies play ball consistently with their every demand including which users get banned for lawful speech. They don't want a free market, they want a market only allows companies whose lawful business model is indistinguishable from the companies they like.

    Also note the irony here in condemning these sites because of their early adopters. Of course trash is going to migrate first to sites like Gab and Parler. They're the most vocal users who don't like Twitter and Facebook. However, when you condemn a startup because of their early adopters and try to destroy them--as the establishment has done--you cripple the ability of the market to speak and let people be themselves (within lawful limits).

    I can guarantee that if all of this happened in 2017, and it was HRC supporters who stormed the Capitol and there were a witch hunt for "Democrat-voting insurrectionists" 95% of the people making these statements would be shrieking about corporate Fascism, their civil rights, etc.

    • This should be +5 insightful but I have no mod points to give

    • And now I'm gonna debunk your points: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @04:55PM (#60983354)
      1. Parler had been told by Amazon for over 100 days to get the violent rhetoric under control and didn't. This came out in court filings.

      2. Their "moderation" was almost entirely banning left leaning pundits who joined their service and kept making the right leaning ones look silly. They ignored the violence because if they started banning the folks fomenting it they'd run out of users. Parler was a haven for people banned for TOS violations from other platforms. They came to Parler explicitly to do the sort of things TFA is talking about.

      3. Dear God, go sign up for Gab. The reason Gab can't replace Parler is Parler at least made the White Supremacists dog whistle. This makes Gab useless as a recruitment tool because you get a full blast of pure, unfiltered racism within minutes of browsing Gab. The reason they didn't use Gab is the FBI is all over it. It'd be like a Catholic Priest trying to pick up a date from the 4 chan party van.

      4. Twitter only tolerated ToS violations from world leaders. Try being a popular lefty on their forum, they'll ban you in no time from false flags and unless you're *very* lucky and a couple celebs come to your aid you're just no longer on Twitter. Twitter has a hair trigger for bans, but because of their size they can't catch everything. We don't need them to, we need them to stop extremists recruitment drives,

      e.g. if Uncle Earl retweets something about AOC and they miss it that's ok, but when it's being retweeted by a few hundred thousands Uncle Earls we need action. The lack of that action is what got Parler in Trouble..


      Bottom line: Parler fucked around and found out. Now nobody wants to do business with them except the Russians (literally, that's not me trolling). Funny that.
    • This should be -1 Troll not +5. Have we brought back MAGA points? There is no longer an argument. A judge has ruled on the case and determined that Parler had "content moderation challenges."

      Defending Parler after this ruling is like saying that the election was stolen after there were sixty court cases in which judges ruled otherwise. Oh, wait.

      https://beta.documentcloud.org... [documentcloud.org]

  • At this point, we've seen the peak of this sort of crap. They got their one attack on the capitol. They didn't manage to get a single congressperson.

    They failed in their goals, and now the system is alerted to them. They had the element of surprise, but now that's gone.

    The pissed off just about every single congressperson by putting them in direct danger, and Trump didn't issue a blanket pardon to the rioters (which I was worried about). In other words, they're now f*&ked. The end result of t
    • Govt requested over 10,000 national guard for the inauguration. If their goals were to strike fear in politicians, I would say they definitely met those goals.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The insurrectionists (not rioters) are pretty much in deep, yes. The real problem is that they may kick off a series of right-wing terror attacks because they cannot admit having been wrong.

  • If Parler was de-platformed, can't Facebook be de-platformed as well?

    Don't get me wrong - I'd be happy to see Parler just go away. But they were forced onto Russian servers because tech giants have all the power of societal infrastructure without the accompanying responsibility and accountability, and that does not sit well with me. Although the planning for the attack on the Capitol was a minuscule part of Facebook's traffic, I can't help thinking there's a double standard here.

    Also, Facebook is guilty of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      If Parler was de-platformed, can't Facebook be de-platformed as well?

      Well, it certainly would be an improvement. But I guess that Parler was much more blatant in its tolerance, Facebook at least pretended to try to prevent such activities.

    • There is not a double-standard here. Did you even read the Parler/AWS judgment?!

      https://beta.documentcloud.org... [documentcloud.org]

    • If Parler was de-platformed, can't Facebook be de-platformed as well?

      Well, for one, Facebook owns their servers and tech stack, so they'd have have to deplatform themselves.

  • Legal use cases are enough to make it legal. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @03:31PM (#60983060) Journal
    Courts have held it repeatedly, If a product/service has legal use cases, that will be enough. Some people can, or actually did, misuse it can not be used to ban it.

    Big case was related to VCRs. Even burglary tools are legal because the locksmiths use it. So FB was misused, or abused can not be used to ban it or restrict it.

    However, if the company knew its tools are being used for illegal purposes, and it did not make good faith effort to reduce it, it should be prosecuted. That company that was selling the slow release pain killers that caused opioid epidemic, it knew its sales channel was turning a blind eye to pharmacists gaming the system. It was held liable, right?

  • But the news said... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @04:39PM (#60983298) Homepage

    ... it was Trump's speech on the 6th that caused this. It could not have been pre-planned if that were true.

    (this isn't the only story to point out that the people who stormed the Capitol building had been planning it for some time, and that Trump had nothing to do with it, but only trolls would point out that news outlets like CNN aren't run by right-wing conspiracy theorists)

    • Re:But the news said... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @06:03PM (#60983562) Journal

      The speeches that in part caused it happened over a period of years. Beginning with the first rigged election in 2016. Well, rigged until he won it. On that night, it spontaneously unrigged itself.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No,, it wasn't Trump's speech on the 6th that specifically caused this. It was his MULTIPLE speeches on different days that caused this, as well as his trash spewed on Twitter.

    • Yes. NBC is trying to string together incoherent pieces to make it look like it was a premeditated crime. It's a trash story, which makes people guilty by association. So when the president says he is holding a public speech does NBC make people guilty simply because for travelling to the capitol to see their president. And when people trash talk, which happens everyday on both sides by the millions, then it's also not evidence of a crime, but NBC wants you to think it is and that people have been planning

  • Never take a statement from a corporate spokesperson at face value. If it matters, always demand a trustworthy independent investigation. Not doing so just encourages them to lie even more.

  • I would have expected Facebook to be much, much more careful in monitoring for such activities. Seems they screwed up profoundly.

    • Facebook seems to have focused much of it's attention on the public spreading of misinformation which makes sense because (a) this has the most impact and (b) sane people will stop using FB if it gets overrun by RWNJs. They seem to have paid much less attention to private groups that weren't visible to the public as those groups weren't ruining the FB experience for sane people.
  • This just in: violent extremists use written and verbal language in addition to bad thoughts. Words should only be used by state-sanctioned agencies!

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