How the 'Stop the Steal' movement outwitted Facebook ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection
Hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, angry Donald Trump supporters on Facebook coalesced around a rallying cry now synonymous with the siege on the U.S. Capitol: "Stop the Steal."
Inside Facebook, employees were watching with concern.
The presidential election may have passed without major incident, but in its wake, "angry vitriol and a slew of conspiracy theories" were fomenting, Facebook staff wrote in an internal report on the Stop the Steal movement earlier this year. Supporters perpetuated the lie that the election had been stolen from then-President Donald Trump — a lie that Trump himself had been stoking for months.
By the time Facebook banned the first Stop the Steal group on Nov. 5 for falsely casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election and calling for violence, the group had already mushroomed to more than 360,000 members. Every hour, tens of thousands of people were joining.
Facebook removed the group from its platform. But that only sent Stop the Steal loyalists to other groups on Facebook filled with misinformation and claims the election was stolen. It was a classic game of whack-a-mole that Facebook tried but failed to stay on top of. Droves of Trump fans and right-wing conspiracists had outwitted the world's largest social network.
In the days after the election, researchers at Facebook later noted, "almost all the fastest growing groups were Stop the Steal" affiliated: groups devoted to spreading falsehoods about the vote. to use the name.
