Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militia Group Pages as Extremists Organize

I hate articles like this about things getting past a filter in an adversarial system that give no context about what it means. How many group pages does Facebook autogenerate per year? How many extremist groups get blocked? What resources are claimed by facebook to be aimed at solving this problem? What organizations have a better track record? What regulatory requirements and public organizations exist which help or hinder efforts? For all we know this is a resounding success on Facebook's part.

"Keyword gets blocked so people start using a euphemism that hasn't yet been blocked" isn't a shocking story.

If you find many of these groups on X or Facebook, you’ll find a slew of comments accusing them of being Feds. The Patriot Front is a good example. Go to any post they make on social media and you’ll see dozens of comments making fun of them and saying they are obviously federal agents.

Whether that’s true, I do not know, but I think it is noteworthy that even right-wing people doubt whether most of these groups are even real.

Auto-generating those pages for separatists should be no more alarming than pages for, say, the Muslim Brotherhood or other currents of political Islam.

In fact, if Facebook is working as intended, those pages are loci for collecting data on networks. The first two assassination attempts appeared not to have a network behind them. The third last month was an attempt to see how close someone with militia connections could get while carrying guns.

This is a bipartisan issue in America. The threat to Trump is the mosaic of these groups who prefer he remains a potent symbol but have no use for him as an active participant in politics.