Analysis shows Facebook's role in spreading false US election narratives; 650,000+ posts questioned Biden's victory between Election Day and the January 6 siege
three weeks before the election — Facebook announced, through life-long Dem operative @AndyMStone — that it was suppressing discussion of reporting about the Biden family pending a 3rd-party fact-check. The fact-check never came: because the docs were real. https://twitter.com/... Glenn Greenwald / @ggreenwald : Facebook's interference in the 2020 US election by algorithmically suppressing reporting on Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine was vastly worse than alleged Russian activity. That they used DNC operative @AndyMStone to lie, and now refuse to answer, shows the malice. https://twitter.com/... Robert Young Pelton / @ryp__ : Poverty of attention and poverty of moral clarity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Veronica Escobar / @vgescobar : And here's where much of the brainwashing happens and then spreads like a cancer cc: @Meta https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Wow, re-watching Zuckerberg's answer is such a clear reminder of his abject failure to provide leadership all the while harming civil society and global democracies. https://twitter.com/... Zamaan Qureshi / @zamaan_qureshi : Here's that key moment where @janschakowsky asked Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, to address Sheryl Sandberg's comments about the Insurrection at a House hearing last March. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Yes, I do, Representative Schakowsky. (reminder, the video stream slows at the key moment). https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @stjbs : History is going to remember Facebook as a cancer https://twitter.com/... Dinesh D'Souza / @dineshdsouza : Long term I don't see Twitter, YouTube or Facebook surviving. I realize that sounds outlandish to say now. But how can platforms that regulate speech win in the end? This is a rigged playing field. People will eventually move to greener pastures where the air is free Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Adding one last tweet to the @propublica report and one of the key reporters' thread about it. ht @CraigSilverman and rest of reporting team in his thread. Cheers. https://twitter.com/... Jan Schakowsky / @janschakowsky : Remember when Cheryl Sandberg said January 6 wasn't planned on their platform? #January6 https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Side note, what is absurd is Sandberg hasn't even had to testify about a number of key issues from 2016 or 2020 despite being the intersection for them. /4 https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : The statement from Facebook today compared to its attempt to defend Sandberg's gaslighting in the immediate aftermath is pretty obvious. /3 https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : I've noted recently how Facebook is rotating 2016 Andy Stone clones in their Kaplan/Washington PR department to defend the company from the indefensible. Pusateri is apparently on deck for this one - attempting to reframe the point into something impossible to prove. /2 https://twitter.com/... Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : One post, featuring an avatar of a woman smiling with arms raised, said: “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!” (I blocked out the face) https://twitter.com/... Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : One popular meme showed a photo of Trump winking, with the text “Not Only Can Martial Law Guarantee a Trump Victory, It Also Allows Trump To Arrest Anyone He Wants!” It was posted at least 70 times across public groups, generating more than 2,400 total likes. Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : FB spox Drew Pusateri denied that the company had pulled back on efforts to combat violent and false postings about the election after the vote. He said the company is not to blame for Jan. 6. https://twitter.com/... Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : “Facebook took its eye off the ball in the interim time between Election Day and Jan. 6,” said a former integrity team employee who worked on the task force. “There was a lot of violating content that did appear on the platform that wouldn't otherwise have.” Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : Through interviews, data & internal docs, we reveal how FB/Meta relaxed its oversight of groups after election day, and belatedly rushed to try and police them once the Capitol attack was underway. But by then, groups had become a hotbed of election misinfo and threats. Donie O'Sullivan / @donie : “The notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd.” Facebook likes to pretend it is being entirely blamed for January 6th — rather than answering questions about the role it actually played in it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Donie O'Sullivan / @donie : A damning report. “Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege... with many calling for executions or other political violence...” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Derek Willis / @derekwillis : Between Nov. 2020 & Jan. 6, 2021, an average of 10k posts a day attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory appeared on Facebook, many calling for violence. They appeared in more than 27k public groups. https://www.propublica.org/... Josh Sternberg / @joshsternberg : Society: Facebook played a huge role in organizing 1/6, from spreading false narratives to calls for violence. Facebook: We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Richard Tofel / @dicktofel : Just out @propublica and @washingtonpost: Facebook let up on policing groups on its platform after 2020 election, with the consequence of fueling January 6. Facebook says Trump and the rioters are the only ones to blame. https://www.propublica.org/... Tim O'Brien / @timobrien : Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden's victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, per WaPo/ProPublica examination. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Mark Seibel / @markseibel : Aside from the statistical analysis, this report reveals the problem with Facebook's dependence on group administrators to vet posts on their groups for hate speech and violence. Those administrators often are true believers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Mark Seibel / @markseibel : One interesting finding: groups carrying election delegitimizing content remained active on Facebook long after Jan. 6. One administrator with dozens of violations remained active till last month; Facebook closed his account only after we asked about it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @washingtonpost : Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory between Election Day and Jan. 6, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post found https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Mark Seibel / @markseibel : In the absence of a Facebook investigation, ProPublica and The Post examined millions of posts in political groups after Election Day. The result provides a look at Facebook's role in the spread of the lies that fed the Jan. 6 violence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
What the Washington Post adds is the aggregate: at least 650,000 group posts attacking Biden's victory between Election Day and the siege, many calling for violence — a quantified record of what happened while, per the company's own documents, oversight of political groups was relaxed after the vote. Spokesperson Drew Pusateri denies any pullback and rejects responsibility for January 6, making this a direct collision between Facebook's public account and its internal record.
First-order effects
The 650,000-post count turns Facebook's post-election loosening of political-group moderation from an allegation into a measurable dataset, handing House investigators and journalists a concrete evidentiary base against Pusateri's denial.
Facebook now faces two parallel accountability tracks from its own archives: this election-narrative tally and the separately documented suppression of Biden-family reporting announced through Andy Stone, where the promised third-party fact-check never materialized.
Second-order effects
Every new document release raises the cost of Facebook's deny-and-deflect posture — each spokesperson rebuttal must now survive comparison against internal numbers like the 10x pre-riot jump in violent-content reports.
Rival platforms and advertisers watching these releases face pressure to prove their own election-period moderation records before investigators or reporters reconstruct them from leaked files instead.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — internal warnings, relaxed post-election enforcement, external forensic accounting — election-period content moderation drifts toward becoming a regulated, auditable compliance function rather than discretionary platform policy, with Section 230-style liability debates as the likely vehicle; how far Congress goes remains genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Platform accountability is shifting from companies grading their own crisis performance to external, archive-driven audits of what moderation systems actually did during democratic flashpoints.
This entire Washington Post - ProPublica joint report is superb as it states as clearly as I've seen the critical role of Facebook. The same unbridled tech generating $100B/year from advertisers in order to amplify microtargeting also does the same for the Big Lie. /1 https://t.c…
One year since the insurrection was organized on Facebook, all we've seen from Facebook is a name change. We can't let them off the hook. Congress must #InvestigateFB. https://twitter.com/...
This is one of the best quantifications of election lies and calls to violence on Facebook, and shows how the company allowed false narratives to fester in Facebook Groups in the weeks before Jan 6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
While FB used @AndyMStone to decree censorship of the Biden reporting, many media outlets spread the CIA lie that the docs were “Russian disinformation.” Even after POLITICO's @SchreckReports published a book proving the docs were real, they ignored it. https://rumble.com/...
In October, 2020 — three weeks before the election — Facebook announced, through life-long Dem operative @AndyMStone — that it was suppressing discussion of reporting about the Biden family pending a 3rd-party fact-check. The fact-check never came: because the docs were real. htt…
Social media, Facebook esp, has fanned the flames of division & calls for violence. We're more divided & more hateful than ever, as platforms exploit vulnerabilities by pushing the worst content. Isn't it time for policy reform? https://www.propublica.org/...
Facebook's interference in the 2020 US election by algorithmically suppressing reporting on Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine was vastly worse than alleged Russian activity. That they used DNC operative @AndyMStone to lie, and now refuse to answer, shows the malice. htt…
Worth a read (and subscribe) from @CaseyNewton. I would add Facebook (Sandberg specifically) likes to talk about how its tools helped BLM mobilize and organize but wants to play down how it did the same for Stop the Steal. https://twitter.com/...
Donald Trump is calling for all of his followers to “drop off of Twitter and Facebook” because those social media platforms “are a disgrace to our Nation.” Who else would NOT be sorry to see them go? ✋
Guy who's banned from using Twitter and Facebook tells followers to leave Twitter and Facebook 'cause it's totally boring and lame. Not even kidding. 🤣🤣🤣
Wow, re-watching Zuckerberg's answer is such a clear reminder of his abject failure to provide leadership all the while harming civil society and global democracies. https://twitter.com/...
Here's that key moment where @janschakowsky asked Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, to address Sheryl Sandberg's comments about the Insurrection at a House hearing last March. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Long term I don't see Twitter, YouTube or Facebook surviving. I realize that sounds outlandish to say now. But how can platforms that regulate speech win in the end? This is a rigged playing field. People will eventually move to greener pastures where the air is free
Adding one last tweet to the @propublica report and one of the key reporters' thread about it. ht @CraigSilverman and rest of reporting team in his thread. Cheers. https://twitter.com/...
Side note, what is absurd is Sandberg hasn't even had to testify about a number of key issues from 2016 or 2020 despite being the intersection for them. /4 https://twitter.com/...
The statement from Facebook today compared to its attempt to defend Sandberg's gaslighting in the immediate aftermath is pretty obvious. /3 https://twitter.com/...
I've noted recently how Facebook is rotating 2016 Andy Stone clones in their Kaplan/Washington PR department to defend the company from the indefensible. Pusateri is apparently on deck for this one - attempting to reframe the point into something impossible to prove. /2 https://t…
One post, featuring an avatar of a woman smiling with arms raised, said: “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!” (I blocked out the face) https://twi…
One popular meme showed a photo of Trump winking, with the text “Not Only Can Martial Law Guarantee a Trump Victory, It Also Allows Trump To Arrest Anyone He Wants!” It was posted at least 70 times across public groups, generating more than 2,400 total likes.
FB spox Drew Pusateri denied that the company had pulled back on efforts to combat violent and false postings about the election after the vote. He said the company is not to blame for Jan. 6. https://twitter.com/...
“Facebook took its eye off the ball in the interim time between Election Day and Jan. 6,” said a former integrity team employee who worked on the task force. “There was a lot of violating content that did appear on the platform that wouldn't otherwise have.”
Through interviews, data & internal docs, we reveal how FB/Meta relaxed its oversight of groups after election day, and belatedly rushed to try and police them once the Capitol attack was underway. But by then, groups had become a hotbed of election misinfo and threats.
A damning report. “Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege... with many calling for executions or other political violence...” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
“The notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd.” Facebook likes to pretend it is being entirely blamed for January 6th — rather than answering questions about the role it actually played in it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... ht…
Between Nov. 2020 & Jan. 6, 2021, an average of 10k posts a day attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory appeared on Facebook, many calling for violence. They appeared in more than 27k public groups. https://www.propublica.org/...
Society: Facebook played a huge role in organizing 1/6, from spreading false narratives to calls for violence. Facebook: We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Just out @propublica and @washingtonpost: Facebook let up on policing groups on its platform after 2020 election, with the consequence of fueling January 6. Facebook says Trump and the rioters are the only ones to blame. https://www.propublica.org/...
Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden's victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, per WaPo/ProPublica examination. https://www.washingtonpost.com/…
Aside from the statistical analysis, this report reveals the problem with Facebook's dependence on group administrators to vet posts on their groups for hate speech and violence. Those administrators often are true believers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
One interesting finding: groups carrying election delegitimizing content remained active on Facebook long after Jan. 6. One administrator with dozens of violations remained active till last month; Facebook closed his account only after we asked about it. https://www.washingtonpos…
Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory between Election Day and Jan. 6, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post found https://www.washingtonpo…
In the absence of a Facebook investigation, ProPublica and The Post examined millions of posts in political groups after Election Day. The result provides a look at Facebook's role in the spread of the lies that fed the Jan. 6 violence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...