According to The New York Times
Facebook said on Tuesday that it took down a network of accounts, groups and pages connected to an antigovernment movement in the United States that encourages violence.
People and groups associated with the decentralized movement, called boogaloo, will be banned from Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook also owns, the company said. Facebook said it had removed 220 Facebook accounts, 95 Instagram accounts, 28 pages and 106 groups as a result of the decision. It is also designating boogaloo as a dangerous organization on the social network, meaning it shares the same classification as terrorist activity, organized hate and large-scale criminal organizations on Facebook.
As a result, Facebook said it would ban people and organizations linked to boogaloo, and remove content that praises, supports and represents the movement.
The boogaloo network promoted “violence against civilians, law enforcement, and government officials and institutions,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Members of this network seek to recruit others within the broader boogaloo movement, sharing the same content online and adopting the same offline appearance as others in the movement to do so.”
The decision is the latest in a flurry of recent moves by tech companies to tighten the speech allowed on their popular services and more aggressively police extreme movements. The issue has become more pronounced in recent weeks after the death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who was killed in police custody last month. The killing set off major protests across the country demanding changes to police departments and the treatment of Black people more broadly.
On Monday, Reddit said it was banning roughly 2,000 communities from across the political spectrum that attacked people or regularly engaged in hate speech, including “r/The_Donald,” a community devoted to President Trump. YouTube said it barred six channels for violating its policies, including those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer.