The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on
social media.
Jan. 6,
2021, 4:41 p.m. ETJan. 6, 2021
Jan. 6,
2021
By Sheera
Frenkel
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/protesters-storm-capitol-hill-building.html
Just after
1 p.m., when President Trump ended his speech to protesters in Washington by
calling for them to march on Congress, hundreds of echoing calls to storm the
building were made by his supporters online.
On social
media sites requested by the far-right, such as Gab and Parler, directions on
which streets to take to avoid the police and which tools to bring to help pry
open doors were exchanged in comments. At least a dozen people posted about
carrying guns into the halls of Congress.
Calls for
violence against members of Congress and for pro-Trump movements to retake the
Capitol building have been circulating online for months. Bolstered by Mr.
Trump, who has courted fringe movements like QAnon and the Proud Boys, groups
have openly organized on social media networks and recruited others to their
cause.
On
Wednesday, their online activism became real-world violence, leading to
unprecedented scenes of mobs freely strolling through the halls of Congress and
uploading celebratory photographs of themselves, encouraging others to join
them.
On Gab,
they documented going into the offices of members of Congress, including that
of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Dozens posted about searching for Vice President
Mike Pence, who had been the target of Mr. Trump’s ire earlier in the day.
At 2:24
p.m., after Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Pence “didn’t have the courage to do
what should have been done,” dozens of messages on Gab called for those inside
the Capitol building to hunt down the vice president. In videos uploaded to the
channel, protesters could be heard chanting “Where is Pence?”
As Facebook
and Twitter began to crack down groups like QAnon and the Proud Boys over the
summer, they slowly migrated to other sites that allowed them to openly call
for violence.
Renee
DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory who studies online
movements, said the violence Wednesday was the result of online movements
operating in closed social media networks where people believed the claims of
voter fraud and of the election being stolen from Mr. Trump.
“These
people are acting because they are convinced an election was stolen,” DiResta
said. “This is a demonstration of the very real-world impact of echo chambers.”
She added:
“This has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and
an offline world and that what is said online is in some way kept online.”
Sheera
Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco. Previously, she spent over a
decade in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, reporting for BuzzFeed,
NPR, The Times of London and McClatchy Newspapers. @sheeraf
Twitter and Facebook Lock Trump’s Accounts After
Violence on Capitol Hill
The moves came after critics and even some allies of
the social media companies said they had failed to prevent the misinformation
that led to chaos on Wednesday.
By Kate
Conger, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel
Jan. 6,
2021
SAN
FRANCISCO — Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday locked the accounts of President
Trump, which prevents him from posting messages to his more than 88 million
followers on Twitter and 35 million followers on Facebook, after he published a
string of inaccurate and inflammatory messages on a day of violence in the
nation’s capital.
The moves
were an unprecedented rebuke of Mr. Trump by the social media companies, which
have long been megaphones for the president.
Twitter
said Mr. Trump’s account would remain locked for 12 hours and the ban could be
extended if several of his tweets that rejected the election results and
appeared to incite violence were not deleted. Mr. Trump’s account will be
permanently suspended if he continues violating Twitter’s policies against
violent threats and election misinformation, the company added.
Twitter
said the risks of keeping Mr. Trump’s commentary live on its site had become
too high. “Our public interest policy — which has guided our enforcement action
in this area for years — ends where we believe the risk of harm is higher,” a
spokesman said.
Facebook
later followed by barring Mr. Trump from publishing on the social network for
24 hours after finding that he had violated the company’s rules with two posts,
a Facebook spokesman said. Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook,
said it would also lock Mr. Trump’s account for 24 hours.
The actions
followed a torrent of criticism aimed at social media companies for their role
in spreading misinformation and being a bullhorn for Mr. Trump after a
pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday and halted the
certification of Electoral College votes. For years, Mr. Trump had built his
influence with posts on Twitter and Facebook. Since losing November’s election,
he had used the platforms to challenge the election results and call them
fraudulent.
On Twitter
on Wednesday, users called for the company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, to
take down President Trump’s account. Civil rights groups said action by social
media companies against calls for political violence was “long overdue.” Even
venture capitalists who had reaped riches from investing in social media urged
Twitter and Facebook to do more.
“For four
years you’ve rationalized this terror. Inciting violent treason is not a free
speech exercise,” Chris Sacca, a tech investor who had invested in Twitter,
wrote to Mr. Dorsey and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. “If you
work at those companies, it’s on you too. Shut it down.”
Twitter,
Facebook and others had previously resisted cracking down on Mr. Trump’s posts
and other toxic content, saying that the posts were in the public’s interest.
While the platforms had started taking more steps against political
misinformation in the months before the election, they declined to remove Mr.
Trump’s messages and instead took half measures, such as labeling his posts.
So when
violence broke out in Washington on Wednesday, it was, in the minds of longtime
critics, the day the chickens came home to roost for the social media
companies. After the onslaught of criticism began, Twitter and Facebook started
removing several of Mr. Trump’s posts from their sites, including one where the
president falsely said that “a sacred landslide election victory” had been
“unceremoniously & viciously stripped away.”
“We know
the social media companies have been lackadaisical at best” at stopping
extremism from growing on their platforms, said Jonathan Greenblatt, director
of the Anti-Defamation League. “Freedom of expression is not the freedom to
incite violence. That is not protected speech.”
Renee
DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory who studies online
movements, added that the violence was the result of people operating in closed
social media networks where they believed the claims of voter fraud and of the
election being stolen from Mr. Trump.
“This is a
demonstration of the very real-world impact of echo chambers,” she said. “This
has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and an
offline world, and that what is said online is in some way kept online. I hope
that this eliminates the conception from people’s minds.”
YouTube
also said on Wednesday that it would not tolerate calls for violence on their
sites. The video site said it removed multiple live streams that showed
participants storming the Capitol building carrying firearms. It also said it
would elevate authoritative news sources on its home page, search results and
in recommendations.
Mr.
Zuckerberg said in an internal memo to employees that he was “saddened by this
mob violence,” according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times. He said
Facebook had stepped up the moderation of Mr. Trump’s comments because the
situation was “an emergency.”
“The
peaceful transition of power is critical to the functioning of our democracy,
and we need our political leaders to lead by example and put the nation first,”
Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
Mr. Trump
also told his supporters to go home in a video that he posted on multiple
social media sites on Wednesday afternoon. “You have to go home now. We have to
have peace. We have to have law and order,” he said, while repeating false
claims that the election had been stolen from him.
Twitter
later removed three tweets, including the video and the tweet by Mr. Trump
inaccurately claiming a “sacred landslide election victory” before locking his
account. YouTube also deleted the video, as did Facebook, which also took down
the misleading post by Mr. Trump on the “election victory.”
Critics
said the moves by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were too little, too late,
after calls for violence and plans for protests had already spread on the
platforms.
On
Facebook, protesters had openly discussed what they aimed to do in Washington
on a Facebook page called Red-State Secession for weeks. The page had asked its
roughly 8,000 followers to share addresses of perceived “enemies” in the
nation’s capital, including the home addresses of federal judges, members of
Congress and prominent progressive politicians.
Comments
left on the page often featured photos of gun and ammunition, along with emojis
suggesting that members of the group were planning for violence. One post on
Tuesday said people should be “prepared to use force to defend civilization.”
Several comments below the post showed photos of assault rifles, ammunition and
other weapons. In the comments, people referred to “occupying” the capital, and
taking action to force Congress to overturn the results of the elections.
Facebook
said it removed Red-State Secession on Wednesday morning. Before it was taken
down, the page directed followers to other social media sites like Gab and
Parler that have gained popularity in right-wing circles since the election.
Those
alternative social media sites were rife with Trump supporters organizing and
communicating on Wednesday. On Parler, one trending hashtag was
#stormthecapitol. Many Trump supporters on the sites also appeared to believe a
false rumor that Antifa, a left-wing movement, was responsible for committing
violence at the protests.
“WAKE UP
AMERICA, IT’S ANTIFA and BLM operatives who are committing the violence, NOT
TRUMP SUPPORTERS!,” said one Parler account member called @Trumpfans100,
offering no evidence for the claims.
Officials
at Parler did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Over the
past year, Facebook and Twitter had stepped up efforts to moderate Mr. Trump’s
account, though they have stopped short of taking down his posts. Twitter began
adding labels to Mr. Trump’s false and misleading tweets last year and has
prevented users from sharing the posts to limit their spread. Facebook has also
attached labels to some of Mr. Trump’s posts, redirecting users to reliable and
accurate data.
When Mr.
Trump leaves office, the companies may have a freer hand. On Twitter, Mr. Trump
had largely enjoyed exceptions to its rules because the company has said it
considers posts from world leaders to be in the public interest. But Twitter
has said that after Mr. Trump is no longer president, he will be treated like a
regular user.
“This level
of insurrection should not exist, whether it is on the Twitter platform from
the president, or whether it’s on Facebook, which allows people to recruit and
carry out these types of dangerous activities,” Derrick Johnson, president and
chief executive of the N.A.A.C.P., said in an interview.
Kate Conger
is a technology reporter in San Francisco, covering privacy, policy and labor.
Previously, she wrote about cybersecurity for Gizmodo and TechCrunch.
@kateconger
Mike Isaac
is a technology correspondent and the author of Super Pumped: The Battle for
Uber, a NYT best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing
company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in The
Times's San Francisco bureau. @MikeIsaac • Facebook
Sheera
Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco. Previously, she spent over a
decade in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, reporting for BuzzFeed,
NPR, The Times of London and McClatchy Newspapers. @sheeraf
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