Premium Episode 94: Qanon Facebook Groups Are the New 8chan (Sample)
What do Facebook, Donald Trump, and QAnon have in common? They all bend reality for the president. We explore this convenient relationship, and then dive into the cesspools of the earth: QAnon Facebook groups, where the quality of discussion resembles a less coherent 8chan.
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Welcome, listener, to the 94th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the QAnon Facebook Groups episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Today, we turn our wary eyes to Facebook Groups, modern American terror cells limited only by the apathy and general nihilism of their members.
Facebook has a history of enabling violence.
The platform was used as a misinformation tool by the military of Myanmar in their genocide of the country's Muslim population.
Mark Zuckerberg's platform was slow to respond and people died as a result.
The same lumbering response time, and that's if we assume it's involuntary, has plagued their response to QAnon.
Although they've taken some steps to mitigate the movement, most observers agree that they've proven ineffective and failed to live up to their promises, many times in favor of Trump.
Travis will be taking a closer look at this messy history.
Once your brains have been sharpened with facts, I aim to undo that whole cloth.
To this effect, I personally dove from my solitary rock into the depths of these QAnon Facebook groups and will be taking a look at the cursed treasure I surfaced in my voyages.
It turns out all the gold bullion was printed with JFK Jr.' 's face.
Facebook and QAnon.
On June 18, 2016, one of Mark Zuckerberg's most trusted lieutenants at Facebook circulated a memo weighing the costs of the company's relentless quest for growth.
That memo, authored by then-Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth, observed that the company's mission of connecting people could have some ugly consequences, but they were ultimately justified.
We talk about the good and bad of our work often.
I want to talk about the ugly.
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive.
Maybe someone finds love.
Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide?
What the fuck?
So we connect more people.
That could be bad if they make it negative.
Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies.
Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still, we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.
I mean, everyone knows a village runs really well when every person in the village is in contact with every single other person in the village.
Just on a bizarre kind of flat post world that none of us can handle.
Even emotionally or even intellectually.
It's not even realistic to say that human beings are looking to be disconnected to the world at large.
He goes on to say, it is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn't something we're doing for ourselves or for our stock price. Ha!
Ah, fuck, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
I'm going to punch this person's head off their fucking body.
I knew you'd love this.
Ha?
The most annoying version of ha that you can use.
You went public!
You lost long ago the capacity to say you weren't in this for the fucking money.
And then he writes, It is literally just what we do.
We connect people, period.
That's why all the work we do in growth is justified.
Wait, that justified?
He's walked you through terrorism as just a side effect of his great awesome plan?
That's, that's what he's saying.
It's like, hey, Subtite, Facebook is going to cause a terrorist attack, but this is what we do.
We're just, it's in our nature to grow.
This makes me want to just roll myself into a small rocket and just launch myself at the Facebook building.
I want to be in Running Man at the end.
I want to be that guy.
Yeah.
I'm not actually proposing to fly a plane into a building in America.
Never mind.
In the four years since that memo circulated, Facebook has been true to that philosophy, often ignoring how their platform enables violence until long after the damage is done.
In one of the worst examples, Facebook enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
In 2016 and 2017, Myanmar soldiers and their civilian proxies massacred the country's Rohingya Muslim population, forcing more than 800,000 to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.
These events came after misinformation about local Muslims spread on Facebook for years.
That misinformation, as it turned out, was heavily pushed by the Myanmar military.
Facebook troll accounts run by the military shouted down critics and deliberately inflamed tensions.
Often, they posted sham photos of corpses that they said were evidence of Rohingya-perpetrated massacres.
Nice.
This is just fantastic.
Why have a plane dropping leaflets when you could just have a company like Facebook?
Yeah, apparently in Myanmar, the internet was sort of like confused with Facebook.
It was just the site that everyone used.
So it's where everyone like got their information, that information often incited violence.
And that's the thing with Facebook is that the main issue here is that they don't want to admit they've become a utility.
So they're both Saying, well we just connect people, you know, that's just how it works.
We want to kill people with that connection, I mean, that's out of our hands.
But usually that kind of process, if you're arguing that it's that integrated into society, we would have a conversation about whether or not that should just be up to pure profiteers, or whether the democratic will of the people should have some say in what our infrastructure does and doesn't do.
Right now we have none.
We can shut the fuck up until there's a PR problem, and then they'll deal with it to mostly just put it under the carpet.
Yeah, like power companies, like if a line breaks and then causes a fire, they're responsible for that.
They're responsible for repairing the line and putting out the fire and the damages that causes, they have to clean up after that.
But in Facebook, they say, well, we're just going to provide the services that sort of fundamentally changes how this society communicates, and then we'll take absolutely no responsibility for what happens.
Yeah, it's like there is their position essentially like, well, Facebook is the tools are good.
It's just people that are bad.
I mean, isn't that like the same argument as like, you know, for gun legislation and shit?
In November of 2018, Facebook acknowledged its role in this human rights disaster.
Alex Worofka, Facebook product policy manager, wrote this.
Prior to this year, we weren't doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite online violence.
We agree that we can and should do more.
Until now, I have failed.
The future, though.
Keep an eye out for me.
I'm one to watch.
It's such a bizarre response.
Yes, we helped enable a genocide.
We will do better.
Never should have.
Never should have happened.
In retrospect, that was bad.
But also, this is the cost for all your shiny new toys.
What, you're going to tell me you don't want Facebook?
I mean, that's basically the boomer stance.
You're going to tell me you don't like these smartphones that we've given you through this new system?
And it's like, no, actually, I don't.
I would like to burn it all down to the ground.
And we've several times said that if Facebook just disappeared from the fucking planet today, it would be a net positive by far.
One would hope that Facebook would learn their lesson after being party to one ethnic cleansing.
But according to recent reporting from David Gilbert at Vice News, Facebook has also been fueling ethnic violence in Ethiopia over the past few months.
In response to that violence, a group of activists wrote an open letter to Facebook, which says this in part.
As human rights organizations, journalists, and activists, we are seeing the negative impact that content on Facebook that incites violence has on the communities we serve.
This content can lead to physical violence and other acts of hostility and discrimination against minority groups.
Based on international human rights law, content that meets the threshold of incitement to violence, hostility, and discrimination does not belong to the protective scope of the right to freedom of expression.
Despite the real risk it carries for minority groups and others in Ethiopia, such content remains online and visible on the platform.
Really, this is the tip of the iceberg on how Facebook has enabled extremism and corroded democracy all over the world.
For a more comprehensive picture of Facebook's negligence, I would turn you to the recent two-part series from the podcast Behind the Bastards entitled, Mark Zuckerberg Should Be on Trial for Crimes Against Humanity.
Yes.
Great title.
Very good title, very honest and direct.
We stan.
It's good.
But yeah, by the end of that two-part series, you'll see why it was titled that way.
But the bottom line is this, like just this happens over and over and over again.
Like Facebook enables terrible things, misinformation, extremism, violence.
And then afterwards, Facebook says, we will do better.
Yeah, like this has been happening for years with no consequences for No, they do respond actually to certain demands like Trump saying stop hitting the, you know, conservative accounts so hard and stuff like that.
That's true.
He bends for that.
But it seems like the rest of our pleas that we don't like genocides not really on his today's calendar for him.
Yeah.
Which brings me to QAnon on Facebook.
Because Facebook has such a tight relationship with Trump, it's reasonable to be suspicious that the social media company would ever crack down on a pro-Trump movement.
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