Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militant Group Pages As Fans Continue To Organize With Easy View

Meta claims to have carried out a “strategic network disruption” of AP3 in 2020 and earlier this year in June, removing from Facebook and Instagram a total of 900 groups, pages and accounts associated with members.

“Enemies are always trying to find new ways around our policies, which is why we’re constantly enforcing breaches of groups and accounts by investing heavily in people, technology, research, and collaboration,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED in an email. “We will continue to remove any groups and accounts that violate our policies.” Meta says the company is investigating some of the group screenshots WIRED is sharing and will remove any content that violates its policies.

But WIRED reviewed posts from AP3 groups and profiles in the field, including examples where members and leaders displayed AP3 signs and shared photos from their in-person training sessions.

There have also been recent cases where Facebook has auto-generated military pages. In May, Facebook automatically activated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook automatically created a page for “AP3 NM [New Mexico] Training Range.” When you hover over the information widget on the page, Facebook’s description reads: “This unauthorized page was created because people on Facebook showed interest in this site or business. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.” (Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has come under fire in the past for pages it automatically created for terrorist, white-collar, and terrorist organizations; a whistleblower first raised the alarm in 2020 in an addendum to a previous complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains an important tool for recruiting and organizing militants like AP3, despite creating policies that prevent them,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “How can Meta be trusted to successfully thwart those extremists with a history of engaging in and inciting political violence when its systems create business pages for them?”

In a 2022 video recently published as part of the Distributed Denial of Secrets leak, AP3 leader Scot Seddon emphasized the importance of Facebook to his team’s operational success. “We always used Facebook, Facebook was our biggest weapon. It got us to where we are today,” Seddon told the camera. “We must use the tools in front of us to achieve the goals of where we want to be. Our goal is to connect, to be as big as possible, to have as many like-minded fans in our states that we can rely on if fans should hit. “