We're seeing a lot of ‘standby’ rhetoric," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks online misinformation. "Extremist activity is starting to pick up. Facebook has taken down some, not not all, pages advertising some of these protests. In one instance, several 4Chan users openly discussed preparing for violent confrontations with left-leaning antifa groups who they allege aim to attack planned “StopTheSteal” protests in battleground states. On Telegram, militia groups, white nationalists and QAnon supporters swap updates on the latest voter fraud allegations and spread calls to take up arms to protect Trump’s presidency. On Telegram and 4Chan, a network of online message boards where users post anonymously, extremists stand out more prominently. But far-right groups are also present on the platform, which prides itself on refusing to impose standards on users or posts, and their messages are echoing there. Parler has been the site of much less extreme content than some of the others, driven more by well-known media personalities and politicians like Sean Hannity and Ted Cruz rubbing shoulders with Trump loyalists who have peppered the network with the #StopTheSteal hashtag and pleas for people to donate to Trump’s legal challenges across the country. “Facebook and Twitter’s suppression of election information was a catalyst, causing many people to lose their trust,” John Matze, Parler’s chief executive, wrote to his network’s users on Wednesday, adding that 4.5 million people had created accounts since November 6. That’s compared with just 150,000 downloads throughout all of 2019, according to AppFigures, a company that tracks smartphone apps The app for Parler, a network favored by conservatives, was downloaded roughly 1 million times during the week ending November 8, based on statistics from Google and Apple. It’s part of a larger outflux of people from mainstream sites to a variety of platforms promising fewer, if any, restrictions on content. MeWe, another alternative social network favored by the far-right, also became one of the most downloaded apps on online stores in the last week.
There were roughly five times as many posts, almost all about vote fraud, on both Telegram channels and 4Chan message boards compared with before the vote, based on POLITICO’s analysis of 40 Telegram channels and thousands of 4Chan conversations.
Many of these forums - including Telegram channels dedicated to militias and the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group - had already garnered a significant number of new members over the last 18 months as Facebook, Twitter and Google banned many extremist groups from their platforms.īut in the days following the November 3 election, these Telegram channels saw a flood of new members - a roughly 20 percent increase across the 40 channels that POLITICO followed since the election. “They’ve attracted hordes of people who think the major platforms are censoring them.” “Fringe networks have become central to how extreme groups mobilize online,” said Nahema Marchal, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project. Groups banned from Facebook, Google and Twitter for spreading falsehoods are moving to other venues and are finding that people who are eager to believe their narratives are not far behind. That highlights the limits of the social networking giants’ expanded efforts to stop election misinformation in its tracks. The fringe forums also have acted as staging grounds for coordinated misinformation campaigns targeting the major social networks, as well as repositories for extreme content, initially posted on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, that was later removed from those platforms, based on POLITICO’s review.
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