Facebook failed to remove an event page for a self-proclaimed militia group, in which people threatened violence against protestors, scheduled the same day as a shooter killed two people at a protest, BuzzFeed News reports.
“I had a bad feeling about it,” said Sandra Fiehrer, who volunteers for the gun control nonprofit Moms Demand Action, after she saw the event, “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property,” on Facebook.
“I fully plan to kill looters and rioters tonight,” one person posted to the event page, according to BuzzFeed News. “I have my suppressor on my AR [rifle], these fools won’t even know what hit them.”
Another added, “When the shooting starts, make sure that somebody is sending a live feed of the mother f-----s going down.”
However, Facebook repeatedly rejected Fiehrer’s complaints, saying, “This event was reviewed ...it doesn’t go against one of our specific Community Standards.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later claimed that the event page being allowed to stay up was “an operational mistake,” and the company initially claimed that it removed the post eventually. However, internal discussion reveals that the event was deleted by the user prior to Facebook removing the group’s page.
“I’m not sure why our external and internal comms have claims that we removed the Kenosha Guard event,” one unidentified staffer wrote on Facebook’s employee-only message board, Workplace. “This is not true: the event was user deleted hours before we disabled the owning page. I’m not sure where the mixup happened, but this is a pretty important distinction.”
A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in a statement: “When we responded to questions about our initial investigation into what happened in Kenosha, we believed we'd removed the Event Page for violating our policies. Our investigation found that while we did remove the Kenosha Guard Page, the Event was removed by the organizer. We apologize for the error."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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