A slew of federal investigations and arrests had caused the Boogaloos to lower their profile, VICE News reports, but the anti-government extremist movement never went away. Now, “the Boogaloo Bois appear to be regrouping, plotting their public comeback to coincide with what many fear could be a tense, even violent, presidential election season.”
And Facebook seems to be playing a critical role in their resurgence.
More from VICE:
In the last six months, the Boogaloo Bois have returned to Facebook and are using the platform to funnel new recruits (and “OG Bois”) into smaller subgroups, with the goal of coordinating offline meet-ups and training, according to data obtained by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with VICE News. They’re posting propaganda videos, guides to sniper training and guerilla warfare, and how-tos for assembling untraceable ghost guns. “The Bois are back in town,” declared a member of one of the new groups.
VICE added that “Facebook deleted many of the groups after VICE News reached out for this story." But how the heck did Facebook not notice what was happening under its nose until VICE alerted the platform?
According to VICE, Facebook banned the Boogaloo movement in late June of 2020. (Boogaloo is a right-wing meme for civil war or uprising). Yet the Boogaloo Bois have easily gotten around the ban.
One anti-government meme group, “Sounds like Something the ATF Would Say,” has recently been flooded with explicit Boogaloo content, and now has over 100,000 followers. The Tech Transparency Project found that the group had gained over 2,000 followers in the last few weeks alone.
Boogaloo Bois were using that group to siphon off users into smaller groups (at times even using QR codes to redirect them). Those groups easily skirted Facebook bans by simply misspelling well-known terms associated with their movement. The fact they were able to do that is an example of what [Katie Paul, director of The Tech Transparency Project] claims is “shitty moderation.”
But a spokesperson for Meta told VICE News that they’re operating in an “adversarial space, where perpetrators constantly try to find new ways around our policies, which is why we keep investing heavily in people, technology, research and partnerships to stay ahead of them to help keep people safe from extremist activity.”
…
“The difference between now and 2020 is they have their ideology figured out,” said Paul. “I'm extremely concerned because with these new Boog groups, there's no longer any effort to appear to be careful in terms of what they're posting. They're going straight to the ‘kill tyrants.’ ‘kill congresspeople’ memes.”
Jon Lewis, research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told VICE that the criminal justice system is not a panacea for the problem. “You can’t prosecute your way out of a narrative,” he said.
But Facebook is obviously a big factor and can play a big part of the solution. There’s simply no excuse for it not to step up and do so immediately.
