Meta says it conducted a “strategic network disruption” of AP3 in 2020 and again earlier this year in June, removing a total of 900 groups, pages and accounts associated with members from Facebook and Instagram.
“Adversaries are constantly trying to find new ways to circumvent our policies, so we continually take action against offending groups and accounts by investing heavily in people, technology, research and partnerships,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED in an email. Continue to remove any groups and accounts that violate our policies.” Meta says the company is investigating some of the group screenshots WIRED shared and will remove any content that violates its policies.
But WIRED reviewed posts from AP3 groups and profiles that are still on the platform, including examples in which members and leaders brandish AP3 badges and share photos of their in-person training sessions.
There have also been some recent cases where Facebook has even automatically generated pages for militias. In May, Facebook automatically generated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook automatically generated a page for “AP3 NM Training Camp (New Mexico).” If you hover over the Page Info widget, Facebook’s explanation says: “This unofficial Page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. “It is not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.” (Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has been repeatedly criticized in the past for automatically generating pages for extremist, white supremacist and terrorist organizations; a whistleblower first flagged the issue in 2020 in a supplement to a previous petition filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)
“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Facebook remains a major recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies prohibiting them,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. . “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists who have a history of engaging in and fueling political violence when their own systems create commercial pages for them?”
In a video from 2022 that was recently published as part of a leak to Distributed secret denialAP3 leader Scot Seddon highlighted the importance of Facebook to his group’s operational success. “We have always used Facebook, Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It has gotten us to where we are today,” Seddon told the camera. “We need to use the tools in front of us to achieve the goals where we want to be. Our goal is to network, to be as big as possible, to have as many like-minded patriots in our states that we can rely on in case things get ugly.”