Facebook officially shut down Stop the Steal, a pro-Trump group that amassed more than 364,000 members in less than 48 hours, for spreading election misinformation regarding the ongoing election. votes are counted.
As protests over the ongoing vote count spread across a number of U.S. cities, Facebook told TIME it removed the group on Thursday due to “disturbing calls for violence.”
“As part of the exceptional measures we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the 'Stop the Steal' group that was creating real-life events,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “The group was organized around delegitimizing the electoral process, and we saw disturbing calls for violence from some members of the group.”
The group that turned out to be connected The pro-Trump organization Women for America First, as well as the Tea Party, were created after President Donald Trump makes false claims that he defeated Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden during a speech he gave in the East Room of the White House after 2 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning.
As state and local election officials continued to count ballots across the country in the days after Election Day, Trump continued to post. LIE And misleading tweetsin which he made unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud in key states. Many of these tweets have been flagged by Twitter as containing controversial or misleading information. The description of the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group appears to reference Trump's statements.
“Democrats are plotting to disenfranchise and erase Republican votes. It's up to us, the American people, to fight and put an end to this,” the page said. “Together with President Trump, we will do everything we can to ensure the integrity of this election for the benefit of the nation.”
Posts on the page were rife with misinformation, including unsubstantiated claims that election workers were throwing out ballots or that voters in Maricopa County in Arizona were encouraged to vote with markers that made their ballots illegible.
The Stop the Steal movement also spread to Twitter, with some pro-Trump users tagging their posts with the hashtag.
