Despite Facebook’s frequent claims that it’s addressing calls to violence this election season, hate groupscontinue to use the world’s largest online platform to deploy their members against people in the United States who are exercising some of the most fundamental democratic rights: protesting injustice and casting a vote during elections.
Facebook routinely fails to address these threats in time, if at all. While it banned the Proud Boys group from its platform in 2018, individual members and supporters remain active across the network, which they used to mobilize turnout for a Proud Boys’ rally in Portland last month.
Through speeches and social-media posts, President Trump seems intent on encouraging the most virulent of these groups to deploy in November to “protect the vote” against a wild range of imaginary threats. Trump has posted to Facebook numerous calls for people to enlist in the “Army for Trump” as election poll watchers. During the last debate, he repeated this line to recruit supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
It’s happened before. In the run-up to Election Day 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump told supporters that the election was going to be “rigged” and that they should monitor polling places for evidence of so-called fraud.
The militia group Oath Keepers took to social networks to call on its members to “help stop voter fraud” by congregating at polling stations to conduct “intelligence gathering and crime spotting.” Neo-Nazi groups, Ku Klux Klan offshoots and the white-nationalist American Freedom Party joined this call, asking their adherents to “watch the polls.” Some did, turning up armed outside voting places nationwide in an apparent attempt to root out alleged voter fraud and suppress the votes of Black Americans and other voters of color across the country.
In reality, voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States: Research by Dartmouth College and Trump’s own voter-integrity task force found that there was no evidence to support the fraud concerns the Trump campaign fomented in 2016.
Excerpted from: ‘Five Things Mark Zuckerberg Must Do If He’s Serious About Preventing Election Violence’
Commondreams.org