‘The Big Delete:’ Inside Facebook’s crackdown in Germany
Al Jazeera
Tech giant’s use of new ‘social harm’ policy to remove accounts spreading COVID-19 misinformation draws mixed response.
Days before Germany’s federal elections, Facebook took what it called an unprecedented step: the removal of a series of accounts that worked together to spread COVID-19 misinformation and encourage violent responses to COVID restrictions.
The crackdown, announced on September 16, was the first use of Facebook’s new “coordinated social harm” policy aimed at stopping not state-sponsored disinformation campaigns but otherwise typical users who have mounted an increasingly sophisticated effort to sidestep rules on hate speech or misinformation.
In the case of the German network, the nearly 150 accounts, pages and groups were linked to the so-called “Querdenken” movement, a loose coalition that has protested lockdown measures in Germany and includes vaccine and mask opponents, conspiracy theorists and some far-right activists.
