Here. From BuzzFeed, here's a sentence that everybody should read and absorb, especially if you work for or have any influence at all over the conspiracy-and-advertising behemoth known as Facebook.
Researchers say Facebook is the primary mainstream platform where extremists organize and anti-Muslim content is deliberately spread.
Super. We've now got a preferred website for encouraging extremist violence, and it's the one everybody's parents are on. Fantastic. And a very large part of the problem is that extremism is being monetized, and well: The "news" sites who use Facebook as prime driver of traffic, and therefore advertisement dollars, may know full well that the content they are producing is false or dangerous. But so long as Facebook lets them do it, they're going to do it.
And then there's the role of state and national Republicans in promoting the same content, and for very similar reasons. It drives traffic and flatters the most "engaged" elements of their base, encouraging them to come back for more.
In April 2018, a BuzzFeed News analysis found that Republican officials routinely spread anti-Muslim sentiments to their constituents across 49 states. People who dislike Muslims often belong to other extremist communities and online anti-Muslim propaganda has made its way from Europe to President Trump’s Twitter feed.
Anti-Muslim conspiracies are peddled like heroin, all for the sake of building a clientele who can no longer function without a steady supply of the stuff.
Buzzfeed's report explains the ins and outs of how Facebook has let's-say-inadvertently constructed a site that rewards sensationalized and extremist content, and company policies that tolerate anti-Muslim extremism even when discovered.
But let's not beat around the issue here. It's not that Facebook and other top content sites (see: YouTube) can't take steps to limit the ability of extremist groups to spread false claims and recruit new allies: It's that the sites themselves act as clickbait mills, preferentially elevating controversial content that drives site interactions and ad revenues. They may be outsourcing the most unseemly bits to Macedonian fake news sites and the worldwide far-right conspiracy movement, but the bottom line is that they're raking in enormous amounts of money from those links. It's corporate growth requirements, not algorithms, that's keeping extremist content up and easily accessible.
The tech companies are hardly alone in this. From Fox News to Donald Trump to Rep. Steve King and his ilk, wide swaths of conservative media are equally devoted to edging as far toward actual conspiracy-mongering and violence-promotion as they can possibly get away with, all for the purpose of regularly and incessantly prodding audiences into an obsessive, extremely profitable panic.
The advertising giants were only goaded into taking begrudging action on anti-vaccination propaganda after a new series of infectious disease outbreaks began to make clear the extent to which such propaganda was taking hold and doing real-world damage. The steady drumbeat of far-right anti-Muslim violence has yet to produce the same reckoning—but it should.