Facebook has removed hundreds of groups and has limited thousands of groups and accounts related to ‘QAnon’ from Facebook and Instagram.

“We are taking action against Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organisations and QAnon,” Facebook said in an official blog post.

QAnon is a far-right-wing conspiracy theory movement that has had “harmful” consequences in the past. Facebook will now be taking additional steps to restrict the QAnon movement on its platforms.

It has already removed over 790 groups, 100 Pages and 1,500 ads tied to QAnon from Facebook, blocked over 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram, and additionally imposed restrictions on over 1,950 Groups and 440 Pages on Facebook and over 10,000 accounts on Instagram, it said.

Policy tweak

“We are expanding our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy to address organisations and movements that have demonstrated significant risks to public safety but do not meet the rigorous criteria to be designated as a dangerous organisation and banned from having any presence on our platform,” it said.

“While we will allow people to post content that supports these movements and groups, so long as they do not otherwise violate our content policies, we will restrict their ability to organise on our platform,” it added.

The social media platform will limit these accounts, pages and groups by measures such as limiting recommendations, reducing their ranking in the News Feed along with their reach in Search, reviewing related Hashtags on Instagram, prohibiting their Ads, commerce surfaces and monetisation tools and prohibiting fund raising.

Apart from this, it had initially also removed over 980 groups, 520 Pages and 160 ads from Facebook related to Antifa.

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