Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militia Group Pages as Extremists Continue to Organize in Plain Sight

Meta says it carried out a “strategic network disruption” of AP3 in 2020 and again earlier this year in June, removing from Facebook and Instagram a total of 900 groups, pages, and accounts associated with members.

“Adversaries are constantly trying to find new ways around our policies, which is why we continually enforce against violating groups and accounts by investing heavily in people, technology, research, and partnerships,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED in an email. “We will continue to remove any groups and accounts that violate our policies.” Meta says the company is investigating some of the screenshots of groups that WIRED shared and will remove any content that violates its policies.

But WIRED reviewed posts from AP3 groups and profiles that are still on the platform, including examples where members and leaders brandish AP3 insignia and share photos from their in-person training sessions.

There have also been some recent instances where Facebook has even auto-generated pages for militias. In May, Facebook auto-generated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook auto-generated a page for “AP3 NM [New Mexico] Training Range.” If you hover over the information widget on the page, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.” (Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has repeatedly come under fire in the past for auto-generating pages for extremist, white supremacist, and terrorist organizations; a whistleblower first flagged the issue in 2020 in a supplement to an earlier petition filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”

In a video from 2022 that was recently published as part of a leak to Distributed Denial of Secrets, AP3 leader Scot Seddon stressed the importance of Facebook to his group’s operational success. “We’ve always used Facebook, Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It has gotten us where we are today,” Seddon told the camera. “We need to use the tools that are in front of us to achieve the goals of where we want to be. Our goal is to network, be as big as possible, have as many like-minded patriots in our states that we can rely upon should shit hit the fan.”