Facebook just banned one of its biggest QAnon groups

Hundreds of thousands of advocates of the QAnon conspiracy theory are going to have to find a new online hangout.

The second largest QAnon group on Facebook has been banned from the platform, the social network announced Thursday. The group, called “Official Q/Qanon,” had nearly 200,000 members at the time of its removal. Facebook said it took the page down on Tuesday.

A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that the group was banned over posts that repeatedly broke the platform’s rules on misinformation, harassment, and hate speech.

BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh points out that the “Official Q/Qanon” group received more than 10 million engagements across 500,000 posts during the first 7 months of 2020. The group spiked in membership in early March, just as the full-force of the coronavirus pandemic began to hit the United States. Read more...