Facebook was the social media network most used to organize the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, an analysis of Department of Justice (DOJ) charging documents shows.
The Program on Extremism at George Washington University has collected the indictments of 223 people who have been charged for participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which caused five deaths and temporarily delayed the certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Facebook was used by 73 of the people charged with crimes, more than all other social media sites combined, according to a Forbes analysis.
New – An analysis of 226 DOJ charging documents shows Facebook was far and away the most used social media platform used by those charged in the January 6 siege of Capitol Hill.https://t.co/Ut6k7Xu29h?
— Thomas Brewster (@iblametom) February 7, 2021
Alternative social media site Parler was banned from using Amazon’s online infrastructure in the wake of the riot due its alleged connection to the violence, but was only used by eight people charged, Forbes reported. Both Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores. (RELATED: Twitter’s Jack Dorsey Ripped For Tweet That Seemed To Mock Parler’s Deplatforming)
Parler did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg had previously assigned culpability for the riot to Parler and Gab, another smaller platform.
“I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” she said on Jan. 11, according to The Washington Post. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.
Facebook has struggled in the past to moderate content from extremist groups on both the left and the right. A New Zealand man who killed 49 worshipers at a mosque in 2019 used the Facebook Live feature to film the mass shooting.
Facebook announced in August 2020 that it would limit the ability of far-left groups under the antifa umbrella to organize on the platform. The social media giant removed over 900 groups and 500 individual pages associated with antifa at the time.
