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Facebook didn't remove Kenosha Guard militia event that called for violence

The social network said Thursday that the event organizer, not the company, pulled down the event listing.

Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer
Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.
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Queenie Wong
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Facebook is facing scrutiny over how it handled an event listing created by a militia group called the Kenosha Guard.

Angela Lang/CNET

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested to employees last week that the company pulled down both an event listing and page created by militia group the Kenosha Guard after a fatal shooting at a Wisconsin protest, and he said the company should've acted sooner. Now, though, it seems Zuckerberg's remarks were partly incorrect.

On Thursday, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook never pulled down the event listing, despite receiving 455 reports from users who flagged the content for violating the site's rules. The Kenosha Guard event listing issued a "call to arms" before racial justice protests, The Verge reported this week. An administrator for the Kenosha Guard's Facebook page, not the company, removed the event a day after the shooting, BuzzFeed reported, citing internal company discussions.

"When we responded to questions about our initial investigation into what happened in Kenosha, we believed we'd removed the Event Page for violating our policies. Our investigation found that while we did remove the Kenosha Guard Page, the event page was removed by the organizer. We apologize for the error," a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. 

Facebook's failure to remove the event and the page before the shooting raises concerns about how well the company is moderating content that could incite violence. BuzzFeed posted screenshots of comments posted on the event's page. In one comment, a user said he or she was going to "kill looters and rioters" at the protest. The social network has also been under more pressure from civil rights groups, advertisers and even its own employees to do more to combat hate speech on the platform. 

Protests pushing for racial justice erupted after Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha police during an arrest in August and became paralyzed. During a protest in Kenosha, two demonstrators were shot to death and another person was wounded. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old resident of Antioch, Illinois, was accused of killing the two protesters. He was arrested and charged with first-degree intentional homicide and other criminal counts.

Facebook hasn't found any evidence that Rittenhouse followed the Kenosha Guard Page or that he was invited to the group's event. The page and event violated a new policy that Facebook rolled out about "Dangerous Organizations and Individuals," Zuckerberg told employees. Under those rules, Facebook would remove accounts, pages and groups formed by organizations and movements that pose a threat to public safety, if they discussed potential violence.

Zuckerberg had said the page and event listing were removed after a second review and that the company didn't act sooner because of an "operational mistake."