“He didn’t condemn anyone, and he didn’t tell them to stand down – he told them to stand back and to stand by,” Anglin, who edits the website which openly spread anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, wrote.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc FB.O identified an "uptick" in content related to the far-right Proud Boys on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump declined to condemn the group during Tuesday night's presidential debate, a company executive said on Twitter.
The content included memes featuring Trump’s instructions to the group to “stand back and stand by,” said Brian Fishman, who directs Facebook’s team handling counterterrorism and dangerous organizations.
During the debate, Trump deflected an opportunity to denounce “white supremacists and militia groups” amid violence that has marred some protests against racism and police brutality in multiple U.S. cities.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said, before immediately pivoting: “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa,” he said, referencing the largely unstructured, anti-fascist movement that broadly aims to confront those it views as authoritarian or racist.
Extremism experts warned the president’s response could embolden Proud Boys supporters, who promptly circulated memes quoting the president’s words on various social networks.
Most of the content Facebook identified on Wednesday condemned the Proud Boys and Trump’s comments about them, but the company was removing any posts it found that praised the group, Fishman said.
In 2018, Facebook banned the Proud Boys, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group, and it has removed three networks of related accounts and content this year.
Still, the world’s biggest social network failed to catch organizers publicizing a rally in Portland earlier this month, which went on for weeks before it was spotted by the Tech Transparency Project, an outside watchdog group.
On Wednesday, Trump supporters in Facebook Groups - which the company has promoted heavily this year, despite concerns about the difficulty of moderating those spaces - defended the Proud Boys and accused left-wing protesters of being “domestic terrorists.”
One member of the 30,000-member Trump Train MAGA Group called the Proud Boys “hardcore patriotic Americans.”
On Facebook, a group called Refuse Fascism that organizes nationwide protests characterized the president’s words as “bullying, lie-filled fascist assault” and accused the Proud Boys of being “fascist thugs.”
Trump already faces a major legal obstacle to implementing his policy, announced in July, of excluding undocumented immigrants from the census count that is used to decide how many House seats each state gets. But the risk that Trump will lose his re-election poses a very real time crunch for him to guarantee he will still be in office when the policy would, in theory, be implemented.
McChrystal said that he was compelled to speak out because of his wartime experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he witnessed firsthand what happens “when we stop talking about policy issues or differences and it starts to become cultural or tribal.”
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade painted the idea as a personal indignity to President Donald Trump.
“It’s also insulting to the most powerful man in the world to be silenced and have their mic cut or her mic cut in the future, if that’s how you’re going to do it,” Kilmeade said.
Co-host Steve Doocy wondered “who decides to cut off the President of the United States” and argued that doing so could potentially lead to “conspiracy theory ideas.”
“You know, they both have the right to say what they want,” Doocy said of Trump and Biden. “They just have to figure out how to do it within the rules.”
The CPD announced on Wednesday that the first debate on Tuesday, during which Trump regularly heckled and spoke over both his Democratic challenger and debate moderator Chris Wallace, “made clear that the additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues” and that the commission would announce the new rules “shortly.”
CBS News reported on Wednesday that one measure the CPD plans to enact is cutting off the candidates’ mics if they violate debate rules.
Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh accused the CPD of deciding to change its rules because “their guy got pummeled.”
“President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs,” Murtaugh said in a statement. “They shouldn’t be moving the goalposts and changing the rules in the middle of the game.”
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