Even after announcing an arbitrary blanket ban on accounts associated with QAnon, Facebook isn’t done suppressing the movement.
As part of another crackdown, the social media platform has revealed that searches for the “save our children” hashtag, a slogan that’s often used by QAnon followers, will now redirect users to “credible child safety resource.”
A Facebook spokesperson said that this restriction on the hashtag is being put in place because “we’ve found that content tied to it now associated with QAnon.”
Facebook’s initial ban on QAnon accounts, pages, and groups was one of the largest and most far-reaching that it has ever deployed against a specific movement.
But following this mass purge, Facebook is continuing to make changes that prevent users from even searching for QAnon content.
Not only are search results for this “save our children” hashtag being redirected to Facebook-approved “credible” resources but the platform also redirects other QAnon-related search results to a resource that frames QAnon as “a decentralised violent ideology” in its opening sentence.
Related: ? Big Tech’s double standard on “conspiracy theories” when they come from mainstream media
Facebook is one of many Big Tech platforms to mass censor the QAnon movement with YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Patreon, Etsy, Spotify, Vimeo, and even the at-home fitness brand Peloton cracking down on the movement.
The pressure to censor QAnon has been driven by mainstream media outlets which claim that QAnon is pushing conspiracies and misinformation.
