Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militia Group Pages as Extremists Continue to Organize in Plain Sight

“Many of us are pissed,” wrote the “commander” of a Three Percenter militia in Kentucky in a post. “We need to have a location all patriots from all states can come to when the time comes,” he continued. “Thoughts?” Other militia members replied, affirming their readiness. “It’s time the enemy paid a price for their treason and crimes against humanity,” one person responded.

These plans for militia activity in the wake of the US election are not from a private conversation on an encrypted platform. It was unfolding on a public Facebook profile.

Anti-government militia movements have been continuing to use Facebook to recruit, coordinate training, promote ballot box stake outs, and prepare for a civil war that many militants believe will break out after election day. And in some cases, the movement is attracting people who don’t appear to have any prior background in a militia. Meta is even doing the work for extremist movements by auto-generating some group pages on their behalf.

Data shared exclusively with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project shows that these groups have only continued to grow on Facebook, despite WIRED previously flagging this lapse in Meta’s moderation.

The brazen proliferation of paramilitary activity on the social media platform days before the election highlights Meta’s lackadaisical approach to enforcing its own bans against groups it has labeled dangerous extremists. Militias require platforms like Facebook to grow: It’s a tool for the paramilitary movement to strengthen and radicalize its network. It also helps them facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county, and boost their membership.

The American paramilitary movement is much less visible than it was in 2020. Militias largely retreated from the streets after the January 6 Capitol riot exposed them to intense public and legal scrutiny, which was intensified by the prosecution of dozens of Oath Keepers. Some groups tried to distance themselves from the movement altogether by dropping any language about a “militia” from their websites, opting instead for more euphemistic names like “civilian guard” and “patriot group.” But after the dust settled following the Capitol riot, the movement began quietly rebuilding on Facebook. And they ramped up training and began coordinating, across counties and states.

The Tech Transparency Project has compiled a list of 262 Facebook public and private groups and 193 Facebook pages for militia and anti-government activists that were created since January 6, 2021. Nearly two dozen of those groups and pages have been created since May, according to the TTP. Some make minimal effort to conceal their affiliations to extremist networks: One new public group created in May is called The Michigan III%. Increasingly, the movement is also relying on individual profiles associated with leaders of local militia, the TTP says. Moderation has put a dent in the presence of American Patriots Three Percent (AP3), one of the largest active militias that Facebook explicitly banned in 2020 as a “militarized social movement” and “armed militia group.”

Meta says it carried out a “strategic network disruption” of AP3 in 2020 and again earlier this year in June, removing from Facebook and Instagram a total of 900 groups, pages, and accounts associated with members.

“Adversaries are constantly trying to find new ways around our policies, which is why we continually enforce against violating groups and accounts by investing heavily in people, technology, research, and partnerships,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED in an email. “We will continue to remove any groups and accounts that violate our policies.” Meta says the company is investigating some of the screenshots of groups that WIRED shared and will remove any content that violates its policies.

But WIRED reviewed posts from AP3 groups and profiles that are still on the platform, including examples where members and leaders brandish AP3 insignia and share photos from their in-person training sessions.

There have also been some recent instances where Facebook has even auto-generated pages for militias. In May, Facebook auto-generated a page for AP3’s Arizona chapter. In June, Facebook auto-generated a page for “AP3 NM [New Mexico] Training Range.” If you hover over the information widget on the page, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.” (Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has repeatedly come under fire in the past for auto-generating pages for extremist, white supremacist, and terrorist organizations; a whistleblower first flagged the issue in 2020 in a supplement to an earlier petition filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)

“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”

In a video from 2022 that was recently published as part of a leak to Distributed Denial of Secrets, AP3 leader Scot Seddon stressed the importance of Facebook to his group’s operational success. “We’ve always used Facebook, Facebook has been our greatest weapon. It has gotten us where we are today,” Seddon told the camera. “We need to use the tools that are in front of us to achieve the goals of where we want to be. Our goal is to network, be as big as possible, have as many like-minded patriots in our states that we can rely upon should shit hit the fan.”

Extremist groups need access to mainstream platforms like Facebook to reach and radicalize people. When those groups are banned from larger platforms and relegated to fringe sites, their reach and recruitment opportunities are limited and their numbers can become stagnant or start dropping.

“We know the power of Facebook as an organizing platform, to pull in people who have fallen down rabbit holes and radicalize them further,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “We should be concerned that actual organized domestic extremist groups have free rein on platforms that millions of Americans use.”

Now, as the election fast approaches, the paramilitary network on Facebook has been a hive of people looking to link up, train, and prepare. A review by WIRED of recent Facebook posts in a number of these militia groups also suggests that the paramilitary movement has lately been attracting individuals who don’t have previous experience of being part of a militia.

“I’m looking for a group of people that see and understand the dire situation our country is in,” wrote one poster in the Facebook group U.S.A. Militia We The People last month. “A group of people that understand that civil war is at our doorstep if Kamala makes it into office. Am I in the right place?”

In another post earlier this month in a group for a county-level militia in Virginia, a member shared that he and his wife were interested in joining up, before asking for more information about how to do so. Also earlier this month, a new member of a militia group in Oklahoma introduced himself as a military veteran and said he was a member of a militia from 2015 to 2017 but wants to get involved again. “My battle rattle is ready to go any time,” he added.

Two county-level militias in Virginia have created Facebook pages in the past month, which they’ve used to coordinate their inaugural “musters” (militia speak for a meetup) in recent weeks. Another local Virginia militia has organized a meeting for two days after the election.

The “commander” of a Three Percenter group in Kentucky—who posed for a photograph viewed by WIRED with Representative Thomas Massie last summer while wearing full gear and insignia—has used his profile to share images from training sessions and regularly makes inflammatory statements. In a recent post, he suggested that state militias ought to rally at their chosen state parks: “Three national base camps could be state or national parks … (for example) west in NV or CO, central Missouri and east WV or VA. Then get comms established.”

In a “Patriot Group” in Barron County, Wisconsin, a recent lively discussion led by a “top contributor” urged members to “organize and monitor” ballot drop boxes. Several members of the group proposed planting small cameras in the vicinity of the boxes. Ballot drop surveillance has continued to be a hot topic of discussion among election deniers and paramilitary groups. Militias also teamed up with election deniers to conduct covert surveillance of ballot drop boxes during the midterm elections, recent leaks published by Distributed Denial of Secrets and reported by WIRED show. A recent DHS intelligence memo warned law enforcement agencies that domestic extremists could try to sabotage or attack ballot boxes.

The administrator of a New Hampshire–based group called the MAGA Continental Army claims that he recently met with the local police chief to discuss preparations in the event that a civil war breaks out. “He told me if it came to civil war that he will be directing his officers to defend the people—they will not be coming after your guns,” he wrote. He added that the chief said all members should come to the police department if conflict broke out.

In one public group called The Party of Trump, with 171,000 members, a discussion about ballot drop box monitoring prompted someone to suggest that Trump supporters come armed with their AR-15s to stand guard. In another public group called We Fight for Our Lives, someone urged others to get organized ahead of the election and suggested enlisting bikers and militia. “I’m ready to fight,” one person responded. “I’ll pull the fuckin trigger fo sho” the original poster added. In another public group called SAVE THE FLAG AMERICA, someone put the stakes of the election in bleak terms: “In a matter of days, we will ascertain our financial capacity to procure essential commodities such as groceries and fuel, or, alternatively face the prospect of engaging in armed conflict.”