By Jeff Horwitz

Facebook Inc. in 2019 redesigned its flagship product to center on what it called Groups, forums for like-minded users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called them the new "heart of the app."

Now the social-networking giant is clamping down on Groups. The effort began after Facebook's own research found that American Facebook Groups became a vector for the rabid partisanhsip and even calls for violence that inflamed the country after the election.

The changes, which Facebook escalated after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, involve overhauling the mechanics of a product that was meant to be central to its future.

Facebook executives were aware for years that tools fueling Groups' rapid growth presented an obstacle to their effort to build healthy online communities, and the company struggled internally over how to contain them. Now Facebook is working to overhaul the mechanics of a product that was meant to be central to its future.

The company's data scientists had warned Facebook executives in August that what they called blatant misinformation and calls to violence were filling the majority of the platform's top "civic" Groups, according to documents The Wall Street Journal reviewed. Those Groups are generally dedicated to politics and related issues and collectively reach hundreds of millions of users.

The researchers told executives that "enthusiastic calls for violence every day" filled one 58,000-member Group, according to an internal presentation. Another top Group claimed it was set up by fans of Donald Trump but it was actually run by "financially motivated Albanians" directing a million views daily to fake news stories and other provocative content.

Roughly "70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying and harassment," the presentation concluded. "We need to do something to stop these conversations from happening and growing as quickly as they do," the researchers wrote, suggesting measures to slow the growth of Groups at least long enough to give Facebook staffers time to address violations.

"Our existing integrity systems," they wrote, "aren't addressing these issues."

In response, Facebook ahead of the election banned some of the most prominent problem Groups and took steps to reduce the growth of others, according to documents and people familiar with its decisions. Still, Facebook viewed the restrictions as temporary and stopped short of imposing measures some of its own researchers had called for, these people said.

In the weeks after the election, many large Groups -- including some named in the August presentation -- questioned the results of the vote, organized protests about the results and helped precipitate the protests that preceded the Jan. 6 riot. After the Capitol riot, Facebook took down more of the Groups and imposed new rules as part of what it called an emergency response.

Facebook has canceled plans to resume recommending civic or health Groups, said Guy Rosen, Facebook's Vice President of Integrity, a role that oversees the safety of users and discourse on the platform. Facebook will also disable certain tools that researchers argued had facilitated edgy Groups' rapid growth and require their administrators to devote more effort to reviewing member-created content, he said.

"That helps us because we can then hold them accountable," Mr. Rosen said, adding that the changes aren't an admission that previous rules were too loose, but show Facebook adapting to emerging threats: "If you'd have looked at Groups several years ago, you might not have seen the same set of behaviors."

Facebook, like some other tech giants, has caught criticism for banning certain content and people, including Mr. Trump. It is also under the close eye of the Biden administration, which has signaled its displeasure with Facebook's handling of its platforms in the months leading to the election.

Mr. Zuckerberg said on an earnings call last Wednesday that Facebook's users are tiring of the hyper-partisanship on the platform. "People don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services," he said, adding that Facebook is also considering steps to reduce political content in its News Feed -- the stream of baby photos, birthday reminders and rants from distant relatives that greets users when they log in.

Mr. Zuckerberg also said that the company was rethinking whether Groups could be redesigned to help people "grow as individuals" in the same way real-life communities can. "We can make it so that Groups on Facebook are not just a feed and a place where you post some content," he said.

Groups pivot

Facebook's 2019 renovations marked a strategic pivot away from its News Feed and one of its most significant platform alterations in years.

It emphasized content from Groups, elevating it in the stream of material it served to users. Giving priority to Groups, Facebook said, would help people make meaningful connections with like-minded friends. The shift came as Facebook faced criticism that News Feed was susceptible to foreign interference and other manipulation.

Groups, once a subsidiary feature, were made central to the app design, recommendation systems and dating features. Mr. Zuckerberg told the Journal at the time that Facebook had devoted six months' work to ensure it made the shift responsibly and was mindful of its obligation not to promote Groups containing dubious medical advice of unfounded conspiracies with its algorithms. "If people really seek it out on their own, fine," he said.

Groups also became central to Facebook's branding, as it battled criticism over issues from data privacy to Cambridge Analytica's role in the 2016 election. In a 2020 Super Bowl ad, it celebrated amateur-rocketry buffs, bouldering clubs and rocking-chair enthusiasts -- brought together through Groups.

Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., said she became alarmed after hearing a Facebook representative advise a European prime minister's social-media director that Groups were now the best way to reach a large audience on the platform.

"My eyes bugged out of my head," said Ms. Jankowicz, who studies the intersection of democracy and technology. "I knew how destructive Groups could be."

The problem, she said, was that Facebook wasn't stepping up oversight along with its algorithmic promotion of Groups. Recommendations could take a user from an alternative-health Group to an anti-Covid-lockdown Group to a militia Group in a few clicks. Facebook eventually banned militia groups entirely. And Facebook's tools to boost Group growth -- such as letting hyperactive Group administrators issue thousands of invitations to new users daily and inserting "previews" of Group content into invitees' news feeds before they joined -- magnified those risks, she said.

Last June, she wrote an essay, "Facebook Groups Are Destroying America," for Wired magazine declaring that partisan publishers and foreign actors were harnessing Groups to peddle conspiracy theories and falsehoods. If Facebook didn't rethink its approach, she warned, Groups could undermine democracy.

Extremist groups

In a 2016 presentation about Facebook's halting efforts to combat polarization, which the Journal reported last year, a researcher noted that extremist content had swamped large German political Groups and that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools." The presentation concluded that "our recommendation systems grow the problem."

In response to the article, Facebook said it had fixed the recommendation problems.

The August 2020 internal presentation showed other issues emerging as U.S. Groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities used Facebook's tools to build large audiences. Many of the most successful Groups were under the control of administrators that tolerated or actively cultivated hate speech, harassment and graphic calls for violence, it said, noting that one top Group "aggregates the most inflammatory news stories of the day and feeds them to a vile crowd that immediately and repeatedly calls for violence."

Administrators had designated most of the Groups as private, so only members could read them. Some were secret -- people outside Facebook wouldn't know they existed, much less that they were garnering millions of views a week.

Americans didn't run some of the most popular Groups, the August presentation noted. It deemed a Group called "Trump Train 2020, Red Wave" as having "possible Macedonian ties" and of hosting the most hate speech taken down by Facebook of any U.S. Group. The Group grew to more than a million members within two months of its creation last summer, according to data archived by the fact-checking website Snopes, before Facebook took it down in September.

The Journal wasn't able to contact the administrators of the Group, whose personal pages, some with dubious English, were also removed. A request for comment to a purported successor Group didn't receive a response.

Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but "Suburban Housewives Against Trump" appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.

Content from the top 10 civic Groups was seen 93 million times over the course of seven days late in the summer. Large groups' intent to break Facebook's rules was often overt, the August presentation noted, with administrators coaching users on how to post offensive material in ways that would escape Facebook's automated filters.

'Toxic atmosphere'

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