The first post in the new Facebook group that was started on Wednesday was innocuous enough. “Welcome” to Stop the Steal, it said.

But an hour later, the group uploaded a minute-long video to its Facebook page with a pointed message. The grainy footage showed a crowd outside a polling station in Detroit, shouting and chanting “stop the count”. Below the video, which was quickly shared nearly 2,000 times, members of the group commented “Biden is stealing the vote” and “this is unfair”.

The viral video helped turn the Stop the Steal Facebook group into one of the fastest-growing groups in Facebook’s history. By Thursday morning, less than 22 hours after it was started, it had amassed more than 320,000 users — at one point gaining 100 new members every 10 seconds. As its momentum grew, it caught the attention of Facebook executives, who shut down the group hours later for trying to incite violence.

Even so, the Stop the Steal Facebook group had done its work. In its brief life span, it became a hub for people to falsely claim that the ballot count for the presidential election was being manipulated against President Trump.

New photographs, videos and testimonials asserting voter fraud were posted to the group every few minutes. From there, they travelled onto Twitter, YouTube and Right-wing sites that cited the unsubstantiated and inaccurate posts as evidence of an illegitimate voting process.

Stop the Steal’s rapid rise and amplifying effects also showed how Facebook groups are a powerful tool for seeding and accelerating online movements, including those filled with misinformation. Facebook groups, which are public and can be joined by anyone with a Facebook account, have long been the nerve centres for fringe movements such as QAnon and anti-vaccination activists. And while Stop the Steal has been deleted, other Facebook groups promoting falsehoods about voter fraud have popped up.

“Facebook groups are powerful infrastructure for organising,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She added that the Stop the Steal Facebook group helped people coalesce around a baseless belief that the election was being unlawfully taken from Trump.

Tom Reynolds, a Facebook spokesman, said the social network removed the Stop the Steal group as part of the “exceptional measures” it was taking on the election. “The group was organised around the delegitimisation of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” he said.

Stop the Steal was born on Facebook on Wednesday at 3pm (Eastern time) as the outcome of the election remained uncertain. About 12 hours earlier, as the vote counts showed a tight race between Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., Trump had posted without evidence on Facebook and Twitter that “They are trying to STEAL the Election”.

New York Times News Service