A day after the Democrats swept to victory in the midterms, online right-wing discourse in the aging corners of Facebook turned to calls for an armed conflict with Muslims and socialists.
“Vote from the rooftops” said the caption on an image of a sniper taking aim from a rooftop. The slogan is a euphemism in rightwing subculture that if voting fails, it’s time to take up arms.
Another post warned of a coming civil war with “no one left to protect Muslims and social democrats” if they defund the police.
“I got a feeling that Abdul El Sayid won’t be around too long,” said another post, referring to the Michigan senator-elect, who faced one of the ugliest islamophobic campaigns.
Hate speech and calls for violence online aren’t new. But the problem has grown worse in recent years, experts said, after social media platforms including Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram rolled back content moderation and fact-checking policies over fears of censorship and bias.
Anti-immigration rhetoric, election denialism and health skepticism are recurring themes for violent and false narratives in extreme right-wing online subcultures, weaponized by politicians. Incendiary speech has been further boosted by AI-powered slop that’s worsened an ailing information ecosystem.
In the runup to the midterms, wishes of harm and violent threats targeted at candidates running for office jumped fivefold on Elon Musk’s X, according to the Center for Countering Digital Harm, a non-profit based in Washington DC. The research analysed replies to posts from ten candidates in battleground races from Michigan to Texas, and found hundreds calling for violence.
A similar analysis in June found violent threats and hate against U.S. politicians on Facebook quadrupled after Meta cut its fact checking program in January 2025, according to CCDH. Hate and violent speech targeted at President Trump also doubled during that period.
“These findings point to a continued pattern of platforms’ safeguards failing to proactively remove content that contributes to our increasingly violent political culture,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, a nonprofit based in Washington.
A spokesperson for Meta said the company regularly issues “public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025.” Meta removed content it found to violate its policies, the spokesperson said.
Platforms have long struggled to strike a balance between free expression and censorship. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg began as a free speech absolutist, but had to beef up moderation and introduce third party fact checking after anti-minority hate speech on Facebook fueled real world violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia a decade ago.
The debate intensified during the COVID 19 pandemic over censoring speech that doubted or joked about the origins of the virus and anti-vaccine content, and culminated in the removal of Donald Trump’s account after inflammatory posts on the day of Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022 changed the moderation landscape even further. As the billionaire railed against “woke” culture, he fired the platform’s moderation and fact-checking teams. Musk replaced it with the crowdsource program known as Community Notes that enables users to fact-check and flag problematic posts.
When Trump returned as President in 2024, the pendulum had swung back. Accused of censoring conservative views, Zuckerberg in public hearings attributed the pandemic-era speech policing to government pressure, and expressed regret over not speaking sooner. In 2025, he said that across Instagram, Facebook and Threads, the company would remove content filters around immigration and gender.
“The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” Zuckerberg said in a video message. He described Trump’s 2024 victory as a “cultural tipping point” to correct the over-censorship, and replaced fact checking with Community Notes.
Now, explicit calls for civil war or posts calling to prepare for the coming fight are on the rise on social media, experts say, especially in the lead up to and days after the midterms.
“So are we wearing camo or what? Sorry, this will be my first ever civil war,” read a Facebook post. Another image with a rifle read: “If it’s time to hide them, then it’s time to use them.”
“Problematic content on Meta platforms, which is primarily Facebook and Instagram, has increased after Meta rolled back its kind of fact-checking and anti-hate speech policies,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, UC Davis professor of communication.
She pointed to an April study that found that Instagram failed to remove 93% of flagged hateful and extremist content by white supremacist and Nazi accounts.
Wojcieszak’s research showed that Meta’s stricter moderation before the 2020 election reduced misinformation exposure by 72%. However, contrary to popular belief, reducing exposure alone did not alter political attitudes or diminish polarization.
Meta has argued that the greater tolerance of offensive speech has resulted in fewer overall complaints about content takedowns.
“Should we prefer to catch 95% of hateful speech at the cost of mistakenly flagging 1% of unobjectionable content, or is it better to live in a world in which 99% of hateful speech is caught but 5% of unobjectionable content is taken down? There’s no right answer,” said Olivier Boutin, UC Berkeley PhD student, studying political misinformation.
Other platforms also have loosened their rules about policing content. Last year, YouTube also began encouraging its moderators to leave up videos that may break its policies, increasing the threshold for offensive content to half a video, from a quarter.
Zuckerberg had called for the Trump administration’s support to push back against governments in Europe and Latin America pressuring American platforms to censor. Meta has moved its U.S. content moderation teams to Texas out of California, and has taken the stance that it will wait for people to report content before taking it down to reduce censorship.
UC Davis’ Wojcieszak said lasting change is possible only with regulation and penalties for platforms spreading hate.
“Without stricter and overt regulation, I do not think that the ‘blue wave’ will change anything by itself,” Wojcieszak said, referring to the big win by Democrats in the midterms. “Like I cannot imagine that suddenly Musk or other platform CEOs would say, ‘Oh, you know, now the Democrats are my best buddies. Let me change back to stricter moderation policies.’”
Still, many believe the Democrats’ win has set the stage for tougher tech and platform regulation.
Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, reasserted his “progressive” credentials earlier this week after playing a key role in Trump’s deportation campaign. Meta’s Washington whisperer, Joel Kaplan, who helped Zuckerberg get close to Trump, will quit after a 15 year stint.
Some argue that there needs to be more consistency to avoid big swings between strict content moderation and free-for-all speech.
“We don’t want this ridiculous pendulum swinging where [tech CEOs are] sucking up to whoever’s in power,” said Ahmed of CCDH. “What the people want is transparency and accountability. So, if they [social media platforms] do contribute to causing real world harm, we should be able to hold them liable for it.”
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com
