San Francisco (AFP)

After Twitter and Youtube, Facebook also cracked down on Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Donald Trump, whose pages promoted Republican efforts to make people believe in massive frauds organized by the Democrats against the US presidential election.

According to the NGO Avaaz, the social media giant removed seven pages directly linked to Steve Bannon, which had 2.45 million subscribers in all and which the organization had reported to the platform on Friday.

"Our team had identified some of these pages earlier this year that shared misinformation about alleged fraud - this content potentially reached 10 million views just last week," said a spokesperson for the Human rights NGO.

"We have removed hotbeds of activity that used non-genuine tactics to artificially amplify their reach," a Facebook spokesperson said.

The social network enforced its rules on abusive, deceptive and spam behaviors, which are used to make content appear more popular and independent than they actually are, including coming from Steve Bannon's page.

- "Trump at war" -

The removed pages were called, among others, Conservative Values ​​The Undefeated We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic. ), or even Trump at War ("Trump at war").

In 2016, Steve Bannon was kept afloat by Facebook's algorithm and helped define the political debate for millions of Americans. For the past months, pages and groups related to him have been promoting these ideas of + electoral frauds + ", commented Fadi Quran, campaign manager at Avaaz.

“Now he seeks to further divide America and spread chaos in this post-election period, again via Facebook. The platform finally acted after Avaaz intervened, but the question is: why the company didn’t has she not acted before? ".

The Californian group had largely hardened, before the poll, its rules against disinformation and attempts to disrupt the democratic process.

In the wake of the election, the social network notably closed the "Stop The Steal" page, which had some 350,000 members on Thursday and listed a series of events - especially demonstrations in the United States. keys - sometimes accompanied by violent allusions.

President Donald Trump, followed by his supporters, has for months fed the baseless thesis that postal voting makes it easier to organize fraud.

He has not budged since Tuesday evening, on television and on social networks, accusing the Democrats of having "stolen" the election and refusing to concede defeat, while Joe Biden was proclaimed the winner on Saturday.

- Calls for murder -

Twitter and YouTube have taken action against Steve Bannon after murder calls against several senior US officials.

The @WarRoomPandemic account, named after Mr Bannon's online show, has been "permanently suspended for violating Twitter rules, especially our policy on glorifying violence," Twitter reported in a press release on Friday.

YouTube has withdrawn for the same reasons the episode from the channel "Steve Bannon's War Room", which is however still active and has more than 200,000 subscribers.

Mr. Bannon had attacked Mr. Fauci, director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases, as well as FBI boss Christopher Wray, claiming to want to "put their heads on the end of spikes" and place them "on either side from the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. "

Mr. Bannon, 66, was one of the architects of Donald Trump's successful presidential campaign in 2016 before being pushed out by the Republican billionaire.

Suspected along with three other people of having embezzled funds allegedly intended for the construction of a wall on the United States-Mexico border, Mr. Bannon was charged and arrested in late August.

He rejects these accusations.

© 2020 AFP