WHY THE FACEBOOK AD BOYCOTT
Facebook Has Been Profiting From Boogaloo Ads Promoting Civil War And Unrest
Facebook said on Tuesday it was banning content associated with the "Boogaloo" extremist group. BuzzFeed News found the company has been running Boogaloo ads advocating for violence for months.

Ryan MacBuzz Feed News Reporter

Caroline HaskinsBuzzFeed News Reporter


Posted on June 30, 2020

Jeff Kowalsky / Getty Images

Armed protesters outside the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, May 20. Their aloha shirts are a kind of uniform for members of the Boogaloo extremist groups.

ITS THEIR SATIRE ON BEING DRESSED AS CIVILIANS SINCE EVERYONE COMPLAINED THE MILITIAS LOOKED LIKE THE NATIONAL GUARD

On Sunday, the @docscustomknives Instagram account placed an ad on the popular photo-sharing social network advocating that people “join the militia, fight the state.” As clips from action movies play, showing police officers being shot and killed, music blares with lyrics proclaiming, "We ain't scared of no police / We got guns too."


As of Tuesday afternoon, the ad was still online.

Several hashtags in the ad — including #Boogaloo, #BoogalooBois, and #BoogalooMemes — connect the ad to “Boogaloos,” a catchphrase for anti-government extremists who have called for violence against the police and state officials and advocated for another Civil War in the US.




BuzzFeed nEWS / Via Facebook: ads


A current ad on Instagram advocated that people "join the militia" and "fight the state," while using hashtags associated with the extremist Boogaloo movement.

This ad is just one of several pieces of paid content related to the Boogaloo movement on Facebook and Instagram that were uncovered by BuzzFeed News; this is despite claims by Facebook that it was doing more to take action against the group.

The @docscustomknives may be the most recent, but it is far from the only Boogaloo ad that has run on Facebook or its photo-sharing site, Instagram. As right-wing extremists have used the company’s tools to organize, the world’s largest social network has also profited from ads pushing for white supremacy.

On Tuesday, Facebook said it would designate the Boogaloo movement as "a dangerous organization," banning it from the platform and Instagram. The company removed 220 Facebook accounts, 28 pages, and 106 groups, as well as 95 Instagram accounts, which made up what it called a “violent US-based anti-government network.” Facebook also removed 400 additional groups and more than 100 pages that shared similar content.

The account that ran the Instagram ad was not among those that the company removed. A person associated with @docscustomknives did not return a request for comment.

“That does not sound good,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News when a reporter described the content of the Boogaloo ads. They noted that the ads would be sent to a team for further review and that Tuesday’s enforcement was “just the start of the impact” on Boogaloo groups.

“We will continue to monitor for symbols and content that the violent network uses and update police and enforcement,” the spokesperson said. “If it’s organic content, it will certainly come down, as well as in ads.”

“That does not sound good.”

That may not be enough to mollify some of Facebook's critics. Tech Transparency Project Director Katie Paul told BuzzFeed News that when Facebook accepted money from Boogaloo supporters and sympathizers, it amplified the movement.

“The company is not just failing to address the fact that its platform is really feeding this echo chamber of supporters, but also the fact that it’s profiting off that movement that is predicated on violence,” she said.

Derived from the name of a 1984 movie, the term “Boogaloo” covers a range of extremists, including some believed to be violent. Earlier this month, Steven Carrillo, a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant and suspected Boogaloo member, was charged with killing a federal security officer and a police deputy in California.

The Anti-Defamation League has called Boogaloo "an old joke [that evolved] into a catchphrase for mass violence." The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that it "emerged concurrently in antigovernment and white power online spaces in the early 2010s. In both of these communities, 'boogaloo' was frequently associated with racist violence and, in many cases, was an explicit call for race war."

Facebook’s enforcement came after watchdog groups warned about right-wing extremist organizations organizing online under the Boogaloo moniker. In April, the Tech Transparency Project found 125 Facebook Groups with an aggregate of "tens of thousands of members" tied to the word “Boogaloo,” more than 60% of which had been created in the last three months.

And ads featuring Boogaloo keywords have been running on Facebook and Instagram for months.


BuzzFeed News / Via Facebook: ads



Facebook's Ad Library shows that Hoplite Armor, a body armor company, was able to advertise on the social network last year using hashtags including #Boogaloo and #CivilWar.



Body armor company Hoplite Armor ran an ad for an “Aloha Combat Shirt and Plate Carrier GIVEAWAY” from Sept. 29 to Oct. 31 last year with the hashtags “#Boogaloo” and “#CivilWar.” (Some Boogaloo members have attempted to appropriate Hawaiian shirts because “Boogaloo” is a homophone for “big luau,” another popular phrase in the movement.)

According to Facebook’s analytics, that ad garnered between 1,000 and 2,000 impressions and was mainly shown to men between the ages of 25 and 34 in California, Texas, and New York. Hoplite Armor’s page spent $517 between May 2018 and today on political or social ads, according to the social network’s Ad Library, and continues to sell the body armor on Facebook. The combination aloha shirt and plate carrier retails for $249 through Facebook’s commerce tool.

Hoplite Armor did not return BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

In February, another Facebook page, “Boogaloo II,” advertised a "2A Strong" sweatshirt. The ad appeared to call for political gun violence: "Let's Keep Virginia 2A Strong,” it said. “Let's Keep Liberty, UnPerverted, By Bullet, Or Ballot, Shall Not Be Infringed."

That ad isn't active currently, but it reached more than 2,000 people, targeting residents of Virginia, where there had been a pro-gun rally at the state’s capitol the month before.

Throughout the spring, the Boogaloo movement has continued to gain momentum. Paul told BuzzFeed News that members have used recent police killings of Black Americans to recruit people who may sympathize with their anti-government views. The @docscustomknives ad, for instance, used the hashtags #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd.

“It makes clear that these individuals are really trying to co-opt these movements to recruit supporters who may have issues with the government and authority,” she said. “It’s really signaling to that recruiting aspect that we’ve seen discussed in these private groups among Boogaloo supporters and organizers.

Facebook said earlier this month that it would take steps to limit the spread of Boogaloo on the platform by limiting recommendations for related Facebook Groups.

People who identify with the group claim the company is discriminating against them. An Instagram post on Monday from @docscustomknives — which ran the ad showing the dramatized killings of police — included screenshots appearing to show that Facebook had removed three of its posts for violating community guidelines and took down a version of the violent video ad.

One person commenting on the post called Facebook's actions a "crackdown.”

The @docscustomknives account remains online, but its owner appears to have a backup plan should Facebook take it down: Someone set up @docscustomknives2 on Instagram, listing it as a “shopping & retail” account.

“If I’m posting here that means I got Waco’d or Instagram fucked me again,” the account’s bio reads.


MORE ON THIS
A Suspected Boogaloo Extremist Has Been Charged With Killing A Federal Officer In Oakland Last Month
Salvador Hernandez · June 16, 2020

Exclusive: Facebook Fired A Contractor Who Was Paid Thousands In Bribes To Reactivate Banned Ad Accounts
Craig Silverman · Dec. 10, 2019

A Self-Proclaimed "Boogaloo Boy" Was Arrested After Allegedly Livestreaming His Hunt To Kill A Police Officer
Emmanuel Felton · April 22, 2020   

Ryan Mac is a senior tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.


Caroline Haskins is a technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

THIS VIDEO PROMOTING USA VALUES FOR AFRICA 

IS A MILITARISTIC PAEN TO IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM

IT IS PERHAPS WHY AFRICA PREFERS BUSINESS SUITED CHINA

Pandemic caused 18 pc rise in deaths in US: study
Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

A worker handles remains at a crematorium in New York on June 5, 2020 Johannes EISELE AFP/File

HEY HEY USA
HOW MANY OF YOU
HAS TRUMP KILLED TODAY

Washington (AFP)

The coronavirus pandemic in the US claimed at least 122,000 more lives than would be expected in a normal year, for a rise of 18 percent, says a study released Wednesday.

But this is just a national average, and the excess death rate was particularly high in virus hot spots such as New York City, which buried three times more people than usual and up to seven times as many during the peak of the pandemic, according to a week by week study carried out at Yale University and published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

In New York City, the expected deaths under a demographic model based on statistics from previous years would be 13,000 from March 1 through the end of May. But this time the number of deaths recorded was 38,170.

What is more, throughout the first phase of the pandemic in the US the official COVID-19 death toll was widely underestimated, the statistics in this study show.

The total number of extra deaths was far greater than that of fatalities officially blamed on the coronavirus. This is because many people who died were not tested for the virus, or because the way death certificates are filled out is not standardized in the US. So 22 percent of the above-normal deaths had no official link to the coronavirus.

States such as Texas and Arizona, which went relatively unscathed in the spring -- but are now hit hard in a new virus surge -- were the worst off by this measure. More than half of the excess deaths went unexplained, with no official link to the pandemic.

But this margin got smaller as more testing was carried out in the US.

"The gap between the official COVID-19 tally and the excess deaths has been shrinking over time and has nearly disappeared in some places, like New York City," Daniel Weinberger, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and first author of the study, told AFP.

"How reliably the official tolls capture the full burden of excess deaths still varies considerably between states," he added.

The official COVID-19 death toll is relatively reliable in New York, Massachusetts or Minnesota, for instance, the study shows.

The study does not address the issue of deaths caused indirectly by the pandemic. These are people who died of other causes, such as a heart attack or stroke and refused to go to a hospital for fear of getting infected with the coronavirus.

Separate data show that these causes of death increased although Weinberger said he does not think they contributed a lot to the overall excess deaths.

© 2020 AFP

Actress 'proud' she walked out of French Oscars over Polanski
AND WELL SHE SHOULD BE 

Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

No regrets: French actress Noemie Merlant found herself at the centre of the Polanski awards furore JOEL SAGET AFPParis (AFP)

Actress Noemie Merlant has absolutely no regrets about walking out of the French Oscars after Roman Polanski won best director to cap what was perhaps the most bitter and fractious awards ceremony in French cinema history.

Merlant followed her "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" co-star Adele Haenel nd the acclaimed movie's director Celine Sciamma, to the exit after Polanski won best film for "An Officer and a Spy".

Haenel cried "Shame!" as they left, furious that the Cesars academy had honoured a man still wanted in the US for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977, and who has since had to deny several claims of sexual assault.

Haenel -- a key figure in the French #MeToo movement, who last year revealed that she had been sexually harassed by a director as a teenager -- had declared that "distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims".

"I am proud that I left with my comrades," Merlant said of the dramatic night four months ago, which caused an earthquake in the French industry.

- 'It had to happen' -

"I think it is good that it caused a stir, that it started a debate.

"The world is changing, and going forward," the actress told AFP.

"Now we are standing up and we are walking out when things have to change. It's something I think that has to happen," said Merlant, who made her breakthrough playing a woman radicalised by the Islamic State in the 2016 film, "Le Ciel Attendra" (Heaven Can Wait).

"Maybe five or 10 years ago, I wouldn't have done it," the actress admitted. But after working with "lots of female directors I began to ask myself some quite perturbing questions about women's lives, about what they wanted to say, and their choices."

Merlant, 31, said that while the Cesars ceremony was "extremely stormy".

"I feel deep down that it opened up some things, both in the profession" and beyond it, even "among families and friends".

- Younger generation shocked -

"It is something that people want to talk about -- and even when people don't want to talk about it, that too is interesting," said Merlant, who was nominated for a best actress Cesar with Haenel.

"As women speak up, it allows you to ask questions about ourselves," the actress said. "This is also why so many of this new generation of (women) are shocked" and angry about cases like Polanski's.

Having worked with a lot of woman directors, Merlant said she has been lucky to star in so many female-driven stories.

"Up to know, I think the women that I played were not objects but the subject, and I want to keep it that way," said the actress, the star of the new French film "Jumbo", in which she plays a loner who forms a strange attraction to a fairground ride.

"I really love to go out of my comfort zone and to take on roles and stories that scare me, that take me somewhere else," said Merlant told AFP in March, before the release of the film was delayed by the French lockdown.

© 2020 AFP

Ex-Canada PM Mulroney calls for revised relations with China

THE ECONOMIST CALLED HIM A BLEEDING HEART CONSERVATIVE WHEN HE WAS PM

IT'S ALL ABOUT I SPY WITH MY FIVE EYES
Issued on: 01/07/2020 - 

Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, seen here at George Bush's funeral in 2018, said his country needed to revise its ties with China Alex Brandon POOL/AFP


Montreal (AFP)

Canada must have an "urgent rethink" of its relationship with China, former prime minister Brian Mulroney said Wednesday as tensions build over the possible extradition to the United States of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.

Conservative Mulroney backed his Liberal successor Justin Trudeau's rejection of any exchange of Meng, who was arrested in Vancouver in December 2018, for two Canadians who were detained in China in apparent retaliation.

Mulroney said Canada's hope that China would emerge as a constructive partner in international relations had been proven wrong, referring in particular to Beijing's militarization of the South China Sea.

"You can see it everywhere from the South China Sea to our two citizens who were bundled off to jail for no reason at all except to protest an extradition decision in Vancouver," Mulroney told The Globe and Mail.

"There has to be an immediate and urgent rethink of our entire relationship.

"We're a civilized important nation in the world. We have an extradition treaty with the United States of America. We were asked to honour it, and we did, and that's what we should have done."

The Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, were both detained in China nine days after Canada arrested Meng.

The two men have been held largely incommunicado since December 2018 and were slapped with spy charges after a Canadian judge ruled that extradition proceedings against Meng could go ahead.

Resetting the relationship should also mean the US "helping us, working with us to get our citizens back," Mulroney said.

He added that Canada should exclude Huawei from deployment of 5G telecoms in Canada, as it threatened the exchange of information between the "Five Eyes" countries -- United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

"We have to preserve our relationship with the Five Eyes and whatever that takes, that is what we do," Mulroney said, adding that he believed the United States would withhold intelligence from members who allowed Huawei to participate in their 5G networks.
Washington says Huawei 5G poses risks of espionage and sabotage of western networks.

© 2020 AFP

CHATHAM HOUSE 

Analysis of Israel's Delay of annexation plans

Brazil's indigenous fear devastation from coronavirus

Issued on: 01/07/2020
Brazil is the second-worst hit country by the coronavirus after the United States, with 1.5 million cases and 60,000 deaths. In remote Amazon regions, indigenous communities fear the impact of the disease, which has caused deaths at almost double the rate of the general population.

Gay marriage proponents fear result of Russian referendum

Issued on: 01/07/2020

A prohibition on same-sex marriage is one of several measures Russians are voting on today under a controversial referendum that could also extend the rule of President Vladimir Putin until 2036. Mikhail Tumasov, a Russian LGBT activist living in exile, says LGBT networks encouraged people to turn out to vote no, and fears than any actions to promote same-sex marriage could soon be deemed anti-constitutional.

Protests in Indian Kashmir over civilian death during attack

#KASHMIR IS #INDIA'S #GAZA

Issued on: 01/07/2020 -

Hundreds of people have protested in Indian-administered Kashmir, accusing government forces of killing a civilian during a clash with rebels TAUSEEF MUSTAFA AFP

Srinagar (India) (AFP)

Hundreds of people in Indian-administered Kashmir staged protests on Wednesday, accusing government forces of killing a man during a rebel attack which also left a trooper dead.

Rebels opened fire from a mosque attic in the northern town of Sopore, setting off a battle with security forces, paramilitary police spokesperson Junaid Khan told AFP.

The family of Bashir Ahmed Khan alleged that he was dragged out of his car after the showdown and shot dead by paramilitary troopers.

His three-year-old grandson, who was travelling with him, was later pictured sitting on his chest.

"Locals said that he (Khan) was brought out of his car and shot dead by the forces," Farooq Ahmed, a nephew of the dead man told AFP.

"They told us that someone in uniform then put the child on his chest as he lay dead on the road and took photographs," Farooq Ahmed said.

The photo of the child sat on the body of his dead grandfather was widely shared on social media.

Paramilitary spokesman Khan said the allegation was "baseless".

Police also denied the claims, saying legal action would be taken for "false reports and rumours".

"There was no retaliation from the security forces," inspector general of police Vijay Kumar told reporters.

Hundreds assembled at the man's funeral near the main city of Srinagar shouting "We want freedom" from Indian rule.

Government forces have intensified counterinsurgency operations against separatist rebels since a coronavirus lockdown was imposed in March.

Since January, at least 229 people have been killed during over 100 military operations across Indian-administered Kashmir, including 32 civilians, 54 government forces and 143 rebels, according to the Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a rights group.

Rebels have been fighting Indian rule in the Himalayan region for more than three decades to back demands for independence or a merger with Pakistan -- which also controls part of the disputed region.

India accuses Pakistan of arming and training rebels. Islamabad denies the allegations.

© 2020 AFP

Campaign launched for statue of English football's black trailblazer
Issued on: 01/07/2020 -

Plymouth fans are raising money for a statue of Jack Leslie Ben STANSALL AFP/File
London (AFP)

Football fans are raising money to erect a statue of Jack Leslie, who was chosen to play for England but dropped when selectors discovered he was black.
The Plymouth player, who had an English mother and a Jamaican father, was called up to the national side in 1925 but the invitation was subsequently withdrawn.
It would be another 53 years until Viv Anderson became England's first black player.

The Jack Leslie Campaign website said: "We not only want to build a statue as a memorial to Jack Leslie, but also use his story to celebrate diversity and combat racism."

It comes at a time of heightened awareness of racial injustice, with Premier League players wearing "Black Lives Matter" logos following the death of George Floyd in the United States.

Leslie's granddaughter, Lesley Hiscott, told the BBC: "I believe that the manager sent in his request, saying 'I've got a brilliant player here, he should play for England'.

"So then someone came down to watch him. They weren't watching his football. They were looking at the colour of his skin.

"And because of that, he was denied the chance of playing for his country."

Anderson said Leslie's achievements in such a hostile atmosphere should be a badge of pride for black people.

The Nottingham Forest star, who also played for Arsenal and Manchester United, eventually became the first black player to represent England against Czechoslovakia in 1978.

"I'd never heard of Jack Leslie until up to two weeks ago," he told the BBC.

"And that's a crying shame because what he achieved and what he did should be paramount in every black person's mind."

There is already a mural to Leslie at Plymouth's Home Park ground and the club named their boardroom after him, but fans want to go further.

Campaign co-founder Greg Foxsmith, who hopes to raise £100,000 ($124,000), told the BBC: "At a time when some statues are being pulled down, we want to put one of Jack Leslie up to commemorate his amazing achievements and to remember the injustice that he suffered."

Plymouth chairman Simon Hallett said: "Having a statue promoted by our fans and funded by fans is a statement by them that they are joining the fight against racism in football,"

"History has been written by the winners and I think we are now trying to pay more attention to some of the victims of those victories."

© 2020 AFP