In March of 2019, Facebook banned white nationalist and white separatist statements from its platform. White supremacism had been forbidden for some time, but last year’s Christchurch massacre seems to have convinced the social network that a more aggresively anti-racist approach was necessary. This ban is not comprehensive, and there are numerous holes in enforcement. This article is about one such hole: the vibrant community of American racists who “hide their power level” just enough to avoid being banned, while subtly pushing their views on friends and family. These white supremacists are not particularly coy about their tactics. They plot out in the open, on VKontakte (commonly abbreviated as VK), a Facebook-like popular Russian social medial platform that has much looser moderation. Here’s Kevin Beair, Exalted Cyclops for the Keystone States chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, explaining how “public outreach” for the racist cause can be done on Facebook: “…get on facebook and post links on small tv stations to soft-right stuff to pull people in our direction…the cool thing about facebook is you can reach people nationwide… nothing stops you from posting on a small town local tv stations facebook page 3,000 miles away… i think i’m the only one who does this… just don’t get carried away and let yourself get banned by calling blacks monkeys like ive done several times.”
We have been unable to locate Kevin’s current Facebook profile. But his VK activity gives hints as to his life on Facebook. Kevin suggests posting content from several “soft-right” sources in order to push white Facebook users in more extreme directions. One such source is Colin Flaherty, a writer with WorldNetDaily who helped popularize the “Knockout Game”, a myth that groups of teens — generally understood to be black teens — were randomly assaulting American adults. Flaherty’s goal seems to be popularizing stories of black people assaulting white people. His book, White Girl Bleed A Lot, makes the case that black mob violence is a massive and growing threat to American white people. It contains numerous basic factual errors, but the book’s Facebook page is at least modestly popular: On January 20, 2020, Beair wrote on his VK account that he was banned from posting on the Virginia Citizen Defense League Facebook page (The VCDL is the group that organized the gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia on that same day). Beair shared the BitChute video he published, called, “New Confederate.” He asserted that the Second Amendment rights battle in Virginia was racially and ethnically motivated and directly cited George Lincoln Rockwell (GLR) the original founder of the American Nazi Party.
via bellingcat: VKontakte vs. Facebook: From Open White Supremacy To Stealth