This is the eighth installment of our special series, The Facebook Files, which is based

on a vast array of internal Facebook documents.

If you haven't listened to the previous episodes, they're already in your feed.

After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump and his supporters claimed there was widespread

voter fraud.

They demanded recounts across the country.

They called their efforts stop the steal, and it started to spread rapidly on Facebook.

Stop the steal was just like the fastest growing stuff on the platform.

Although stopped the steal groups, like they dwarfed everything in the period that they

were growing in.

They were able to use the tools that Facebook had given them, like people were inviting

thousands of other people per day, and to stop the steal groups.

There's no evidence the election was fraudulent.

And Facebook saw the stop the steal movement as harmful and wanted to prevent it from spreading.

So the company used tools that it specifically developed for major crises, called break

glass measures, which is something we talked about in episode 4 of this series.

Those measures slowed down the entire platform, and made it harder for content, any content,

to spread quickly across Facebook.

Just slow the whole thing down.

I don't mean like slowing down the platform in the sense of like everyone's internet connection

gets worse.

I mean like, take away a bit of viral boost.

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