It took two months for Facebook to remove an alt-right group that was abusing a female journalist

A journalist who was the subject of sexist abuse and trolling from an alt-right Facebook group has succeeded in getting the group taken down.

However, Jesselyn Cook of the Huffington Post had to to undertake a great ordeal in order to get the group removed.

On 13 February, Jesselyn discovered that a picture of her had been shared in a private Facebook group called 'Emperor Trump's Dank Meme Stash'.

The group reportedly had more than 72,000 members at the time. Jesslyn's image had been posted in the group with a caption reading:

This is going to be a hard one guys. Huffington Post reporter, smash or pass?

Jesselyn learned of this thanks to an anonymous member of the group who messaged her a screengrab of the post through a direct message.

She explains that she immediately requested permission to join the group but had to answer to offensive questions before the administrators would accept her.

The questions were "Where do you fall on the cuck spectrum?" and "Are you a normie?"

Not wishing to answer the questions, Jesselyn returned to the anonymous man who first sent her the image and asked him to send screenshots of some of the replies.

Many are too offensive to republish here but many included threats of sexual violence, rape and insults to mental health sufferers.

Jesselyn then used her contacts at HuffPost to alert Facebook to what was happening in the group. Her co-workers also reported the group to the social media giants.

Hours later, Facebook responded and informed them that they "removed that specific content... instead of the entire group".

However, Jesselyn reports that she later received screenshots showing that the post was still live. After complaining to Facebook again, the website responded two days later asking for a specific link to the post.

Obviously, she was unable to obtain the link as this was a private group, so Facebook confirmed that not much could be done. By now Jesselyn had begun to receive direct messages from trolls on Facebook.

Her colleagues then posted on their own Facebook pages asking others to report the group, but soon enough they also became the subject of trolls.

After six days, Jesselyn got in touch with one of the group's administrators to ask them to remove the post.

Their reply was that the post had "flown under the radar" and "blame Facebook for their stupid reporting system". She was also refused entry to the group.

Two months later, when HuffPost contacted Facebook for a comment on their article, the organisation finally reviewed the group and removed it by the end of that day.

A spokesperson from Facebook told HuffPost in a statement:

As groups evolve, we can evaluate their activity over time. We have removed this group for violating our policies.

A replacement bearing the exact same name has since emerged on Facebook and already has 13,000 members.

HT Huffington Post

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