Some accounts that Facebook Inc. has said appear to be tied to Russian entities and bought ads around the U.S. election continued to post divisive messages as recently as this past August, according to saved versions of the now-deleted pages.
“Secured Borders,” a Facebook page that the social-media giant told congressional investigators bought ads during the presidential campaign last year, posted messages after the election that called for killing Muslims and that labeled illegal immigrants as “rapists, murderers, child molesters,” according to cached versions of the page. A person with knowledge of the Facebook page confirmed its authenticity as well as that of three others.
The pages expressed extreme views on both sides of the U.S. political and social spectrum, espousing radical ideas that demonized opposing viewpoints. “Blacktivist,” another Facebook page that bought ads during the campaign, posted videos that allegedly showed police violence toward blacks. “We could see that police are totally out of its mind and its actions are no longer correlate with common sense [sic],” said one post from August.
That same month, during the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Secured Borders posted an article from a separate site called The Blacksphere titled “Democrats ARE White Nationalists in Charlottesville.” The article from Blacksphere, a site by conservative black commentator Kevin Jackson, included a photo showing civil-rights leader John Lewis, a representative from Georgia, in a defiant stance. Secured Borders added its own comment: “Charlottesville is a real mess. We’re on the brink of another civil war.”
Four of the accounts that remained active at least until late August—“Secured Borders,” “Blacktivist,” “Heart of Texas” and “Being Patriotic”—collectively had nearly a million followers before Facebook removed the accounts for violating its policies by misrepresenting their identities.
—Natalie Andrews contributed to this article.
