In the first week of April, something strange happened in the far corners of Facebook. More than 80 pages linked to the anti-government Boogaloo movement burst onto the platform; immediately, they started racking up hundreds of followers.
It appeared to be a coordinated effort, signaling a dramatic escalation in the insurgent movement’s year-long efforts to quietly return to Meta’s Facebook, despite the company labeling the Boogaloo a “dangerous network” in 2020 and banning it after its adherents were linked to several incidents of real-world violence, including murder.
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And it wasn’t just 80 pages.
The Tech Transparency Project, a social media watchdog that’s been monitoring the Boogaloo on Facebook since its inception in late 2019, compiled a database of more than 200 pages, two-thirds of which were created just this spring. Its findings offer some sense of scale to the recent report by NBC News that found the Boogaloo movement was back on Facebook despite long-standing bans, raising questions about moderation failures. Days after that report came out, Facebook appeared to crack down on the Boogaloo network, axing around 100 pages.
But members of the Boogaloo community, who are bonded by their shared fantasies of a bloody civil war or uprising, had prepared for this moment. Within 24 hours of that crackdown, dozens of pages were already back up and running. Some of the movement’s top lieutenants used a web of dormant back-up pages to coordinate what they dubbed “Operation Boomerang” to reinstate the network—despite Facebook supposedly having mechanisms in place to prevent what they call “recidivism.”
More than 60 pages were created in the last two weeks of July. “They will absolutely be looking for our new pages etc,” wrote The Grey Man, one of the most influential accounts in the Boogaloo network (prior to the latest purge, he had thousands of followers across six different pages). “Avoid pit vipers and using our terms as the algorithms may be targeting them. Remember what got hit in the last purge and assume those conditions apply again.” He also assured his followers that he and other leaders were “working diligently to come back, identify algorithmic triggers, the cause and methods used to purge us.”
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, thinks the Boogaloo have little to fear. Facebook has shown time and again that it takes a whack-a-mole approach to content moderation, said Paul, rather than a proactive one. And these days, it often takes an unflattering news article or report to directly flag those pages to the company, in order for them to take action, she added.
After VICE News contacted Meta for this story, many more pages disappeared. A spokesperson for Meta declined to offer comment though, instead pointing to a statement that the company put out in 2020, in which it pledged to continue studying the Boogaloo movement and continue to remove content or pages that violate their ban from the platform. “So long as violent movements operate in the physical world, they will seek to exploit digital platforms,” Meta wrote at the time. “We are stepping up our efforts against this network and know there is still more to do.”
But despite this commitment, the Boogaloo movement has been able to operate openly on Facebook for nearly a year, building a vast network of pages while making almost no effort to conceal their ideological affiliation. In her dataset, Paul coded pages according to whether they used explicit Boogaloo iconography in their banner photo, profile picture or page name—such as their flag, which has an igloo in the top left corner and a strip of Hawaiian print running across the center. She found that, prior to the latest purge, more than 100 pages (over half of the entries in her database) used those symbols.
These symbols act as the glue in what continues to be a sprawling ideological movement, that’s drawn in hardline libertarians, shitposters, militiamen, firearm fanatics, anti-government extremists, anarchists, accelerationists, white supremacists, and these days, some Christian nationalists.
In 2020, the movement made its way offline and into the real world by way of what they saw as clear examples of government tyranny. First it was proposed gun laws in Virginia. Then it was lockdown orders designed to keep people safe from the deadly spread of COVID-19. Then, after a white cop killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Boogaloo Bois tried to co-opt the ensuing national unrest to advance their own goals—accelerating the collapse of America.
While the movement’s core today looks and sounds a lot like the original network in 2020—such as generalized anger towards the government, violent rhetoric targeting lawmakers or federal agents, and memes glorifying guns—for now, it lacks clear focus and the impetus to actually return to the streets.
Members of the movement have become increasingly nihilistic or “blackpilled.” One page with 10,000 followers recently posted an image of a noose, with the words “I’m past the point of just wanting them in prison.” “I have been at that point for quite some time,” someone replies.
There have been, however, recent efforts by a few prominent voices in the movement to streamline the Boogaloo’s goals. Earlier this year, some pages started circulating a newly drawn “manifesto” that resembled a more extreme Libertarian political platform, demanding the legalization of drugs, an overhaul of the tax system, and the demilitarization of police agencies, all while making vague complaints about tyranny and personal freedom. “If it is radical and extreme to simply want to be left alone, then we will be radical, and we will be extremists,” the 22-page document stated. “One does not shake the hornets’ nest and complain of the venom.”
Others have tried to find ways to monetize the movement, selling Boog merch—and even a Boogaloo-themed wine called “The Blood of Tyrants.”
But the majority of the Facebook pages remain a noisy, chaotic rabble that glorifies violence and guns and takes a nihilistic view of the future. Some even continue to openly share instructions for making explosive devices. And on its fringes, the movement appears to be evolving in ways that Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project, finds alarming.
Particularly troubling to Paul is the creeping overlap with Christian nationalism, whose adherents believe they’re fighting a spiritual war to make all American policies and cultural institutions reflect evangelical Christian values.
The combination of Christian nationalism’s goals with the violent fantasies of the Boogaloo movement remind Paul of the types of propaganda she’d see promoted in ISIS networks on Facebook almost a decade ago. There’s also growing overlap between white supremacist content and Boogaloo content. Screenshot of page showing Boogaloo and Christian nationalist crossover, via Katie Paul, executive director of the Tech transparency Project
The first major action that Facebook took against the Boogaloo movement was in June 2020, after adherents of the movement had started racking up charges on all sorts of crimes, such as murder, bomb plots, and even attempting to sell weapons to the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.
Then, Facebook declared the Boogaloo a “dangerous network” for “actively promoting violence against civilians, law enforcement and government officials and institutions.” The movement was banished, which resulted in it splintering across an array of fringe sites including MeWe and Telegram. The split intensified simmering divisions between Boogaloo factions, and cut off the movement’s ability to recruit “normies” on Facebook.
Brian Fishman, who previously oversaw Facebook’s global counterterrorism policy, was closely involved with efforts to deplatform the Boogaloo movement back in 2020. The “strategic disruption” of the Boogaloo network that Facebook conducted that year was an “intense lift,” Fishman told VICE News, and a very manual process—meaning it required a lot of attention from multiple moderators in addition to AI tools. “We impacted the problem pretty significantly, and we kept it from being a surface level movement. We forced them to go underground, more or less,” said Fishman.
After some half-hearted, short-lived efforts to rebuild on Facebook, the Boogaloo eventually retreated. The deplatforming was coupled with a crackdown by federal law enforcement, which stoked paranoia about infiltration.
By Jan. 2021, the Boogaloo movement had disappeared from public view entirely. According to George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, there were 49 arrests of people affiliated with the Boogaloo movement from 16 states between January 2020 and July 2022. A trickle of Boogaloo arrests continue to the present day.
But last year, galvanized by rising anti-FBI sentiment due to the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters and the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, Boogaloo Bois started rebuilding on Facebook and plotting their comeback.
A report by Tech Transparency Project flagged this development in September, resulting in a small flurry of page removals that failed to make any meaningful impact on the network. Then in March, VICE News reported about the Boogaloo movement’s continued efforts to rebuild, and highlighted their presence on Facebook, which again, led to a small removal of pages in the network.
Boogaloo’s return to Facebook has coincided with massive layoffs at Meta, which resulted in the company ending more than 200 content moderators’ contracts earlier this year. Fishman doesn’t have any specific insight into any particular policy changes regarding moderation at Meta, but he did express concern about a lack of “surge capacity,” which leaves the company potentially unprepared for a fresh wave of extremist activity around what’s anticipated to be yet another highly contentious election season.
The Boogaloo movement has always been good at finding creative ways to skirt moderation bans. The earliest example of this was their adoption of “Big Luau” and “Blue Igloo”—homophones of Boogaloo—as a way to evade early Facebook moderation. Those terms helped shape the Boogaloo Bois’ aesthetic, and explains why they often opted to wear Hawaiian shirts under their tactical gear.
Those terms have continued to evolve, and the movement continues to find new ways to integrate in-jokes into their shared language. They’ll use synonyms for “luau” or “igloo” such as “fiesta” or “ice house.” They briefly called themselves the Alphabet Bois, in reference to federal agencies, which first evolved into jokes about Alphabet Soup, and later being simplified to soup in general.
When Boogaloo Bois were arrested for attempting to sell weapons to Hamas, the movement began embracing the term “Boojahideen.” Following previous VICE News reports on the movement, they started co-opting VICE’s logo and changing their page names to reference it.
Not only does their shared language continue to evolve, but they are actively trying to become more resilient to moderation efforts. They’ve posted instructions for how to create new accounts and ensure their identities are protected—which is why they use the Page function in particular, as opposed to Groups, which they primarily used in 2020, making it somewhat easier to identify members.
Months ago, I’d set out with the goal of trying to find out who was behind this network. I’d wanted to know whether a few people were diligently operating this massive web of pages or if the number of pages were representative of the movement’s actual size.
I sent a fairly innocuous email to a handful of pages that featured email addresses, explaining that I’ve hoped to talk to them about the Boogaloo’s return to Facebook. But within days, the community was up in arms. Screenshots of my requests were posted on Boogaloo Facebook pages, along with instructions to bombard me with emails and dick pics. The campaign was coordinated with the hashtag #viceoffensive, and members photoshopped my face into unflattering memes, set up fake accounts pretending to be me, and spammed me with memes.
After trawling through page after page, I noticed something odd. One Facebook user, named Travis Pugh, was leaving identical “reviews” on many of those pages.
“I’ll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda. and I recommend this page for its Based and Wholesome Content.”
For anyone who hasn’t been intensely enmeshed in memespeak and gaming lore from the past two decades, it’s a reference to a famous order at “Big Smokes,” a drive-thru to 2004’s Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas game. I decided to DM Pugh to ask him about this review he was leaving—and whether he knew who was behind the Boogaloo’s return to Facebook.
He responded almost immediately. “Deep Russian Breath,” he wrote. “Now. What does a bankrupt news company journalist writer vant with Zis Man.” I told Pugh that I suspected he was building the dozens of Boogaloo pages that he was leaving reviews for.
“I’m going to be Brutally Fucking Honest with you,” he replied. “NYET. I did not make those pages, I just recommended and commented on them just for the shits and giggles. “The lulz” 1 would say in 2008.”
He later conceded that he isn’t actually Russian—that was a bit. And he said he has no idea who was making those pages, but whoever it was, they were “really determined to get the Boogaloo started and going.”
