In September, Facebook posted a lengthy blog post on "Latest Steps to Keep Facebook Groups Safe," reviewing its efforts to date to curb groups that promote violence. We have banned violent U.S.-based anti-government networks associated with the boogaloo movement and removed 106 of their groups. We also expanded our policy to address organizations and movements that have demonstrated a significant risk to public safety, including QAnon, U.S.-based militias, and anarchist groups that support acts of violence during protests." [It is no different than mixing with the Michigan Militia Organization, the Missouri Citizens Militia Organization, and the Ohio Defense Force. This is because the group is not actually a militia group, but a private Fallout 76 role-playing group on Facebook.

The creator of the group, named Bobby, told PCGamesN that he first realized something was wrong when he tried to check some lore he had posted to the group and found he could not log in.

"Rebooting my phone didn't work and it became apparent that my account had been disabled. I attempted to contact the other leaders of the group, but they all proved to be unretrievable." I finally contacted them via PSN messages and found that they all had their accounts banned from Facebook and their Free States Militia game pages deleted.

The exact cause of the group's ban is unknown, but the combination of the word "militia" and the members' commitment to role-playing apparently resulted in a false positive. According to Bobby, members of the group tell stories in character and interact with other lore-based groups with names like "Vulture Raider Gang" and "Enclave Armed Forces."

A Facebook spokesperson apologized for the mix-up and suggested in a statement to Kotaku that an automated error was to blame. 'We have both 15,000 human content reviewers as well as AI to detect these groups, but occasionally groups are mistakenly removed,' the rep said. If we detect that a group is connected to a compromised organization, we may delete the group and disable the associated administrator profile."

Ironically, Facebook groups that claim to represent real militias, such as SW Missouri Militia, Michigan Rising, Michigan Whitetail Militia, and Southern Texas State Militia, continue to be active on Facebook.