Facebook allowed a man charged with threatening to kill congresswoman Ilhan Omar to post violent and racist content for years, and took no action to remove his posts when he was arrested.
Patrick Carlineo, of upstate New York, posted several entries to his Facebook page alluding to violence against Muslims and US officials including former president Barack Obama, a Guardian review found.
Carlineo, 55, frequently used the platform to taunt Muslims, attacking them with racist slurs and saying he wished he could confront a group of Muslim politicians with “a bucket of pig blood”. He also shared video clips of alarmist reports about American Muslims by Fox News.
Carlineo’s entire profile was removed by Facebook after the Guardian asked the company why the posts remained online, two weeks after Carlineo was arrested. He is charged with threatening to kill Omar, one of the first Muslim women to serve in the US Congress. Carlineo is due to appear in federal court on Tuesday.
Facebook’s regulations say it allows content “threatening or calling for violence in facetious and non-serious ways” and removes posts only when there is “a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety”.
Carlineo, a supporter of Donald Trump, is accused of telephoning Omar’s office in Washington last month and asking an aide: “Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull.”
When interviewed by the FBI eight days later, Carlineo told an agent “that he was a patriot, that he loves the president, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government”, according to a complaint filed by prosecutors to the federal court in Rochester, New York.
In an email, Sonya Zoghlin, a public defender representing Carlineo, said: “Mr Carlineo is passionate about his political beliefs and his right to express them, but at no point did he intend to harm congresswoman Omar or make any plans to bring about that result.”
A spokesperson for Facebook, who declined to be identified, said in a statement: “We have removed this profile for violating our community standards.”
Before his alleged death threat to Omar, Carlineo posted frequently to social media about what he saw as a danger posed to the US by the Muslim Brotherhood. He pushed false conspiracy theories about Islamists serving inside the US government.
Carlineo lives in the village of Addison, close to New York’s border with Pennsylvania. Formerly a registered Democrat, he moved his registration to the New York Independence party following Obama’s re-election in 2012, according to public records.
From 2013, he used Facebook to denounce the Democratic party. He said Obama and other senior officials – including the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, and the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano – were traitors. And he aggressively pushed the false conspiracy theories that the then president was born in Africa and is a Muslim.
During 2013 and 2014, Carlineo shared posts that included:
A photograph of a white man pointing a shotgun directly to the camera, together with the caption: “HOW TO WINK AT A MUSLIM”.
A graphic featuring a large photograph of a bullet, with text noting that American revolutionaries shot their British occupiers. Carlineo added, in his own words, that Obama was damaging the US and people had “better wake up and do something”.
A post about Obama and Eric Holder, then the US attorney general, in which Carlineo stated: “Hope you end up like the Kennedys”. John F Kennedy and one of his brothers, attorney general Robert F Kennedy, were both assassinated.
A meme that attacked “dictator Obama” for allegedly trashing the US constitution. The post included text that asked: “Is it time to remove the enemy by force?” Carlineo added in his own words: “It’s time.”
Facebook says it does not allow hate speech, which it defines as a “direct attack” based on race, religion or several other characteristics.
But between 2013 and 2018, Carlineo posted racist material and jokes relating to Muslims and pigs on eight occasions. Muslims generally refrain from eating pork products. Three of these posts were removed by Facebook following an inquiry from the Guardian.
In March 2014, when a group of Muslim organisations announced a new political coalition in Washington, Carlineo shared a news article on the event and said: “Wish I was there with a bucket of pig blood.”
The company’s rules on hate speech state: “We allow humour and social commentary related to these topics.”
Carlineo appears to have been an avid viewer of Fox News, once mentioning on his Facebook page that he had been told he watched the channel too much. He shared video clips of segments broadcast by the channel stoking fears of Muslims in America.
The footage included inflammatory claims that there were 22 “no-go zones” in the US for non-Muslims, to which Carlineo added the comment: “We need these places gone now.” Another Fox News clip he shared claimed Minnesota was “on its way to being America’s first Somali-Muslim state”. Carlineo commented underneath: “We should send them home in boxes.”
Carlineo frequently returned to warnings about supposed incursions into the US by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political group that is influential in countries including Egypt. Carlineo falsely accused Obama and other US officials including Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, of being spies for the group.
Other times he endorsed Trump, who spearheaded the false conspiracy theory about Obama’s birthplace before he was elected in 2016. “This president has done more by himself than the muslim did in 8 years,” Carlineo said in November 2017, referring to Trump and Obama.
