Wednesday 11 December 2019

165,000 “fake news” posts with 14.3 million interactions on 21 co-ordinated accounts that Facebook Inc. let slip by without close scrutiny


The Guardian, 6 December 2019:

The message from Israel arrived on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon for 36-year-old Beau Villereal.

At his family’s sprawling 42-acre property outside Live Oak in Florida’s rural north, Villereal sat alone in his bedroom trawling for news about Donald Trump to share on the rightwing Facebook  page he runs with his mother and father.

The messenger, who gave her name as Rochale, asked Villereal to make her an editor of Pissed off Deplorables, a self-described “pro-America page” that feeds its thousands of followers a steady diet of pro-Trump, anti-Islam content.

I totally understand you,” she wrote. “I’m from Israel and this is ... really important to me to share the truth.

Please give me a chance for a day.”

About 1,000 miles north in Staten Island, New York City, Ron Devito was tapping away on his laptop to the 20,000 followers of his pro-Trump Facebook page, Making America 1st, when he received a similar message, this time from someone using the name Tehila.

She pitched to me that she was a good editor, she could provide some good content to increase likes and views on the page,” Devito told the Guardian. “Could I just give her a chance and let her post her stuff, right? So I figured, ‘What the heck, give it a shot’.”

Villereal and Devito weren’t the only ones. Over the past two years, a group of mysterious Israel-based accounts has delivered similar messages to the heads of at least 19 other far-right Facebook pages across the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, Austria, Israel and Nigeria.

A Guardian investigation  can reveal those messages were part of a covert plot to control some of Facebook’s largest far-right pages, including one linked to a rightwing terror group, and create a commercial enterprise that harvests Islamophobic hate for profit.

This group is now using its 21-page network to churn out more than 1,000 coordinated faked news posts per week to more than 1 million followers, funnelling audiences to a cluster of 10 ad-heavy websites and milking the traffic for profit.

The posts stoke deep hatred of Islam across the western world and influence politics in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US by amplifying far-right parties such as Australia’s One Nation and vilifying Muslim politicians such as the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

The network has also targeted leftwing politicians at critical points in national election campaigns. It posted false stories claiming the UK Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said Jews were “the source of global terrorism” and accused the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of allowing “Isis to invade Canada”.

The revelations show Facebook has failed to stop clandestine actors from using its platform to run coordinated disinformation and hate campaigns. The network has operated with relative impunity even since Mark Zuckerberg’s apology to the US Senate following the Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference scandals.

When the Guardian notified Facebook of its investigation, the company removed several pages and accounts “that appeared to be financially motivated”, a spokesperson said in a statement.

These pages and accounts violated our policy against spam and fake accounts by posting clickbait content to drive people to off-platform sites,” the spokesperson said. “We don’t allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook and we’ve updated our inauthentic behaviour policy to further improve our ability to counter new tactics.”

But this comes too late for some of the network’s victims. Australia’s first female Muslim senator, Mehreen Faruqi, felt the full force of the network in August last year, when 10 of its pages launched coordinated posts inciting their 546,000 followers to attack her for speaking in parliament against racism….

It begins with a single post, curated by Israel-based administrators.
The post typically has an attention-grabbing headline and links to an article that mimics the style of a legitimate news story.

It employs a blend of distorted news and total fabrication to paint Muslims as sharia-imposing terrorists and child abusers, whose existence poses a threat to white culture and western civilisation.

It is then published almost simultaneously to the network’s 21 Facebook pages, which have a combined 1 million followers across the globe….

The Guardian conducted an analysis to confirm the extent of coordination across the network, checking where posts were identical in content and similar in publication time across different pages.

The network published 5,695 coordinated posts at its height in October 2019, receiving 846,424 likes, shares or comments in that month alone.

In total, the network has published at least 165,000 posts and attracted 14.3 million likes, shares or comments. The content is amplified further by other far-right Facebook pages, including those run by the rightwing UK Independence party (UKIP), who share it organically.

The posts link back to one of 10 near-identical websites masquerading as news sites with generic titles like “The Politics Online” and “Free Press Front”. Ad-heavy and poorly designed, the websites feature “stories” that usually combine slabs of copied text intermingled with unsourced opinion and graphic imagery.

Although Facebook Inc. asserts it removed several accounts it appears that only five account pages have been taken down and, even after the far-right network was outed by the newspaper a number of the “controlled” accounts are still displaying content.

The Guardian podcast with journalist who did the spadework is here.

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