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.
