Not sure if this belongs in a separate thread, but Facebook seems to have issues recognizing what is and isn’t legit news going legit viral on its site.
This is the online version of the Popular Information newsletter.
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The Daily Wire, the right-wing website founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, is a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation. Its toxic content is also fantastically successful on Facebook, with each story reaching more people than any other major media outlet. A Popular Information investigation reveals some of this success is attributable to a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.
This kind of "inauthentic coordinated behavior" violates Facebook's rules. Facebook has taken down smaller and less coordinated networks that promoted liberal content. But Facebook told Popular Information that it will continue to allow this network to operate and amplify The Daily Wire's content.
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According to NewsWhip, a social media analytics company, The Daily Wire was the #11 publisher on Facebook in September, garnering 18,125,590 engagements, which include likes, comments, and shares. The Daily Wire narrowly trailed publications like the New York Times (24.4 million engagements) and the Washington Post (22.4 million engagements).
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But looking at total monthly engagements understates the scale of The Daily Wire's Facebook success. The Washington Post and the New York Times are large news organizations with hundreds of journalists. The Washington Post produced 10,591 pieces that were posted to Facebook in September, and the New York Times produced 13,442. The Daily Wire has a much smaller staff and produced just 1,181 pieces in September.
Popular Information has uncovered a network of 14 large Facebook pages that exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire. None of the pages reveal their connection to The Daily Wire, and many purport to be independent media outlets.
The "Conservative News" Facebook page, for example, lists conservativenews.com as its affiliated website. But conservativenews.com does not contain any content -- only a link back to the Facebook page, which only publishes links to The Daily Wire.
Conservative News and nearly all of the other sites in the network publish the same content from The Daily Wire, at the same time, with the same text. In other words, they are centrally controlled.
Earlier this month, Facebook provided further information about its policy regarding "inauthentic behavior" and how Facebook would respond to violators. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy, said that "the actors behind these campaigns are using deceptive behaviors to conceal the identity of the organization behind a campaign, make the organization or its activity appear more popular or trustworthy than it is."
Gleicher explained the punishment for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior is to take down the pages and related "authentic" accounts:
“As with our previous takedowns, we will continue looking for groups of accounts and Pages working together to mislead people about who they are and what they’re doing. When we find domestic, non-government campaigns in which the use of fake accounts is central to the operation, we will remove all inauthentic and authentic accounts, Pages and groups directly involved in this activity.“
But, in a statement to Popular Information, Facebook acknowledged these pages are engaging in deceptive behavior but will continue to allow them to operate. The company said that "next month" it will roll out "stronger tools to help people better understand who is behind Pages like these on Facebook."
Last year, Facebook responded differently to a much smaller network of accounts that promoted progressive political news. At the time, an activist named Chris Metcalf ran a network of seven pages — Snowflakes, The Resistance, Reasonable People Unite, Hostile Politics, Four Years of Fight, Political News Review and I Did Not Vote For Donald Trump — that he used to promote news of interest to liberals.
Working for years, Metcalf was able to attract 1.8 million fans to these pages. In October 2018, Facebook permanently took down all of Metcalf's pages for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
Facebook accused Metcalf and others of using "massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites." Although Metcalf briefly launched a website that he promoted through his pages, it was defunct at the time of the takedown. And Metcalf always used his pages to promote content from a variety of sources. Facebook denied Metcalf's appeals to reverse his ban.
Why? Facebook did not answer follow up questions. But earlier this month, a former employee of Facebook's DC office told Popular Information that Joel Kaplan, Facebook's head of global public policy, acts to protect the interest of right-wing websites. Kaplan is a Republican operative who worked in the George W. Bush administration.
"Any time there was an issue with Breitbart or Daily Caller, Joel made the decision, and he always acted to protect them," the former Facebook employee said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently invited Shapiro, The Daily Wire's founder, to his home for dinner. The purpose of the meeting, Politico reports, was to "talk about issues like free speech and discuss partnerships."
Shapiro has recently emerged as a vocal defender of Facebook. "Democrats are angry at Facebook because they want less free speech," Shapiro tweeted on October 23.
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Note that the woman in charge of policing political ads for “truthfulness” at Facebook is also a right-wing operative formerly with the RNC and Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
Also, Facebook responded to the Popular Info report, and it didn’t go so well:
This is the online version of the Popular Information newsletter.
popular.info
The exposé and Facebook's decision not to act garnered considerable attention online. By Monday evening Facebook released a new statement, announcing the results of its own "investigation."
Our investigation found that these are real pages run by real people in the U.S. and do not violate our policies. We're working on more transparency so that in the future people have more information about Pages like these on Facebook.
While Popular Information's reporting indicated that this was a coordinated astroturf campaign to enable The Daily Wire to game the Facebook algorithm, the new Facebook statement presented a different narrative. The activity of these pages was "real" — authentic and genuine expressions of the "real people" behind them.
On the surface, this statement makes little sense. The pages are clearly managed not by individual "real people" but by a central authority. That authority is using the pages exclusively promote The Daily Wire. At 12:02 PM on Tuesday, for example, 13 pages all tweeted the same story from The Daily Wire with the same text. (This data comes from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics company owned by Facebook.)
Perhaps, as Facebook's statement suggests, these are just a group of 13 "real people" who got together and decided to promote The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion. It's a nice story, but Popular Information has uncovered information proving that it isn't true. At least two of these pages are owned by the parent company of The Daily Wire, Forward Publishing.