Facebook Identifies an Active Political Influence Campaign Using Fake Accounts
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Among the campaign’s efforts was organizing support for a counterprotest to a conservative rally. Specifically, an account called Resisters, which interacted with one Internet Research Agency account in 2017, created an Aug. 10 event, “No Unite the Right 2 — DC,” to counter a planned white supremacist rally in Washington on Aug. 11 and 12 by the same group that organized the racist march in Charlottesville one year earlier.
Although other Facebook pages are promoting the counterprotest, the social network said that the Resisters page was the first, and that it had coordinated with administrators for five other apparently real pages to co-host its page — publicizing details about transportation and other logistics. A person familiar with the matter said the page was created on June 24.
That event page has been taken down, and Facebook has notified roughly 2,600 users who had indicated interest in attending the event, and 600 more who planned to attend, about the suspicious activity behind it.
Organizers of the counterprotest — who quickly created a new Facebook page — objected to Facebook’s suggestion that a fake account was behind the event itself and not just the creator of a Facebook event page for it.
One organizer, Chelsea Manning, the former Army analyst who was convicted of sending archives of secret documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 and whose sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017, said the counterprotest was “real and organic.” She called Facebook’s implication that the Resisters account had started it misleading.
“We started organizing several months ago,” Ms. Manning said. “Folks from D.C. and Charlottesville have been talking about this since at least February.”
On Capitol Hill and in congressional races across the country, the #AbolishICE campaign has divided Democrats and provided Republicans with fodder to paint Democratic candidates as extremists who want open borders. The issue, Republicans hope, could help drive a wedge between liberal Democrats and the moderate voters the party needs to retake control in Washington. Mr. Trump has gone as far as encouraging Democratic candidates to embrace the campaign.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/us/politics/trump-puerto-rico-hurricane.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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