<https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/06/inside-the-hate-facto...> [...] 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. The posts prompted what Faruqi described as a “horrific feeding frenzy of racism, fake news and hate”, soliciting vile comments like “put your burka on – and shut the fuck up!”, “deport the whining bitch” and “Revoke citizenship and Deport”. Faruqi said the network represented a “new level of far-right organisation and coordination”, and she places the blame squarely on social media companies. “By allowing racist and misleading posts, social media giants like Facebook … are profiteering from the proliferation of hate speech and abuse,” Faruqi said. “Facebook could do much more and shut these pages down but so long as they continue to profit from the reach and engagement, they don’t seem to be interested in decisive action.” A spokesperson for Facebook told the Guardian: “Nobody can advocate or advertise hate or violence on Facebook and we remove any violations as soon as we become aware.” 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 content is so predictable that even Devito once complained to his Israeli counterpart. “I told her flat out, ‘you’re a one-trick pony’,” he said. “It’s Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam and more Islam. Like, enough with the Islam already, we get it.” Interactive 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. The Guardian worked with researchers from Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre, who conducted an analysis of the order in which identical posts appeared across the 21 Facebook pages. Their analysis indicates a single entity is coordinating the publication of content across the Facebook pages, likely using automatic scheduling software, and that a single entity controls the websites that receive traffic from the posts. “It’s very obvious looking at the websites, the way that they’re structured, the way that they’re sharing design and code, and the way they share Google site IDs, that they’re all interconnected with each other,” said QUT professor Axel Bruns, one of Australia’s leading internet researchers. “They’re just cheap sites to set up, cheap sites to run … It’s not very sophisticated and it’s just brute force, to push all this stuff out.” Bruns and his colleagues believe the motivation is commercial, and that hatred, division and political influence may be byproducts of the pursuit of profit. “Here’s a bunch of people who – they’re not stupid but they’re highly prone to clicking on content that reflects their already held beliefs, especially content that is highly emotive and contains polarising and extreme material,” said Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer on social network analysis at QUT. “These people are great for business. If you get them to come to your website, they’re not going to [look closely at] the content, they’re going to click through and keep [sharing] it. They’re the perfect foot soldiers.” ‘You’re the one profiting’ The network wasn’t always so extensive. The delivery of coordinated content began in 2016 through just a few pages in Israel and the US. Unique v duplicated content within a network of far-right Facebook pages
From 2018 onwards, the network began approaching the administrators of large, pre-existing Facebook pages across Australia, Austria, Canada, the US and the UK, promising content that would help grow their audiences.
In March 2018, the network gained access to a Canadian pro-Israel page dubbed Never Again Canada, which has 232,000 followers. A previous BuzzFeed News investigation into Never Again Canada showed it was regularly sharing content about the Jewish Defence League, an FBI-designated rightwing terror group, and coordinating content with other pages. Coordinated content posting by far-right Facebook pages, by target country The network reached its peak in October this year with coordination across 21 pages. Each time a local page-owner agrees to let one of the Israeli administrators in, they become unwitting though not necessarily unwilling participants in the globally coordinated distribution of online hate. Some page-owners, like Villereal, who runs Pissed off Deplorables, had no idea their new Israeli counterparts were making money from the following they had built. “It’s a little disheartening to sit here and think I’ve been doing this for two years and I haven’t made a dime, and I allowed someone to come in who’s built the little back channel but they’re going to use my clientele to make money,” he said. “You know, it’s like I own the store, I built it and everything like that, and you’re the one profiting.” Those behind the network went to great lengths to hide their identities, concealing personal information from websites and using different Facebook profiles when contacting the owners of existing far-right pages. But by following a trail of digital breadcrumbs, the Guardian’s investigation traced the network back to a key player: a man going by the username Ariel1238a. [...]