In an article published by Washington Post, Facebook stated it will enduringly block from its platform an Arizona-based marketing firm running what specialists called as a domestic “troll farm” — in a probe of the deceptive behaviour provoked by a Washington Post article last month.
In an inquiry launched by the media, it was discovered that that teenager had been hired to pepper social media with conservative messages.
The firm in question Rally Forge was operating on behalf of Turning Point USA Consequently Facebook after investigation deleted 200 accounts and 55 pages, as well as 76 Instagram accounts — many of them operated by teenagers in the Phoenix area. The fake accounts which largely involved giving comments sympathetic to President Trump and other conservative causes across social media.
However, according to the post, the social media giant decided not to penalize Turning Point USA and it CEO Charlie Kirk, stating it could not decide the degree to which the group’s leaders were informed of the specific violations carried out on their behalf, such as the use of fake accounts. On its part, Twitter acted by suspending 262 accounts involved in “platform manipulation and spam” — in addition to the several hundred accounts already removed last month following questions from The Post. The move was meet by criticism by specialists in disinformation, who stated the limited action would indicate to well-heeled organizations that they can get away with social media manipulation so long as they farm the operation out to vendors.
“If once exposed, there are no consequences, others will try it too,” said Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute. “Long term, the industry shoots itself in the foot because limited action diminishes our trust in the authenticity of public life on the platforms. There’s been worry about white nationalists or other extremists using Russia’s tactics; now it’s also the teenager around the corner who’s on the payroll of a troll operation.”
But Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the company needs to anchor its enforcement action in “evidence we can observe on the platform,” calling on regulators to set clearer standards about “what is acceptable advocacy and what is deception in politics.”
The accounts and pages removed by Facebook had developed a following of nearly 400,000 accounts across Facebook and Instagram. They had purchased nearly $1 million in advertising.
In addition to domestic politics, the network removed by Facebook more concentrated on trophy hunting, the company said.
Much of the activity drew on the spam-like behaviour of bots and trolls, with the same or similar language posted repeatedly across social media, primarily in response to mainstream news articles.
The messages parcelled out in precise increments, glorified Trump and denounced his Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden. They played down the threat from the novel coronavirus, falsely suggesting case counts were being intentionally inflated, and cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots, amplifying the erroneous claim that 28 million of them went missing in the past four elections, reads the post.
Designing the appearance of a social media groundswell in support of Trump, the work was carried out by teenagers, some of them minors, paid to participate in the campaign. The users set up and wielded fake personas in addition to using their personal accounts, Facebook announced. The teenagers drew the posts from a shared online document and scored bonuses if their activity spurred higher engagement, according to two people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of their underage nephew.
By enlisting human users in the effort rather than relying on computer scripts — and by modifying the posts slightly to avoid automated detection — the campaign offered a case study in the evolution of deceptive online tactics, Gleicher said, noting that many of the fake accounts had been caught by Facebook’s automated systems. The secretive operation, which began in 2018 and kicked into high gear ahead of the 2020 election, appeared designed to evade the guardrails put in place by Silicon Valley to limit disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 election.
Likening the arrangement to a troll farm, analysts and technology industry experts said the Phoenix-based activity resembled efforts by Russian actors to disrupt American political discourse — just arising domestically.
According to the post, “The activity gets at the heart of what’s happening in 2020 that’s distinct from 2016,” said Claire Wardle, co-founder and director of First Draft, a nonprofit that combats misinformation. “Because of the focus on Russia, we have failed to see how domestic operatives have used similar tactics.”
“This is sincere political activism conducted by real people who passionately hold the beliefs they describe online, not an anonymous troll farm in Russia,” the group’s field director, Austin Smith, said in a statement.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, which prepared a report on the network, concluded that most of the content “consists of fairly standard political and issue-based advocacy work.” What distinguished the activity from standard campaigning, the analysis determined, was the “extensive inauthenticity in the form of fake accounts,” as well as “secret coordination or unearned amplification.”
Rally Forge and Turning Point USA are closely intertwined. Hoffman, in an email this week, described the people participating in the campaign as “Students For Trump digital activists,” referring to a project sponsored by Turning Point Action, which debuted last year.
Multiple teenagers involved in the effort viewed themselves as working for Turning Point USA or its affiliates rather than for Rally Forge, according to four separate family members interviewed by The Post.
The media outlet quoting Hoffman, 35, is a city council member in Queen Creek, Ariz., and a Republican candidate for the Arizona House of Representatives described Rally Forge as “one of the nation’s top conservative digital and communications agencies.”
Until at least February 2019, Hoffman was listed in a staff directory on Turning Point USA’s website. Described as a “media and communications consultant,” he was featured alongside just three others: Kirk; William Montgomery, a co-founder of the group who died in July after contracting the coronavirus; and Tyler Bowyer, the organization’s chief operational officer. A review of LinkedIn profiles and other public documents suggests the two groups still have overlapping personnel.
Facebook said the deceptive election-focused activity began in 2018, in the run-up to the midterm elections. Two years ago, some of the accounts posed as left-leaning individuals, whereas the recent activity all reflected a conservative viewpoint.
The network was largely dormant until June 2020, according to Facebook. When it sprang back to life, much of the activity involved what the company called “thinly veiled personas” — using duplicate accounts with slight variations of the real names of the people behind them. Gleicher said the shift owed to Facebook’s increasing skill in rooting out fake accounts, forcing deceptive actors to “work harder” to avoid detection, sometimes using tactics that expose them in other ways.
Adding to this,Rally Forge received nearly $120,000 in 2016 from a political action committee supporting Kelli Ward, who was unsuccessful in her primary challenge that year to Sen. John McCain, and another $50,000 in 2018 when she ran again in the Republican primary. She now chairs the Arizona Republican Party.
In 2016, more than $300,000 directed to the firm from Hoffman’s political action committee, RallyPAC, was used to finance a pro-Trump meme campaign on a Facebook page called, “I Love My Country,” according to CNBC
(The Washington Post)
