Activist Uncovers Fascist Botnet Recruiting On Social Media

A massive botnet, at least partly based in southeastern Europe, is flooding social media with fascist recruitment spam, and nobody’s stopping it.

The Background

Hi, folks.

Let me start this off without flinching: this is the internet and there are ten million grifting handwaving losers begging for your attention with unfounded, ill-considered conspiracy theories whose only real merit is that they drive traffic and attention to those who propagate them.

This is not that.

As a well-qualified and experienced expert in political communication, I keep a close eye on social media and every day see hundreds of messages obviously crafted to dogwhistle bigots and fascists. Last week, I noticed a SHARP spike in this activity…and I noticed that Facebook was recommending these pages to me at high volume.

First I was annoyed — nothing about my social media profile suggests that I’m interested in cheerleading transphobic boycotts or that I’m afraid a rainbow on a beer can.

Then I got annoyed enough to take a closer look, and my jaw dropped.

Yes, this is absolutely a fascist honeypot scam. Keep reading.

There are some things to keep in mind here before I go forward:

• The eastern European geotag that I was able to trace on a couple of the associated sites may be a red herring; most of them trace to servers in New York, Atlanta, and Florida.
• There are MANY other pages appealing to other popularity triggers, e.g. hard rock music or outdoor sports, that appear to be engaged in the same type of behavior and activity (clickbaiting, basically) but I didn’t happen to catch overtly fascist content from them so I noted the stylistic similarities but didn’t spend time tracing the sites.
• This is the important part: every single one of these pages is being constantly recommended to me by Facebook’s algorithm which is injecting this content into my news feed unsolicited. I spend days hitting the “hide all” button 20–30 times out of every fifty articles I saw, before I started looking more closely…but Facebook refuses to honor that and keeps shoveling this content at me wholesale.

An example of this content being “suggested for me” by facebook. I’ve told FB I don’t want to see “Social Pulse” at least two dozen times in the last four days. I took this screenshot out of my active feed two minutes ago.

How It Works

This is an operation that makes the Internet Research Agency (Russian cyberintelligence and propaganda distribution and recruitment org) floods during the 2016 election look like a lazy troll.

There are hundreds of these pages and at least three to five dozen websites propagating this stuff, and it’s all the same content — often identical and always with the same fundamentals and focusing on the same key points.

This content comes in two basic formats:

• glurge intended to suck in kindly old folks who don’t have good, modern-age information literacy skills because they didn’t need them until they were middle-aged or older.
• appeals to bigotry, particularly transphobia, but just generally “anti-woke” nonsense, nearly all of it stolen content. This is where they accidentally tipped their hands, as I’ll explain below.

Lots of glurge, too, usually exploiting people of color. This is intentional as it both helps attract people who like to think of themselves as not being fascists or racists, and also people of color who are prone to accepting fascist ideology. Don’t @ me with your outrage about the suggestion that people of color can be susceptible to authoritarian propaganda; the long, deep, and well-documented history of homophobia in the Black community and even entire African nations like Uganda validates the statement without further reference.

The first is intended as a “honeypot” to initially attract potential marks, the second as a filter to get rid of those who won’t be receptive to the less savory content.

If you like and share “DO YOU REMEMBER TYPING ON A REAL TYPEWRITER” or “WEREN’T THE GOOD OLD DAYS GREAT,” you’re in their bubble. Then they add some of the more odious stuff, and if you don’t unlike/unfollow/hide/block the page, they know that you are particularly likely to be easily manipulated into propagating more fascism, bigotry, and general rancor to further fray the fabric of western democracies.

Where It Started

This is probably the place to say that these techniques are not at all new, and indeed I’ve been screaming at clickbaiters on the left for a decade and a half to stop writing instruction manuals for fascists by engaging in precisely this kind of coordinated inauthentic activity pandering to ideological biases for profit. I’ve just never seen them deployed this obviously and at this volume before.

Note this is an app domain. High probability of malware here. (The story is fabricated, you can’t go to jail for not mowing your lawn, anywhere in the US.)

The disinformation actors in this piece were absolutely taught to do what they do by the same leftist clickbaiters (like Occupy Democrats and Being Liberal) that I’ve been begging folks in my band of the spectrum for years to stop supporting because they’re obviously pandering for profit, and that motivation causes them to continue putting out content that is absolutely not aligned with the leftist, progressive, or antifascist values they claim as a sales tool to con people into following them.

This is those same tactics, on steroids and with massive funding support. Exactly the same network construction you see built up around, oh let’s say the known to be owned by the Democratic Party status quo account @ReallyAmerican1 and those being paid by them like BrooklynDadDefiant and JoJoFromJerz, the folks who pretend to be all independent and grassroots (and often soliciting donations under claim of poverty) while not mentioning they’re being paid thousands and given their content cues by the capitalist, center-right power core of the Democratic Party.

This level of activity, however, requires the kind of funds and resources that only really come from governments or multinational corporations. Instead of merely trolling for internet traffic and profit like the leftist clickbaiters, they’re trolling to bring people into their information stream so that they can be further influenced into anti-western and anti-American belief and behavior, then validate that ideology and give it social proof to create the artificial appearance of a great deal more approval in western cultures for fascism and bigotry than there really is.

This then entices fascists and bigots to out themselves, now they’re self-identified as high-quality targets for manipulation by propaganda.

Sometimes you have to look a little harder. This one smelled like the same offal to me so I dug in; googling the headline shows the story reposted on the same networks of sites as all the other content I reviewed even though this particular page and domain hadn’t yet caught my attention until I saw this.

The Big Problem

Obviously, “fake news” is a problem. But in this case the problem goes much further in that Facebook is deliberately shoveling this stuff into people’s timelines as recommended content at high volume. Of every fifty FB posts I see right now, 20–30 of them are this content — often identical and just shared repeatedly through multiple accounts, sometimes to multiple websites reposting the same content multiple times — and it’s usually in a “Suggested For You” box.

Problem is there’s nothing about my account to suggest I’m interested in this content. I founded and run a page called “Antifa,” and that’s not a secret to anyone. I’m radically outspoken in my opposition to bigotry, fascism, and abuse of power and have been since long before I was ever on Facebook.

This has implications that are horrifying — that the world’s largest social media network is deliberately propagating hate speech, fascism, and gun sales (another spike trend that I didn’t bother going into for this article). They can’t not know; I’ve certainly reported plenty of it and contacted them via other means besides. Zero response and no change in content.

I have reached out to one of my senators, Gary Peters, who is also the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but only informally. I’ll be contacting his office directly via e-mail with a link to this story on Tuesday morning, because I am 99.98% convinced that this whole mess is a coordinated disinformation, recruiting, and propaganda operation by either hostile foreign governments, hostile domestic politicians, and/or both.

The other 0.02% is the remote possiblity that this entire thing is a leftist troll by a satire site. Which brings us to...

The Punchline

How the folks doing this gave themselves away is fairly hilarious if you ignore the implications.

They stole a ton of content from noted left-wing satire site The Dunning-Kruger Times, posted it on their own domains as original content, and then spammed it all over social media as legit news.

Originally appeared at https://patriotpartypress.com/michael-jordan-ends-partnership-with-nike-our-values-no-longer-align/. PPP is part of the “America’s Last Line Of Defense” leftist satire network. The story is, of course, entirely made up…but 105 people just on this page believed it and approved. Just this story, to say nothing of dozens of others, has shown up at least twenty times in my timeline, always posted by a different account and hosted on a different domain, and always loaded with the worst examples of human ugliness partying in the comment section not realizing they’ve just been trolled into outing themselves publicly as bigots and incipient fascists.

They apparently missed both the copyright notice (“Copyright Paid Liberal Trolls of America”) and the disclaimer on the site that “Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.”

It’s also worth noting that the whole DKT operation is a project of Christopher “Busta Troll” Blair, a minor player as part of the coalition of leftist clickbait pages that dogpiled me and spent years rigging FB’s algorithm to treat my content as spam around 2010–2013, which I still haven’t recovered from. (I’ve done him the favor of linking his site dozens of times in the comments on these posts.)

One of their primary problems with me was that I pointed out exactly the same issues I’ve described above with this content — that it validates and reinforces social proof of fascist and autocratic dogma by people who believe it — and I must therefore consider again the small but non-zero possibility that all of these pages and websites belong to him and this is just a massive spamming run for him to drive content and troll fascists and their aspirant bootblacks into outing themselves.

If so it’s extraordinarily stupid and is having exactly the opposite of the intended effect as thousands of knuckle-dragging bigots buy in and rejoice and spread the word — thereby reinforcing and empowering their community, and these are not the kind of folks who are going to be embarrassed or ashamed of being taken in by content deliberately designed to appeal to the worst examples of human stupidity and ugliness.

The stark fact is that if this is the case, then the very best case scenario here is once again you’ve got a “leftist activist” out there who really doesn’t have much in the way of an ideological commitment to genuine progressive values but rather sees them as a profit center for himself without regard for the harm he’s doing.

That’s only marginally better than the primary theory, and I really hope I’m wrong in considering this possibility…but given what I know of the actors involved and the internet in general, it would be irresponsible of me to not point it out.

Prescription

Whether legitimate foreign fascist influence or a misguided troll, this must stop…and frankly given what I’m seeing if it’s a misguided troll they’re probably being worked themselves by foreign or domestic fascist and anti-US intelligence agencies or NSAs appealing to their ego and greed.

This one’s from “The Boomerang,” and happens to validate my note earlier about southeastern Europe. Most of the pages involved lack this transparency box completely.

Regardless of whether it’s intentional fascist indoctrination or a badly misfired joke, the results are the same: thousands upon thousands of Americans flooding the comment sections to celebrate fascist bigotry and abuse of power. Take this semi-random screen grab from the comments of one of the reposts on that Jordan article above.

These people are not satire, and there are tens of thousands of comments like this on these articles.

Some of these pages have hundreds of thousands of followers. Pandering to the ignorance of bigotry and fear has never been a losing proposition, and they’re all in this echo chamber convincing each other that their bigotry and oppressive behavior is somehow consistent with the values of democracy, human liberty, and the founding principles of the United States.

That’s not merely dangerous, it’s an act of instigating stochastic terrorism, which I’m fairly sure is not the result intended by the original satires regardless of any personal conflict I may have had in the past with the author. (Stochastic terrorism works like this: throw this ugly garbage out on the ‘net and wait for some “lone wolf” and gallumphing refutation of Darwinian theory to do something murderous about it.)

Like the guy who showed up at a DC pizza parlor convinced the basement was full of enslaved children being abused…except the place didn’t even have a basement and the guy showed up with a loaded weapon and ended up doing three years in prison. Given that he discharged his shotgun in the place three times, it’s only luck that nobody was killed.

Facebook absolutely must be legally compelled to reveal the identities of the operators of these pages wherever they can be determined, as a matter of critical national security and defense intelligence — and that transparency box means Facebook has seen official identification for at least three people in the US, North Macedonia, and Russia. They know who’s behind this, and they’re not going to tell unless they’re forced.

Conclusion

I’m just one irascible longhaired leftie in the middle of Michigan who’s already fighting against an ongoing blitzkrieg of attempts at extortion, blackmail, whisper campaigns, and slander spread back-channel among bad actors because the work I do threatens the lucrative ideological clickbait model — which shouldn’t even exist, it’s an obscenity against the entire democratic process and siphons resources and audience away from authentic activists, issues, and priorities.

I’m also very, very good at what I do. I’m well aware that I’m “looking through a glass darkly” and what I’m perceiving may be something not quite that; that’s why I’ve taken the time to point out the issue of where this content originates.

Regardless of where it’s coming from and whether the person doing it thinks they’re being cute, or they’re genuinely engaged in a fascist propaganda campaign, it has to stop and it has to stop now. More importantly Facebook and other media companies absolutely must start being held to account for their failure to stop platforming fascist propaganda and disinformation.

I don’t mean by public outcry, either; that’s just the tool to bring attention to this.

I mean a full-out federal investigation.

Not only must this model be broken, those responsible for it must be identified and held to public account for their ongoing assault against democracy.

Somebody’s going to end up dying over this if it doesn’t end very, very soon.

Please do your part by helping spread this article around. You can use this link to share: https://medium.com/@johnhenryus/6f5427c09048?source=friends_link&sk=3b72454de1a82377f21353c830411985 . This ensures nobody will be stopped from reviewing this material by the paywall at Medium; I’ve chosen to publish here because it’s a far larger platform than mine is. I’ve chosen to leave the story metered because I’m extraordinarily poor and I like eating.

Thank you for your time and attention…and don’t take anything you see online as legitimate and without ulterior motive unless you’re 100% confident in the source.

Author’s note: I realize this article is light on a list of specific evidence in terms of domain names and so forth. There are two reasons for this: the first is that the list would easily quintuple the length of this article and nobody’s gonna click an article with an hour read time.

The second is that I didn’t set out to investigate a massive collection of hundreds of pages and sites all doing the same thing and all with the same clearly malicious and deliberate behaviors and intentions to disarm and deceive their audiences with appeals to things like nostalgia, cuteness, or — most alarmingly! — being a US military service member or related to them. What you’re seeing here is what I put together quickly after spending a few hours going down a rathole with this stuff and realizing how huge and malicious it was, then checking and doublechecking and even spent time commenting on the posts with pointers to the original content. I published this deep into that process and I wasn’t taking written notes. Most of the stuff you see here, I had to go back and find again.

The trails will all be there for the pros to track down specifics and find out with certainty what’s happening here.