The Bangladesh group’s use of the wrong date appears to have been an oversight. presidential election.įacebook removed the specific event pages that were advertising the wrong date for the march in late September and early October. While the Bangladeshi group’s motives appear to have been financial, rather than ideological, they used the same playbook and exploited some of the same vulnerabilities - the ability to create pages essentially anonymously online, and the tendency of all people to rush to support causes with which they agree - that Russian government-linked trolls utilized to sow division in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. The network of fake pages highlights the increasing challenges facing both American activists and companies like Facebook as bad actors, both foreign and domestic, use social media platforms to tap into the highly charged and partisan nature of American politics for financial or political gain. (As ever with numbers on social media sites, it is possible that at least some of the RSVPs came from fake accounts used to make a page seem more popular). Fake events for Philadelphia and Chicago received more than 10,000 RSVPs the event posted for Seattle picked up more than 20,000. While the vast majority of the pages and events had no followers or attendees, some of the fake events promoting the wrong march date became popular. In all, there were 1,700 separate Facebook pages designed to look like they were run by local Women’s March organizers, a source familiar with Facebook’s investigation into the issue told CNN. They were run from Bangladesh, a CNN investigation has found - and they were designed to exploit Americans’ interest in politics and protests in order to sell t-shirts. Activists in Maine, Vermont, and elsewhere began noticing similar event pages advertising marches in their cities and listing the wrong date.īut the pages were not run by the Russian trolls who meddled in the US’ 2016 election, and have continued doing so since.
“This is *exactly* how the Russians/Republicans have been manipulating our communication, politics, and elections for over 2 years now,” she wrote in a Facebook post in August in which she warned her friends about the page. Besides, it was August, months before January’s Women’s March, and local organizers had yet to post the details for the march online. No one she knew in the activism community in North Carolina seemed to know who was behind the event. Ruby Sinreich knew “something didn’t smell right” as soon as she responded to a Facebook invite this summer for the 2019 Women’s March in Raleigh, North Carolina.Ī web developer and long-time activist, Sinreich grew suspicious when she noticed the page was posting what she recently called “weird, partisan memes that seemed totally out of character.” Then she saw that the event page was promoting the wrong date for the 2019 march. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.