Organizers behind the newly revealed batch of fake Facebook accounts often sought to work alongside legitimate groups organizing rallies and protests in the U.S., marking a new strategy in efforts to sow discord through social media ahead of the midterm elections, a review of archived event listings shows.
The fake Facebook pages and accounts helped promote more than three dozen events in the last 15 months, most of them protesting the policies of President Donald Trump or promoting left-leaning causes, according to a Wall Street Journal review of 40 now-deleted listings promoted by three groups in particular: “Resisters,” “Black Elevation” and “Aztlan Warriors.” The archived events provide a deeper understanding of the activity beyond what Facebook Inc. disclosed on Tuesday.
Collaborating with grass-roots organizations on existing events goes beyond the tactics employed by the Internet Research Agency, according to Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which analyzes misinformation online and works with Facebook. The Kremlin-backed IRA group created hundreds of fake accounts and pages on social media during and after the 2016 U.S. election.
The new accounts identified by Facebook, like the IRA, published posts and planned events related to hot-button causes such as race, immigration and women’s rights. Both the IRA and the new accounts showed a desire to push online activity into the real world. Infiltrating grass-roots organizations could undercut trust in legitimate political activists, according to researchers studying online misinformation.
Facebook said it had removed 32 fake pages and accounts from its main platform and its Instagram photo-sharing app. It said the now-deleted pages “created about 30 events” starting in May 2017. A spokesman said that didn’t encompass all their event activity, such as cases where the fake page was invited to host a pre-existing event.
Events promoted by the fake accounts included a November 2017 march against cops in New York, a June 2017 birthday celebration in San Diego for a Chicano activist and a June 2018 protest at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The page for Resisters, which described itself as “feminist activism against fascism,” promoted more than 30 events across several U.S. cities and one in Rome. It also had events planned for the months ahead, including anti-fascism protests in mid-August and a New Year’s Day rally in Times Square called “A NYC Protest in Support of Rosenstein,” an apparent reference to Rod Rosenstein, the embattled U.S. deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Fake accounts can push unwitting groups toward the fringes, Mr. Brookie said.
“It just piggybacks onto very real sentiment,” he said. By appearing to be peers, fake pages can push others to increasingly polarized positions and make the extreme seem normal, he said.
Victor Perez found himself drawn to the Aztlan Warriors, a page that used divisive memes to promote Native American and Hispanic culture, after stumbling across it sometime in the past year. He was one of more than 84,000 Facebook users who liked the page, which featured themes of anticolonialism and resistance.
“It was the truth about our people,” said Mr. Perez, a 19-year-old construction worker in Salt Lake City. He said he disagrees with Facebook’s assessment that the account was fake.
In June 2017, the group organized a “Chicano Unification” event in San Diego.
Many up-and-coming grass-roots organizations rely on social media to connect with activists and publicize events. It is difficult to tell which groups online are legitimate, said Sam Woolley, director of digital intelligence at the think tank Institute for the Future.
“What’s real grass-roots activity versus fake grass-roots activity?” he asked.
Facebook didn’t say who was behind the newly deleted groups. Several lawmakers pointed the finger at Russia. Efforts to reach the groups weren’t successful.
Russia has denied it attempted to interfere in the 2016 election. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“Whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities,” Facebook operating chief Sheryl Sandberg told reporters on Tuesday. ”Security is an arms race and it’s never done.”
Last summer, representatives from Resisters contacted activists in Springfield, Mo., who were organizing a rally called “The People’s Protest. Springfield against Trump.” A cached version of a Facebook listing for the event shows Resisters as one of eight co-hosts.
It wasn’t unusual people hadn’t heard of Resisters, said Erin Kappeler, a 35-year-old English literature professor and co-chair of Springfield Indivisible, a political-activist organization that helped organize the event. Some organizers were new to activism, with many groups meeting each other for the first time, she said.
She said she and the other organizers likely added Resisters as a co-host “because there wasn’t any harm in adding them” to the Facebook event. “Anyone who sounds like they’re willing to help, we’re at least willing to field their messages,” Ms. Kappeler said.
A Resisters representative who went by the name Mary Smith sent an email offering to organize some speakers for the event, but ignored requests to discuss the plans by phone and ultimately didn’t show up to the protest, Ms. Kappeler said. She concluded the group wasn’t serious but didn’t connect it to a broader misinformation campaign.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
