As millions of people throughout the world hit the streets to protest police brutality and racism, disinformation seeking to polarize the debate, or to demonise and undermine the protests, continues to spread on social media platforms. A new analysis from Avaaz’s investigative team estimates that a small sample of posts connected to a dozen viral disinformation narratives about the anti-racism protests have been viewed millions of times on Facebook during the last two weeks. 

Furthermore, the team was able to identify a network of nine Facebook pages amplifying some of these narratives in a coordinated manner to potentially monetise the virality of outrage.  

To understand the scale of disinformation targeting protesters on the platform, Avaaz analysed a dozen of the most egregious, false and misleading narratives about the protests and associated posts between May 27, 2020 - the start of the U.S. demonstrations - and June 9, 2020. We found that:

Below are screenshots of the most egregious narratives examined in this study:

False Claim

A coordinated effort exists to place piles of bricks at protest sites to stoke violence [sample post archive here - Fact checked by: Buzzfeed, BBC, Snopes, PolitiFact]

7,584,905 estimated views

 

False Claim

“Antifa” shared a tweet espousing plans to bring violence to white residential areas [sample post archive here - fact-checked by: FactCheck.org, Snopes]

539,661 estimated views

 

False Claim

Black Lives Matter activists are threatening to assassinate white families [sample post archive here - fact-checked by: Buzzfeed, Snopes]

78,131 estimated views

 

A full list of the twelve disinformation narratives we detected and analysed, and their estimated views, can be found in the table below. 

These disinformation narratives are spread through a mixture of memes, videos, doctored images, fake-news website links, and text posts, a mish-mash of tactics that, in some cases, appears to be designed to go around Facebook’s counter-disinformation tools. 

The 12 protest-related disinformation narratives Avaaz analysed

To see all table data, please, scroll to the right

The “I Am A Texan” Network: Coordinated monetisation of anti-protest disinformation

As we analysed the viewership of the 12 protest-related disinformation narratives, we identified a coordinated network of 9 Facebook pages with an audience of over 1.5 million followers. We are calling this the “I Am A Texan” Network, because the ‘I Am A Texan’ page is the oldest page with the most page likes in the network. In addition to possibly sharing administrators and coordination on content posting, this network also appears to have tried to monetise its referral traffic by driving viewers to Resurge.com, which is a website promoting a dietary supplement. 

Between May 26, 2020 and June 8, 2020, this network promoted three of the disinformation narratives we analysed: that George Soros orchestrated the protests; that “Antifa” placed pallets of bricks at protest sites to stoke violence; and that “Black Lives Matter” had announced its intention to “assassinate white families.” The network regularly posts identical content to its pages within seconds of each other.

The 9 pages in the “I Am A Texan” Network that we identified are shown below. 

To see all table data, please, scroll to the right

A number of factors indicate that these pages are maintained by the same administrators. As you can see in the table above, the pages appear to share a set of administrators based in the US and Germany. Note that all of the pages have 1 admin in Germany, plus 2 to 3 in the US. The one exception is the page, “I Love America,” which has 7 US-based admins and 1 in Germany. 

Further, the same items are frequently posted to several of the network’s pages within very tight time bounds, with identical post text and an identical Buff.ly shortlink. 

For example, on 8 of the pages in the “I Am Texan” Network, Avaaz observed that the story of Black Lives Matter announcing its intention to “assassinate white families” was posted on each page within 11 seconds of each other, and they all included identical text and links. It appears that, in the last 24 hours, all but one of these posts have now been taken down. The rest of the network appears to still be live. 

This table shows the 8 posts on the Network that have the false content claiming “Black Lives Matter activists intend to assassinate white families”

We also discovered interesting monetisation behaviour by this network which we observed in all the posts we reviewed, including the Black Lives Matter examples set out above. The network’s posts consistently include shortlinks that direct to Resurge.com, a site that sells a dietary supplement via an affiliate marketing service provided to sellers by a company called ClickBank. 

Each of the posts we examined includes the text, “Watch this video right away or you'll hate yourself later,” followed by a short link that contains an identical tracking code - “hop=iamatexan”. This tracking code tells ClickBank who should be credited the commission if a sale of a Resurge product is made through the referral link. So-called “affiliate” marketers of Resurge’s products earn a commission for every product sold. In every post we reviewed that's the, "I Am A Texan," page, the network's oldest and most popular page. It appears that someone(s) in the “I Am a Texan” network has become a registered “affiliate” of ClickBank for the purpose of marketing  Resurge.com products. According to the Resurge.com website; “CLICKBANK® is a registered trademark of Click Sales Inc.” The fact that each node of the network markets Resurge using an identical Clickbank shortlink points strongly to the nodes’  connection to each other. 

Avaaz found no evidence to suggest that Resurge or Click Sales Inc. are aware that Resurge’s  products are being marketed in connection with the spread of disinformation.

Dataset and Methodology ⁶

Endnotes

1. The ProtestJobs.com narrative, as debunked by Snopes and Reuters , has its roots in a series of satirical websites that emerged in 2017 that posed as protester hiring companies. Despite the sites’ satirical intent (including ProtestJobs.com), they have been promoted by hyperpartisan actors on social media since 2017 as legitimate companies aiding mass protests throughout the country. The fact that this narrative went viral, that those commenting on the posts largely believed the story was true, and that major fact-checkers were compelled to debunk them as “false” clearly indicates that once viral on social media, so-called “satire”, without labels, can easily be interpreted as real news. In previous research conducted by Avaaz, we have highlighted how websites can abuse the satire label to avoid fact-checking.
2. Archived post available here .
3. Archived post available here .
4. Archived post available here .
5. See Dataset and Methodology section.
6. The methodology description below has been updated with more details on June,12, 2020, including a correction that Facebook does share relevant research data with a number of independent researchers working with the company’s research programs.
7. Data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks interactions on public content from Facebook pages and groups, verified profiles, Instagram accounts, and subreddits. It does not include paid ads unless those ads began as organic, non-paid posts that were subsequently “boosted” using Facebook’s advertising tools. It also does not include activity on private accounts, or posts made visible only to specific groups of followers.
8. Independent fact checks were available for each narrative analysed from Buzzfeed, Politifact, Snopes, Reuters, FactCheck.org, Lead Stories, and the BBC.
9. See estimated views calculation methodology below.