Large network of Facebook pages circulates voting misinformation from obscure right-wing website

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://popular.info/p/large-network-of-facebook-pages-circulates

Facebook has permitted a large network of Facebook pages and groups — with names like Trump's Deplorable Army, To The Death Media, and One Angry Conservative — to spread disinformation about voting in the 2020 election to millions of people. The network operates by funneling traffic to Conservative Brief, an obscure right-wing website. Conservative Brief does not engage in any original reporting. Instead, it distorts reports from mainstream sources to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the upcoming election.

Here is how it works. On July 13, the Associated Press reported that California had rejected about 100,000 absentee ballots submitted in the March presidential primary — about 1.5% of the total. Most of these ballots, 70,330, were rejected because they arrived late. The state requires ballots to be "postmarked on or before Election Day and received within three days afterward." Others "either didn’t have a signature, or the signature didn’t match the one on record for the voter."

This report was then aggregated on the Conservative Brief on July 14. Author Martin Walsh wrote that the story "lends credence" to Trump's claim that mail-in voting "can pave the way for mass fraud." Walsh said the story means it will be easy "for election works [sic] to simply throw away ballots that they collected from an area in which they assume was more conservative than liberal." All of these claims are baseless.

The post on Conservative Brief was then shared repeatedly across the network with the text: "Dems CAUGHT — 100,000 Illegal Ballots Found." The description of the post is, "They are trying to steal the election!" There is no indication that "Dems" were doing anything. California did not even release a breakdown of the rejected ballots by party. Nor is there any indication that any of these ballots were "illegal" or part of a plot to "steal the election."

*snip*

[dchill]

1. "It's true! I seen it on my Facebook!"

[2naSalit]

2. Fuck fake book...

Not to be confused with the musical Fakebook of jazz motifs.