Bannon Caught Running another Fake News Network on Facebook

[notimp]

Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran told Gizmodo that its team identified the Bannon ring by running an “influencer analysis,” keeping tabs on frequent guests on Bannon’s podcasts and pages affiliated with Bannon’s former “We Build the Wall” grift. Avaaz, which is comprised of 40 investigators and data analysts, has kept tabs on habitual misinformers and their coordinated sharing through custom software.

They noticed that the Bannon-related pages tended to publish content at the same time and linked to the Populist Press, an even more right-wing Drudge Report copycat trafficking in disproven election fraud claims. The pages avoided warning labels by laundering links through the Populist Press domain rather post the original URLs for stories Facebook had already flagged as misinformation. Avaaz says they’d previously alerted Facebook to a network of 180 Bannon-connected pages and groups which have been sharing misinformation.

https://gizmodo.com/steve-bannon-caught-running-a-network-of-misinformation-1845633004

How many of you got their 'news' from:

Brian Kolfage, Conservative Values, The Undefeated, We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic, American Joe, and Trump at War—who collectively managed over 2.45 million followers.

Last week, Facebook removed two videos posted to Bannon’s official page, including one in which Bannon suggested the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. CNN reported that the video had amassed over 200,000 views before Facebook removed it. Bannon’s page remains live, but Facebook’s content discovery platform CrowdTangle shows that his page immediately stopped posting on Saturday.

Avaaz’s findings beg the question of what’s even in Facebook’s war room—possibly a few dudes posing for photo ops, or a competent team lost in Facebook’s labyrinthian policy loopholes. Either way, the self-described honey badger doesn’t give a shit. “In 2016, Steve Bannon was buoyed by the Facebook algorithm and helped define the political narrative for millions of Americans,” Quran said in a statement shared with Gizmodo. “Over the last few months, pages and groups connected to him pushed ‘voter fraud’ and other misinformation content to millions. Now, he is seeking to further divide America and spread chaos in this post-Election Day landscape, again using Facebook. Facebook has finally acted after Avaaz’s pressure, but the question is: Why did the company not act earlier?”

 

[Seliph]

Imagine my shock-