A mysterious group has used some of Facebook’s largest far-right pages to create a commercial enterprise that harvests anti-Islamic hate for profit and influences politics across the globe, a Guardian investigation has revealed. The revelations show how Facebook has failed to stop clandestine actors from using its platform to run coordinated disinformation and hate campaigns. Once they gain access, the Israeli administrators publish identical posts almost simultaneously to the network’s 21 Facebook pages, which have a combined 1 million followers around the globe. Queensland University of Technology researchers worked with the Guardian to confirm that the Facebook posts are being distributed by a single source across the 21 pages, probably using auto-scheduling software. The network published 5,695 coordinated posts receiving 846,424 likes, shares or comments in October alone, Guardian analysis shows.

Source: The Guardian December 05, 2019 13:52 UTC