The biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook is fake
For at least a year, the biggest page on Facebook purporting to be part of the Black Lives Matter movement was a scam with ties to a middle-aged white man in Australia, a review of the page and associated accounts and websites conducted by CNN shows.
The page, titled simply “Black Lives Matter,” had almost 700,000 followers on Facebook, more than twice as many as the official Black Lives Matter page. It was tied to online fundraisers that brought in at least $100,000 that supposedly went to Black Lives Matter causes in the U.S. At least some of the money, however, was transferred to Australian bank accounts, CNN has learned.
Fundraising campaigns associated with the Facebook page were suspended by PayPal and Patreon after CNN contacted each of the companies for comment. Donorbox and Classy had already removed the campaigns.
The discovery raises new questions about the integrity of Facebook’s platform and the content hosted there. In the run-up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress this week, Facebook has announced plans to make the people running large pages verify their identity and location. But it’s not clear that the change would affect this page: Facebook has not said what information about page owners it will disclose to the public — and, presented with CNN’s findings, Facebook initially said the page didn’t violate its “Community Standards.”
Only after almost a week of emails and calls between CNN and Facebook about this story did Facebook suspend the page, and then only because it had suspended a user account that administrated the page.
The discovery also raises questions about Facebook’s commitment to change, and to policing its platform, even in the midst of its PR offensive leading up to Zuckerberg’s testimony. Not for the first time, Facebook took action against a major bad actor on its site not on its own but because journalists made inquiries.
Indeed, Facebook was told of concerns about the page some time ago. Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, told CNN that Black Lives Matter had, suspecting the page was a scam, contacted Facebook about removing it a few months ago.
The Facebook page was — separate from Facebook’s suspension of it — apparently taken down by a person who administrated the page shortly after CNN contacted one of the Australian men who may be associated with it. “Black Lives Matter” appears to have been set up some time in 2016.
The people behind the page also ran a hugely popular Facebook Group also titled “Black Lives Matter.” With almost 40,000 members, it appears to be the biggest group on the platform professing to be supporting Black Lives Matter. Facebook Groups are similar to traditional discussion forums, and unlike pages, people normally need to request to join.
For years, the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll group, ran pages meant to look like they were created by American activists from all over the political spectrum. Some of the pages amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. One, Blacktivist, a fake Black Lives Matter page, had more followers than the movement’s official page.
In theory, had Facebook’s proposed rules been in place in 2016, the social media company would have sought to verify the identity and location of the person running the Blacktivist page.
If Facebook found that the profile behind the page was fake — using a stolen identity for instance — the people controlling that profile would no longer be able to post on the page.
What’s not clear from Friday’s announcement is whether proving you’re a real person is enough to pass Facebook’s litmus test. Is it going to be against Facebook policy to run a Black Lives Matter page if you’re a Russian living in St. Petersburg, for instance? Facebook hasn’t said.
Facebook did not provide any additional clarity when asked by CNN, but said it was working on the authorization process and plan to roll it out later this year.
Writing about the new rules on Friday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckbrberg acknowledged, “these steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did.”
And there are potential downsides to this change. Anonymity online allowed Russian trolls to run fake Facebook pages for nefarious purposes, but anonymity also gives people the opportunity to speak out and organize who otherwise may not feel comfortable doing so.
People living in totalitarian countries where dissent can be dangerous, for instance, or workers in the U.S. who want to organize around a cause that their employer doesn’t support, might be less inclined to use Facebook to do so if they know they have to reveal their identity to someone, even if it is just Facebook.
The move could have a chilling effect on activism, Micah White, one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement, told CNN on Friday.
“American activism is being pinched on both sides. On the one hand Russian infiltration that delegitimizes protests and on the other hand by efforts by social media companies to make their networks less useable for social protests,” he said.
The solutions to the platform’s problems are often complicated, with similar potential downsides even for much-needed fixes.
Earlier this week, CNN reported that the Internet Research Agency connections of some pages Facebook just removed on Tuesday should have been obvious months ago. But Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told CNN that the question of when to delete such pages is a complicated one.
Comparing it to a law enforcement sting, Gleicher said that if the company were to remove each individual page as its ties to the Internet Research Agency were confirmed, it would risk tipping off the troll group off and giving it a chance to try to obscure its connection to other accounts it might be running.
Source:-http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/06/technology/facebook-new-rules-analysis/index.html?iid=EL
