A web of far-right Facebook accounts spreading fake news and hate speech to millions of people across Europe has been uncovered by the campaign group Avaaz.
Facebook, which is struggling to clean up the platform and salvage its reputation, has already taken down accounts with about 6 million followers before voting in the European Parliament elections begins today.
It was still investigating hundreds of other accounts with an additional 26 million followers, Avaaz said.
In total, the group reported more than 500 suspect groups and Facebook pages operating across France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Poland and Spain.
Most were either spreading fake news or using false pages and profiles to artificially boost the content of parties or sites they supported, in contravention of Facebook’s rules.
The networks are far more popular than the official pages of far-right and anti-EU populist groups in those nations. The pages taken down by Facebook so far had been viewed half a billion times, Avaaz estimated.
“The pages [uncovered by Avaaz] have high levels of interactions. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have if there are no interactions,” Avaaz campaign director Christoph Schott said. “They have over 500 million views just on the pages taken down, that’s more than the number of voters in the EU.”
However, while some had been taken down, including a large network in Spain also uncovered by Avaaz, many had not.
Activity ranged from French accounts sharing white supremacist content to posts in Germany supporting Holocaust denial and false pages promoting the Alternative for Germany party.
In Italy, tactics included setting up general interest pages for beauty, soccer, health or other interests, then after followers signed up, transforming them into political tools.
The researchers traced how a page, ostensibly set up for an association of agricultural breeders, slowly morphed into one supporting the far-right League, sharing a video that purported to show migrants smashing up a police car. It is actually a scene from a movie and has been repeatedly debunked.
The pages were not just targeted at upcoming elections, but aimed at changing politics by giving a false impression of grassroots support for their content, Schott said.
“We feel [these networks] have a significant impact; they run disinformation campaigns that go on for years, for example, making a specific issue seem more important,” he said.
The investigation was carried out by independent investigators and journalists hired by Avaaz after an online funding drive. More than 47,000 people donated small sums, making the project financially independent.
Facebook had followed up on the investigation, but at no point did the Avaaz team work with the social media firm, it said.
Instead, it handed over its findings for Facebook to verify and take action, and investigations are still under way.
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