Surprised no one has mentioned this, but earlier today, Facebook nuked a network of pages with close ties to The Epoch Times, the rabidly pro-Trump “news” site with close ties to Falun Gong.
Back in November, as part of his effort to convince us that the impeachment inquiry against Trump was an attempt to “impeach your values,” religious right activist Jim Garlow shared a link to his Facebook page from a then-obscure right-wing news site called “The BL.” A little bit of digging revealed that The BL has some too-close-for-comfort ties to Epoch Times.
Specifically, a Snopes investigation revealed that The BL used at least one server associated with Epoch Times’ Vietnam subsidiary. One of its directors uses an email for the pro-Falun Gong TV station NTD TV. The BL’s American address is shared with a pro-Falun Gong radio network, and several BL writers also write for Epoch Times or formerly wrote for Epoch Times.
This led to speculation that Epoch Times was using The BL to do an end run around being banned from advertising on Facebook. Further digging by Snopes revealed a nest of mostly Vietnamese emails that promoted BL-linked groups without proper disclosure. This led Snopes to conclude that The BL’s massive social media presence was built on fraud—and that The BL was little more than a front for Epoch Times Vietnam.
Snopes presented its evidence to Facebook, contending that this was a textbook case of “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—a seven-dollar term for astroturfing. However, it didn’t seem that Facebook was willing to respond. That changed earlier today, when Facebook announced it had nuked the BL’s entire Facebook presence.
Facebook took down more than 600 accounts tied to the pro-Trump conspiracy website The Epoch Times for using identities created by artificial intelligence to push stories about a variety of topics including impeachment and elections.
The network was called “The BL” and was run by Vietnamese users posing as Americans, using fake photos generated by algorithms to simulate real identities. The Epoch Media group, which pushes a variety of pro-Trump conspiracy theories, spent $9.5 million on ads to spread content through the now-suspended pages and groups.
Apparently when Facebook finally got around to doing something about The BL, it discovered that the BL’s tactics were comically easy to detect. Security policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher said that the AI-generated faces made them a lot easier to detect, as it was more evidence they were engaging in fake behavior.
But Facebook doesn’t deserve a whole lot of credit. Snopes has been sounding the alarm on The BL and Epoch Times for most of the fall. Operations chief Vinny Green claimed that Facebook ignored “hundreds” of emails about Epoch Times’ perfidy. It’s hard to blame Green. After all, despite being banned from advertising, Epoch Times and its associated pages are still active and “verified” on Facebook. It looks like Facebook only acted when things just got too big.