Last fall, you may have seen a scurrilous YouTube documentary making the rounds attacking George Soros for, among other things, helping the Nazis murder Jews. It was heavily promoted by Frank Gaffney, among others.
Well, it turns out that this video was part of a long-running social media astroturfing campaign operated by veteran religious right activist Kelly Kullberg. Earlier this month, Snopes revealed that a network of 24 Facebook pages with names like “Christians for Trump,” “Blacks for Trump,” “Catholics for Trump” and “Teachers for Trump” which spewed all manner of hard-right propaganda had very close financial ties to Kullberg. Specifically, 10 of the pages were listed on the Website of a Kullberg project, Christians for Trump—which shared a Columbus, Ohio mailing address with the Kullberg group that crafted that Soros video, the American Association of Evangelicals. The other 14 were listed as “projects” of Kullberg’s flagship outfit, The America Conservancy.
Snopes compiled what appears to be uncontestable evidence that Kullberg and her minions were engaging in an egregious violation of Facebook’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—a fancy term for astroturfing or running an influence campaign. Indeed, Aysha Khan of Religion News Service noted that Kullberg’s operation was very similar to the Kremlin’s playbook for the 2016 campaign. NYU’s Joshua Tucker, an expert on social media disinformation, told Snopes that Facebook would have deleted those pages posthaste had someone told them that these were being run out of Moscow, not Columbus.
From the looks of it, Kullberg has been playing this deceptive game long before “disinformation” and “influence campaign” were part of the social media lexicon. According to Snopes, a number of these pages had been around in one form or another since 2012, and many of them were loudly pro-Romney before switching to Trump.
Fast forward to Sunday. Sometime before then, all 24 Kullberg pages abruptly vanished. It initially wasn’t clear whether Kullberg deleted them herself, or Facebook finally woke up and nuked them.
But as I note at RDTDaily, there’s a very strong indication Kullberg herself pulled the plug. Three of Kullberg’s flagship sites—the American Association of Evangelicals, Christians for Trump, and the America Conservancy—are all down for “maintenance.” These pages’ presences on social media—including that aforementioned Soros documentary—are gone as well. Kullberg has taken her Twitter private.
As we all know, whenever Facebook nukes prominent right-wingers for egregious violations of its rules, they bleat and screet about how Mark Zuckerberg and his army of evil libruls are out to silence conservatives. But that’s not happening here. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Kullberg deleted them herself under a torrent of criticism on social media. A search for “Kelly Kullberg” on Twitter revealed that she took an absolute beating in the two weeks since Snopes went live. However, Alex Kasprak, who led the Snopes investigation, told me that he has another theory—that she is trying to rebrand in the face of the hot lights being turned on her. In either event, she’s sadly mistaken if she thinks her previous shenanigans disappeared into the ether.
The staggering thing is that Kullberg was able to keep this up for the equivalent of an eon in Internet terms. And if not for the attention on Russia gaming social media in 2016, she might very well still be at it.
So there you have it. One of the people leading the “blame Soros” campaign may have gotten a long-overdue dose of karma.