As soon as I RSVP’ed to a Facebook event for the 2019 Women’s March in Raleigh, I knew something didn’t smell right. The page owners were posting weird, partisan memes that seemed totally out of character, and no-one would reply to my messages asking who was in charge. This week I decided to get to the bottom of it, and by way of friends of friends I found that the page is in fact a scam!
This is exactly how the Russians/Republicans have been manipulating our communication, politics, and elections for over 2 years now. The fake “Women’s March Raleigh NC 2019” page on Facebook has a fake event that has thousands of RSVPs for the wrong march date! And by spreading questionable memes they may be manipulating sentiment in ways we can’t even predict or understand until after the fact.
One of the real Women’s March organizers replied to me about this on Facebook:
we’ve reported the page as spam several times. It’s 100% not managed or set up by the WMOR organizers, they’re at Women’s March On Raleigh. Last year we had a similar problem when a vendor set up a FB page posing as the WMOR group to sell t-shirts. This page and it’s event aren’t legit
Read my Facebook post with all of the receipts in the comments:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160753082835321
The New York Times published an interactive article last month about this exact phenomenon of deceptive influence campaigns. As you can see they are very insidious because they gain your trust by posting things you agree with before subtly getting into disruptive tactics like sharing fake news or creating actual events to disrupt from real organizing.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/04/technology/facebook-influence-campaigns-quiz.html
Also a follow-up to my post: the real NC Women’s March finally posted an event page for the real march last week.
https://www.facebook.com/WomensMarchNC/posts/537380930034187
And whaddya know, my friend sent me a link to this fake NATIONAL women’s march page! Also on the wrong date and also posting bad memes (which were how I realized the Raleigh one was a fake). https://www.facebook.com/events/338622813317294/
Here is the real national Women’s March event, on Jan 19 (not Jan 20 as the fake one above says). https://www.facebook.com/events/541059066339895/
They’re baaaack! The fakers have a new page and a new event up. *Zero* RSVPs so far. Let’s keep it that way. https://www.facebook.com/events/633468610381100/