In a column for the conservative Bulwark, senior editor Jim Swift claimed that Facebook is still allowing fake news about an election to be disseminated to targeted users despite executives insisting that they have cleaned up their act after the 2020 presidential election.
Case in point, Swift began by explaining that he fits the profile that is a preferred target for conservative-leaning news producers -- real or not -- and that Tuesday's election in Virginia is the current hot topic.
Explaining, "I'm what you would think would be a prototypical Glenn Youngkin voter: a white male around 40 with a near-perfect voting frequency and obvious signs that throughout my voting life, I've been a Republican. That is the kind of publicly accessible information that can be hoovered up by anyone building databases for advertising campaigns," Swift claimed he was on the receiving end of an advertisement on Facebook from "Old Dominion News."
Following the link, he claims it took him down a rabbit hole that led him to a supporter of Donald Trump who has been pushing the "Big Lie."
"It's a page that had fewer than 20 likes as of Sunday night—which is to say, it was little-read and obscure. It is clearly a fake publication trying to push people like me to turn out to vote," he wrote before adding, "Despite the 'publication' having such little influence, the ad has 840 comments and 209 shares."
"First, the website that the 'news' article points to, VoteRef.com, resembles the mailers that political parties and organizations have used in previous election years and again this year. The idea of these mailers—targeting algorithmically selected voters—is to try to shame the recipients into voting," he explained. "Maybe the guilt over seeing your own past voting record would get to you; maybe the fear that your neighbors can see that you haven't voted will get to you; either way, the idea is for you to tie yourself to the voting booth."
Digging deeper, Swift discovered the VoteRef website belonging to "Voter Reference Foundation" has as its executive director Gina Swoboda who worked for Donald Trump as a director of elections in Arizona.
As Adam Klasfeld of Law & Crime has reported Swoboda is an "apparent Sharpiegater, attesting to a conspiracy theory that has been debunked by officials' testimony and abandoned by the Trump campaign's own lawyer who now claims it's not not (sic) to their case."
As for Swift, he claimed it is likely that supporters of Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe are also using Facebook in sketchy ways to sway voters, but that misses the big picture.
"One can't read too much into either the Youngkin or McAuliffe campaigns (or their allies) in Virginia based on the use of this sort of eleventh-hour Facebook advertising and astroturfed news outlet. This fake publication—and the hundreds of other such fakes out there, and the ads promoting them—are reminders of just how much money is mysteriously sloshing around on the hidden, fake-news, data-driven side of our politics," he wrote before concluding, "Cambridge Analytica may be dead and gone, but its successors are still clunking along."
You can read his whole column here.
