By Ben Kesling and Dustin Volz
Kris Goldsmith's campaign to get Facebook Inc. to close fake
accounts targeting U.S. veterans started with a simple search.
He was seeking last year to gauge the popularity of the Facebook
page for his employer, Vietnam Veterans of America. The first
listing was an impostor account called "Vietnam Vets of America"
that had stolen his group's logo and had more than twice as many
followers.
Mr. Goldsmith, a 33-year-old Army veteran, sent Facebook what he
thought was a straightforward request to take down the bogus page.
At first, Facebook told him to try to work it out with the authors
of the fake page, whom he was never able to track down. Then, after
two months, Facebook deleted it.
The experience launched him on a hunt for other suspicious
Facebook pages that target military personnel and veterans by using
patriotic messages and fomenting political divisions. It has become
a full-time job.
Working from offices, coffee shops, and his apartment, he has
cataloged and flagged to Facebook about 100 questionable pages that
have millions of followers. He sits for hours and clicks links,
keeping extensive notes and compiling elaborate spreadsheets on how
pages are interconnected, and tracing them back, when possible, to
roots in Russia, Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
"The more I look, the more patterns I see," he said.
Facebook's response to his work has been tepid, he said. Company
officials initially refused to talk with him, so he used a personal
contact at Facebook to share his findings. Lately, the company has
been more active.
Facebook didn't respond directly to a list of questions about
Mr. Goldsmith's research, but a spokesman said the company had
14,000 people working on security and safety -- double the amount
last year -- and a goal of expanding that team to 20,000 by next
year.
In a statement, the spokesman said the company relied on "a
combination of automated detection systems, as well as reports from
the community, to help identify suspicious activity on the platform
and ensure compliance with our policies."
About two dozen of the pages Mr. Goldsmith flagged, with a
combined following of some 20 million, have been deleted, often
coinciding with Facebook's purges of Russian- and Iranian-linked
disinformation pages -- including a separate crackdown by the
company last week on domestic actors.
The most recent suspensions included the page "Vets Before
Illegals," with nearly 1.4 million followers, which Mr. Goldsmith's
research showed had five page administrators in the U.S. as well as
three in the Philippines and DcGazette, a page pushing conservative
news that had attracted more than 400,000 followers.
Several of the pages Mr. Goldsmith has studied expressly catered
to conservative audiences and frequently promoted divisive memes
depicting President Trump favorably on issues involving veterans,
illegal immigration and the National Football League. While posts
didn't specifically discuss congressional candidates seeking
election in next month's midterms, they often promoted Mr. Trump's
2020 reelection bid while disparaging Hillary Clinton as a criminal
who deserved jail time.
But, based on his own research, he says the company needs to do
much more. "They have a responsibility" to deal with manipulative
accounts, Mr. Goldsmith says. "What you see on Facebook is your
reality."
Mr. Goldsmith is part of a cottage industry of digital
detectives investigating malfeasance on social media that extends
beyond internet firms, journalists and academics to include
ordinary citizens.
"They see me as a novice cybervigilante, and not someone with
the reputation of a research university to back me up," Mr.
Goldsmith said of Facebook. "Which, to be fair, is exactly the
case."
What U.S. intelligence agencies say was a widespread effort by
the Kremlin to influence the 2016 presidential elections -- and
renewed warnings about attempts to influence the midterms -- have
added urgency to their cause.
Facebook has vowed repeatedly to counter disinformation. Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg has called the effort an arms race, and
said the company is banking on artificial intelligence to better
detect manipulation campaigns.
The inner workings of Facebook's detection and takedown system
remain opaque, making it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of its
efforts -- even for those like Mr. Goldsmith, who has made it a
mission to track webs of connected pages.
Lee Foster, who manages the internet firm FireEye's information
operations intelligence analysis unit, a misinformation-tracking
team, said his team of investigators often struggles to discern
whether a Facebook page that appears fraudulent is a
foreign-influence campaign, a financially motivated click farm, or
something else.
Mr. Goldsmith's persistence and some help from congressional
aides led to a phone call among him, Facebook and House
Intelligence Committee staffers, and then a meeting at Facebook's
office in Washington, D.C. Facebook has responded to some of his
emails, but hasn't explained why some pages he has identified were
removed while others remain or whether his research contributed to
decisions to suspend certain pages.
The Facebook spokesman said veterans are among those who may be
especially appealing targets to bad actors.
"Financially motivated scams, including romance scams, commonly
rely on impersonating members of the public who are more likely to
be considered trustworthy -- including members of the military,
veterans, and other professionals," the spokesman said. "As a
result, organizations like Vietnam Veterans of America are more
likely to be targets of impersonation than most people on Facebook.
We recognize this and are working to combat impersonation in a
variety of ways."
One of Mr. Goldsmith's top concerns is that bad actors are
determined to try to exploit veteran and law-enforcement
communities. Mr. Goldsmith served more than three years in the
Army, including combat in Iraq.
Researchers have identified veterans as a particular target of
disinformation campaigns. A study from the University of Oxford in
October 2017 found accounts tied to the Kremlin were targeting
veterans and active military personnel on Facebook and Twitter with
divisive political propaganda, likely because of their status as
"influential voters and community leaders."
To Mr. Goldsmith's dismay, he has noticed that even friends and
colleagues follow some of the pages he most distrusts.
One was Maureen Elias, who works on outreach and advocacy at
Vietnam Veterans of America and unwittingly followed and then
shared content from a page Mr. Goldsmith has pegged as bogus. She
said she had followed the page only after seeing her own
acquaintances following it.
"It makes me sick to my stomach to think I've shared content
from these sites that target veterans and don't have our country's
best interests in mind," said Ms. Elias, a 41-year-old Army veteran
who specialized in counterintelligence. "It makes me feel even more
foolish because I fell for this crap. Of all people, I should know
better."
In addition to Facebook, Mr. Goldsmith has contacted at least 10
congressional committees and several federal agencies requesting
help to investigate social media use by foreign actors that target
veterans. The overtures largely were met with silence, though Mr.
Goldsmith said he did hear back from some congressional committee
staffers.
Mr. Goldsmith also has begun to examine suspect Twitter
accounts. A Twitter representative told Mr. Goldsmith this month it
had removed one account he had tracked, due to inactivity.
The representative declined to share information with Mr.
Goldsmith about the origin of the account, but Twitter said to Mr.
Goldsmith that his findings were promising and the company was
interested in learning more. Twitter declined to comment.
After his initial discovery of the fake Vietnam veterans account
on Facebook in August 2017, Mr. Goldsmith began noticing other
Facebook pages that had no original content, that appealed to
veterans, and that shared divisive memes, like one about
African-Americans vandalizing veteran memorials. He logged examples
of multiple pages sharing the same image and message -- minutes
apart.
Some accounts have changed their names over time, testing what
approaches garnered the most "likes" and follows. One he identified
was named "Support Police Officer." It has more than 20,000
followers and posts American military and law-enforcement
memes.
Using a Facebook feature that shows the history of a page's
names, Mr. Goldsmith found that the page began in 2015 as "Europe,
Balkan - Military Power" before changing to "Police & Military"
and then "Support Police" before settling on its current name.
Another page, called "Nam Vets," links to a website whose domain
is registered to a user in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, according to publicly
available data.
Facebook in early September launched a new feature allowing
users to see the country of origin for many, but not all, pages.
Using this tool, Mr. Goldsmith found that of more than 100
suspicious, veteran-focused pages he had been following, over half
had begun in a foreign country, and many in Vietnam, targeting
Vietnam veterans.
"I've identified dozens of these pages, but it's already too
late," Mr. Goldsmith said. "They're not just targeting the midterm
election, they're targeting the electorate."
Write to Ben Kesling at benjamin.kesling@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 17, 2018 06:01 ET (10:01 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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