Since January, a set of Canadian Facebook pages have been promoting conservative politicians, attacking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and sharing content culled primarily from conservative website the Post Millennial.

The pages — one for Ontario, one for Alberta, and one national — use the name Liberty Now and have more than 10,000 followers. They are part of a larger network of Facebook pages that cross-promote content from the Post Millennial, potentially reaching millions of Canadians in a matter of hours and at times rivaling the reach of the country’s biggest newspapers and broadcasters.

Yet despite its role in a network that is becoming increasingly prominent in the Canadian online media ecosystem, Liberty Now has never disclosed who runs the pages.

Multiple Facebook messages sent to the pages requesting information about their ownership went unanswered, but an investigation by BuzzFeed News and the Toronto Star confirmed Liberty Now is the work of Yaakov Pollak, a former candidate for the provincial Conservative Party in Montreal who now works for the Post Millennial.



The opaque network and its associations with the Post Millennial and Conservative Party politics show how anonymous players on social media can blur the lines between advocacy, journalism, and marketing, according to Fenwick McKelvey, an associate professor at Concordia University who specializes in political communication.

“Either you’re a journalistic outlet where you have standards ... or you’re an advocacy group, in which case then at least you need to be transparent,” he said.

McKelvey said the anonymous operation of the Liberty Now pages “undermines the spirit of free and fair elections, because you’re not disclosing and having transparency” about links to political parties and partisan publishers.

Pollak, who previously ran a riding Facebook page for the federal Conservatives, acknowledged in an email that he created and operates Liberty Now. He said the pages are his and not run by the Post Millennial.

“I wanted to create a political hub for discussion, but I moved on from this project,” Pollak said of Liberty Now, adding that he considers it “failed” and “basically dormant.”

But the pages are updated consistently, sometimes more than once a day. That’s similar to another page managed by Pollak, Elect Conservatives, which has more than 79,000 followers and has become a key source of promotion for Post Millennial content. A recent analysis by BuzzFeed News and the Star found the Post Millennial’s content achieves impressive reach on Facebook, thanks in part to consistent promotion from a network of pages with no explicit affiliation.

Pollak said he “sometimes” helps manage the Post Millennial’s main Facebook page.