These narratives tend to seem repetitive from year to year. That’s not a coincidence; many articles are recycled on Facebook month after month and even year after year. It’s a common tactic right-wing propaganda pages use to make any issue they fearmonger about seem like a pattern. For example, the Facebook page of fake news site Mad World News originally posted an anti-Muslim “invasion” link on September 21, 2014. The page then reposted it again on October 18, 2014, then again on June 21, 2015, and yet again on December 30, 2016 -- presenting it as a new story each time. Another link from the far-right outlet The New American from 2016 was posted by different Facebook pages over 500 times over the past three years, and has earned 525,000 interactions on Facebook since 2016.

Over the past year, right-wing pages have implemented this white supremacist dog whistle in reaction to two major news cycles: the Trump administration’s family separation policies from May to July 2018 and the caravans of Central American migrants and asylum-seekers heading toward the southern U.S. border in October and November.

After President Donald Trump faced backlash over his administration’s inhumane family separation policies, right-wing Facebook pages rallied behind him by spreading anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and justifying his policies as a tactic to fight the asylum-seekers they characterized as invaders.