A network of profit-driven pages fuelling anti-Islamic sentiment was exposed two months ago but is still operating

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

Facebook has failed to stop a coordinated far-right operation profiting from disinformation and anti-Islamic hate almost two months after it was publicly exposed.

The Guardian revealed in December that a network of Facebook’s largest far-right pages were part of a coordinated commercial enterprise that for years had been harvesting Islamophobic hate for profit, prompting promises from the social media giant that it would crack down on the network.

Facebook soon removed several pages and accounts which it said “appeared to be financially motivated” and said it had updated its inauthentic behaviour policy to “further improve our ability to counter new tactics”.

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“These pages and accounts violated our policy against spam and fake accounts by posting clickbait content to drive people to off-platform sites,” a Facebook spokesperson said at the time.

“Our investigations are continuing and, as always, we’ll take action if we find any violations.”

But two months after Facebook was made aware of the scheme, an analysis by the Guardian has confirmed that a number of the pages are still feeding off anti-Islamic content to drive readers to the same for-profit, third-party websites.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Coordinated Facebook posts falsely claiming German chancellor Angela Merkel paid “terrorists to kill Jews”. Photograph: Facebook

Since December, at least six pages connected to the network have continued posting coordinated content spreading Islamophobic disinformation and attempting to influence political beliefs.

Coordinated posts have falsely claimed the German chancellor Angela Merkel is “paying terrorists to kill Jews” and that Australian police had “refused to arrest Muslims who waved terror flags against Jews in Melbourne”.

The posts were allowed despite Facebook’s repeated promises to crack down on coordinated inauthentic behaviour in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference scandals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Coordinated Facebook posts claiming Australian police had “refused to arrest Muslims who waved terror flags against Jews in Melbourne”. Photograph: Facebook

Facebook is considering the new evidence provided by the Guardian. The company has defined policies on coordinated inauthentic behaviour and inauthentic behaviour, which it generally describes as “groups of pages or people who work together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing”. This can be either ideologically or financially motivated.

Coordinated inauthentic behaviour generally involves the use of fake accounts, and Facebook will generally take action on such networks over their deceptive conduct, rather than over the content of the posts themselves.

In this case, the investigation is complicated by the fact that the Facebook pages spreading the disinformation have genuine, authentic administrators in Australia.

Facebook is separately considering whether the individual posts detected by the Guardian breach any of its community standards, which include restrictions on hate speech.

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But Prof Axel Bruns, of the Queensland University of Technology’s digital media research centre, said there was simply no excuse for the company not to have done more to stop the network.

“This is really obviously a clear-cut demonstrated case of coordinated posting activity across a number of pages, you’d expect Facebook to actually take steps against that, because it is the term that they’re using – coordinated inauthentic behaviour – it matches that description perfectly,” Bruns told Guardian Australia.

“What happens with Facebook is that they tend to only act when something blows up big enough for them to be concerned with their public standing.”

Driven by a single Israel-based administrator, the network previously revealed by the Guardian operated by churning out thousands of coordinated fake news posts to more than 1 million followers across the globe each week, funnelling audiences to a cluster of 10 ad-heavy websites and milking the traffic for profit.

The posts stoked anti-Islamic sentiment across the western world and influenced politics in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US by amplifying far-right parties such as Australia’s One Nation and vilifying Muslim politicians such as the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Australian senator Mehreen Faruqi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Coordinated Facebook posts seeking to exaggerate the scale of celebrations in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Photograph: Facebook

A spokesman for the Australian Imam’s Council said anti-Islamic sentiment and Islamophobia “has significantly increased in recent times” and that the content identified by the Guardian helped to “provoke and fuel hatred and abuse directed at Australian Muslims”.

“The 2019 Islamophobia in Australia Report, produced by Charles Sturt University, found more than 70% of the 350 incidents considered involved abuse directed at Muslim women and girls,” the spokesman said.

“Such conduct is facilitated and provoked by anti-Islamic content. The content which has been identified presents a significant threat and risk to the wellbeing of Australian Muslims. It not only exacerbates anti-Islamic sentiment and the associated risks, but provides an environment which enables and encourages hatred and abuse directed at Australian Muslims.”

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It criticised social media platforms such as Facebook as being “necessarily reactive”, and said they helped “give rise to a risk to the wellbeing and safety of people and in turn cause division and hatred within our broader society, thereby threatening to tear it apart”.

At the time, a number of the group’s targets criticised Facebook for allowing the network to operate under its nose. Faruqi told the Guardian the network represented a “new level of far-right organisation and coordination”, and accused Facebook of “profiteering from the proliferation of hate speech and abuse”.

“Facebook could do much more and shut these pages down but so long as they continue to profit from the reach and engagement, they don’t seem to be interested in decisive action,” she said.

Similarly, Omar labelled the company “a threat to our democracy”.

“It has become clear that they do not take seriously the degree to which they provide a platform for white nationalist hate and dangerous misinformation in this country and around the world,” she said.

“And there is a clear reason for this: they profit off it. I believe their inaction is a grave threat to people’s lives, to our democracy and to democracy around the world.”

• This article was updated on 20 February 2020. A picture caption was amended to describe how Facebook posts gave a misleading impression of isolated celebrations in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks and to avoid inference in an earlier version that there were no celebrations at all.