On the same day that another fabricated hit piece on Justin Trudeau was circulated by thousands on Facebook, company executives confirmed the social media platform wouldn’t ban one of the top outlets responsible for fake Canadian political news.

Instead, Facebook said it’s continuing to rely on existing deterrence measures that haven’t stopped users from sharing and reading lies about the Liberal leader during the ongoing federal election campaign.

The latest article about Trudeau from the Buffalo Chronicle, a site well-known for its false reporting in Canadian media and political circles, made unsubstantiated claims about the Liberals’ increased security measures at a rally this weekend and had been shared on Facebook almost 4,000 times on Tuesday.

And while it may have appeared on the Facebook feeds of more than 200,000 users, according to the social media monitoring site CrowdTangle, its reach is merely a portion of how many people may have at least skimmed the headline of earlier falsehoods the site has pushed about Trudeau.

The Buffalo Chronicle’s fascination with the Trudeau’s and the Liberals began in the early days of the SNC-Lavalin affair. Its first story about Trudeau was published shortly after the Globe and Mail’s first story about Trudeau and his office’s efforts to pressure former attorney general and justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to find a way to allow the Quebec engineering giant to avoid a criminal prosecution.

Ever since, the Buffalo Chronicle has sporadically published unfounded articles attempting to undermine the Liberals, while trying to pass itself off as a reputable news organization. At first glance its website looks like that of a newspaper’s, but there are certain tells – like a lack of bylines on stories, a reliance on unnamed sources and a “writers” page featuring exactly zero writers – that should be red flags to a reader. Canadaland and the National Observer have both been told by Matthew Ricchiazzi, the site’s owner, that he keeps reporters’ names secret. When iPolitics reported on one of the site’s fake articles in February, Ricchiazzi did not return calls that were made to the website’s listed number.

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In spite of various media’s reporting on the publication’s fake stories, the Buffalo Chronicle has persevered with its misleading Canadian political content, ramping up its groundless attack pieces against Trudeau during the federal election campaign.

Over the last five weeks, the Buffalo Chronicle has published stories containing untrue or unsubstantiated information that have touched upon Trudeau’s departure from his past private school teaching job, his life in his 20s, and most recently on Tuesday, about why he wore a bullet-proof vest during a Liberal party rally over the weekend.

iPolitics has chosen only to loosely describe the topics of these stories to ensure that it’s not playing a part in spreading misinformation.

Asked for a comment about the various claims made in Buffalo Chronicle articles, Liberal Party spokesperson Eleanore Catenaro said it was the party’s policy not to comment on any story “from an outlet with a history of spreading disinformation and complete falsehoods.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Buffalo Chronicle’s stories about Canadian politics (all of which disparage the Liberals in some way) have received more than 80,000 interactions on Facebook, which is the combined total reactions, shares and comments on a post, as counted by CrowdTangle. Links to the stories had been independently posted more than 500 times and shared more than 29,000 times.

While speaking with journalists during a teleconference that the company organized to talk about what its doing to prevent interference in the election on Tuesday, Facebook Canada’s head of public policy Kevin Chan defended the social media site’s reluctance to ban the fake news site’s articles from its platform by saying that it allows freedom of speech but was also policing posts based on the relevant jurisdiction’s laws and its own rules, which it calls its community standards.

Facebook will take down posts that contain hate speech, information that’s attempting to suppress voters, and will also block accounts that are falsely representing themselves as political figures, Chan explained. Falsehoods about political figures, however, aren’t removed from the site.

“Misinformation as a whole does not violate our community standards. So we don’t have a rule that says that everything you post needs to be true, although there are cases in which true information intersects with other parts of our community standards and leads us to take content down,” Antonia Woodford, Facebook’s misinformation product manager, told reporters on Tuesday.

Facebook has also tried to counter the spread of misinformation and disinformation on its platform through its partnership with Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) fact check service. AFP’s fact check service writes articles responding to viral hoaxes, which Facebook then links to the disproven post when it’s shared on its site. In these cases, Facebook also notifies users who have shared the original story to let them know it’s been fact checked.

AFP responded to a fake story by the Buffalo Chronicle last week, determining that it was “false.” Woodford said the fabricated story’s distribution was “significantly reduced” after AFP’s fact check. AFP’s fact check was published two days after the Buffalo Chronicle story was. The Buffalo Chronicle story was shared more than 10,800 times and had been pushed to the feeds of more than 895,000 users.

Within hours of being posted on Tuesday, a new Buffalo Chronicle story making unproven claims about the Liberals’ heightened security measures at a rally over the weekend had become its third-most shared fake news piece of the election. AFP had not countered the article with a fact check piece of its own at the time this article was published.

Facebook also punishes pages that repeatedly shares fake news articles by preventing them from running ads on the platform if they share too many false pieces, according to Woodford.

When asked by a reporter about how Facebook’s community standards allow for the Buffalo Chronicle’s articles to remain on the platform, Chan said “at the end of the day it sounds like you almost want a tech company to referee what is being said during an election.”

“And of course when we take a step back, what we think is the right thing to do is for folks like you to report on this, to provide the facts, to the extent that they’re out there. We also think that voters need to decide,” Chan said.

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