Yep it is a long story - take some time to see how all this developed here in Arizona starting with a direct marketing company founded in rural suburban Queen Creek a few years ago that's connected to Turning Point USA. . .you really really need to read between-the-lines to see and understand. In addition to two sources, there is related content on this blog.
First up is a report yesterday featuring Jake Hoffman
He was running for the state legislature in the District 12 House at the time. . ."
State Rep. Jake Hoffman Signed A Fake Election Certificate, Throws AZ GQP Chair ‘Chemtrails’ Kelli Ward Under The Bus
"This serious piece of shit keeps turning up like a bad penny. . .The newly elected legislator who ran what amounts to an internet troll farm — paying teens to post conservative talking points and baseless conspiracy theories aimed at getting President Donald Trump re-elected — has been appointed to the state House committee that oversees elections.
No, really.
House Speaker Rusty Bowers this week not only appointed incoming Rep. Jake Hoffman to the House Government and Elections Committee, he made this minister of disinformation the panel’s vice chairman.
> A spokesman for Speaker Bowers defended the appointment of the Queen Creek Republican.
“Incoming Representative Hoffman was duly elected by the voters in LD12 and will bring experience to the Government & Elections Committee
with his previous elected service on the Queen Creek Town Council and Higley School Board,” House spokesman Andrew Wilder told the
Phoenix New Times’ Erasmus Baxter.> The Washington Post in September
exposed Hoffman’s Rally Forge, a digital marketing firm that paid teenagers, some of them minors, to set up fake personas and blanket social media with thousands of nearly identical posts aimed at undermining confidence in the validity of election and downplaying the impact of COVID-19.
[...] Their posts cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots and trumpeted the baseless claim that 28 million of them have gone missing in the past four elections. They noted that “Democrats will do anything to screw over Americans” and that Joe Biden “is being controlled by behind the scenes individuals who want to take America down the dangerous path towards socialism”.
It’s the kind of thing you might expect to come out of Russia. Instead, it came out of Phoenix — or more specifically Hoffman’s secret cell of paid teenage trolls.
“In 2016, there were Macedonian teenagers interfering in the election by running a troll farm and writing salacious articles for money,” Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told the Post this fall. “In this election, the troll farm is in Phoenix.” We want him influencing election law? . . .
(Hoffman) was, after all, permanently suspended by Twitter along 261 other accounts associated with Rally Forge, for violating rules on platform manipulation and spam once the story came to light.
Facebook also banned his marketing firm for “deceptive behavior”, removing 202 accounts, 54 pages and 76 Instagram accounts tied to Rally Forge — accounts that had amassed 400,000 followers.
“In each case, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fictitious accounts and personas as a central part of their operations to mislead people about who they are and what they are doing,” Facebook wrote, referring to its investigations into trolling operations based in Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Hoffman’s cell in Phoenix.
And this is the guy Speaker Bowers appoints to the panel that approves changes to Arizona’s elections laws: a guy who specializes in internet disinformation campaigns
Copies of the documents obtained by The Arizona Republic show a group that claimed to represent the “sovereign citizens of the Great State of Arizona” submitted signed papers casting votes for what they want: a second term for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, 62, helped created a facsimile of the “certificate of ascertainment” that is submitted to formally cast each state’s electoral votes as part of an effort to prevent what she views as the fraudulent theft of the election.
Osiecki said she and others associated with a group called “AZ Protect the Vote” have attended the postelection rallies protesting the results, including the daylong meeting in Phoenix that included Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. She left that gathering upset that Gov. Doug Ducey wasn’t supporting the president’s efforts and she wanted to take further action. She and the others chose electors as a result.
[W]hile Osiecki’s elector documents do not appear to have been taken as genuine, they are part of a weekslong effort, led by Trump, his advisers, and involving Arizona Republican Party officials and three members of Arizona’s GOP congressional delegation casting doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in Arizona and nationally.
Arizona’s ersatz electors sent their choices using documents notarized by Melanie Hunsaker, who works in real estate. Her husband, Jamie Hunsaker, is a Trump enthusiast and one of the purported electors.
Donald Paul Schween, another would-be elector, has been active in Republican Party politics.
Federico Buck, another real estate veteran, is among the signatories.
Others include Cynthia Franco, Sarai Franco, Stewart A. Hogue, Carrie Lundell, Christeen Taryn Moser, Danjee J. Moser, Jessica Panell and Peter Wang. Osiecki attested to the group’s eligibility as electors. . .
READ MORE >> https://blogforarizona.net/state-rep-jake-hoffman-signed-a-fake-election-certificate-throws-az-gqp-chair-chemtrails-kelli-ward-under-the-bus/
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Content Moderation Case Study: Facebook Knew About Deceptive Advertising Practices By A Group That Was Later Banned For Operating A Troll Farm (2018-2020)
from the election-advertising-moderation dept
Summary:
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, progressive voters in seven competitive races in the Midwest were targeted with a series of Facebook ads urging them to vote for Green Party candidates. The ads, which came from a group called America Progress Now, included images of and quotes from prominent progressive Democrats including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the implication that these politicians supported voting for third parties.
The campaign raised eyebrows for a variety of reasons: two of the featured candidates stated that they did not approve the ads, nor did they say or write the supposed quotes that were run alongside their photos, and six of the candidates stated that they had no connection with the group. The office of Senator Sanders asked Facebook to remove the campaign, calling it “clearly a malicious attempt to deceive voters.” Most notably, an investigation by ProPublica and VICE News revealed that America Progress Now was not registered with the Federal Election Commission nor was any such organization present at the address listed on its Facebook page.
In response to Senator Sanders’ office, and in a further statement to ProPublica and VICE, Facebook stated that it had investigated the group and found no violation of its advertising policies or community standards.
Two years later, during the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, an investigation by the Washington Post revealed a “troll farm”-type operation directed by Rally Forge, a digital marketing firm with connections to Turning Point Action (an affiliate of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA), in which multiple teenagers were recruited and directed to post pro-Trump comments using false identities on both Facebook and Twitter. This revelation resulted in multiple accounts being removed by both companies, and Rally Forge was permanently banned from Facebook.
As it turned out, these two apparently separate incidents were in fact closely connected: an investigation by The Guardian in June of 2021, aided in part by Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang, discovered that Rally Forge had been behind the America Progress Now ads in 2018. Moreover, Facebook had been aware of the source of the ads and their deceptive nature, and of Rally Forge’s connection to Turning Point, when it determined that the ads did not violate its policies. The company did not disclose these findings at the time. Internal Facebook documents, seen by The Guardian, recorded concerns raised by a member of Facebook’s civic integrity team, noting that the ads were “very inauthentic” and “very sketchy.” In the Guardian article, Zhang asserted that “the fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”
Company considerations:
- What is the best way to address political ads that are known to be intentionally deceptive but do not violate specific advertising policies?
- What disclosure policies should be in place for internal investigations that reveal the questionable provenance of apparently deceptive political ad campaigns?
- When a group is known to have engaged in deceptive practices that do not violate policy, what additional measures should be taken to monitor the group in case future actions involve escalations of deceptive and manipulative tactics?
Issue considerations:
- How important should the source and intent of political ads be when determining whether or not they should be allowed to remain on a platform, as compared to the content of the ads themselves?
- At what point should apparent connections between a group that violates platform policies and a group that did not directly engage in the prohibited activity result in enforcement actions against the latter group?
Resolution:
A Facebook spokesperson told The Guardian that the company had “strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency” in the time since the 2018 investigation, which revealed no violations by America Progress Now. The company also introduced a new policy aiming to increase transparency regarding the operators of networks of Facebook Pages.
Rally Forge and one of its page administrators remain permanently banned from Facebook following the 2020 troll farm investigation, while Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action deny any involvement in the specifics of either campaign, and Facebook has taken no direct enforcement action against those groups.
Originally posted to the Trust and Safety Foundation website.
