“Massive ‘I Love America’ Facebook page, pushing pro-Trump propaganda, is run by Ukrainians”

Judd Legum:

The “I Love America” Facebook page boasts 1.1 million fans, with viral content that reaches more Facebook users than some of the largest media outlets in the United States. A typical post is a celebration of the U.S. military and patriotism.


There are lots of references to “our country” and “our military.” Not mentioned is that the page is managed by ten people based in Ukraine. (There is also one manager from Kazakhstan, one from France, and one from the United States.) A website that was previously linked in the “About” section of the “I Love America” page is registered to Andriy Zyuzikov, an online strategist from the Ukrainian city of Odessa.


The “I Love America” page regularly recycles memes used by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian entity that set up phony Facebook pages to benefit Trump in advance of the 2016 election. 


While “I Love America,” which was established in March 2017, focuses on patriotism, in recent weeks it has used its extraordinary reach to push pro-Trump propaganda. 


These pro-Trump memes are cross-posted from several explicitly pro-Trump pages, with names like “God bless Donald and Melania Trump and God bless America.”  All of these pages, which were created in the last few months, are managed exclusively by people based out of Ukraine. 


But the “I Love America” page is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a complex network of Facebook pages, all managed by people in Ukraine, that collect large audiences by posting memes about patriotism, Jesus, and cute dogs. These pages are now being used to funnel large audiences to pro-Trump propaganda. The pages have also joined political Facebook groups and are active on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. 
Facebook promised this would not happen again. “In 2016, we were not prepared for the coordinated information operations we now regularly face. But we have learned a lot since then and have developed sophisticated systems that combine technology and people to prevent election interference on our services,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2018. …

While there is no indication that the Ukrainian network of Facebook pages is backed by any government, they are exposing Americans to a flood of inauthentic and manipulative content related to the 2020 election. …

A Facebook spokesperson told Popular Information that the company does not believe any of the Facebook pages discussed in this article violate its policies, including the policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook defines “coordinated inauthentic behavior” as “when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing.”

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