Thread by @jordanliles

1/ NEW from me tonight via @snopes. Facebook appears to have quietly removed at least three pro-Trump FB groups. #Election2020

1. Trump Train 2020, Red Wave: 1.1 million members
2. Candace Owens: 523,000 members
3. Ivanka Trump (Official): 14,000 members

bit.ly/33YrFbH

2/ All 3 Facebook groups appeared to engage in coordinated inauthentic behavior, whether with fake accounts in admin slots, or with duplicate accounts with the same person having several accounts that were all admins.

Story: bit.ly/33YrFbH

More below in this thread 👇

3/ The largest of the three Facebook groups that Snopes reporters noticed had been removed was Trump Train 2020, Red Wave, which amassed nearly 1.1 million members in just over three months. It was created in June.

That means an average growth of 366,000 members per month.

4/ Candace Owens, a Facebook fan group with more than 523,000 members, was also recently removed. The group’s content consisted of pro-Trump memes and links to conservative news outlets, as well as quite a few accounts saying they had "walked away" from the Democratic Party.

5/ As of Sept. 22, Danny Sherman, the creator of the Candace Owens fan group said in a comment that he had paid advertising “ready” and the plan is to “funnel” people to “our new platform.”

6/ The Candace Owens group added fake accounts for its admins. Tom Walker, an admin, says he lives in “Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro.“ The same photo appears as a stock photo on a travel blog. The group's creator also had at least two accounts for himself. Both were admins.

7/ The third group in our story was named Ivanka Trump OFFICIAL, and it was not the official group for the president's eldest daughter.

One of the admins was Carolina Mendez, a fake Facebook account that used a photograph of actress Ana de Armas for its profile photo.

8/ The fake account displayed Mendez’s workplace as the New York Yankees and twice listed attending college at New York University. It also said that she is both from New York, New York, and also is currently living there.

9/ Fake accounts often give away their lack of authenticity with this kind of location-based information. Some people outside of the U.S. who create fake accounts may only be knowledgeable about a few American locations, like New York, California, and Texas.

10/ Fake account creators will list New York, New York, or Los Angeles, California, for their locations. Some even type out Texas City, Texas, or California City, California, meaning fake account creators started typing a familiar state name and went with the first result.

11/ Example of a California City, California fake account from another investigation: archive.is/GhMIY#selectio….

Both Texas City and California City are real cities (and have small populations), but they’re also often dead giveaways for fake accounts.

12/ The other admin for Ivanka Trump (Official) was Nidhal Naceur, a man claiming to have attended school in Morocco and Tunisia. His Facebook profile claimed he works for YouTube and now resides in Kélibia, Tunisia.

13/ Posts made by members in Ivanka Trump (Official) displayed pro-Trump political messaging.

A page with a small following named My President Is TRUMP was listed as both an admin for and the creator of the Ivanka Trump (Official) group. It also disappeared in September 2020.

14/ We reached out to Facebook with questions about these groups, but did not yet receive a response.

Feel free to retweet this thread from post #1 above, and read our story in full here: bit.ly/33YrFbH.

15/ New tonight, thread above, in case you need to cite yet another example of this sort of thing for future stories.
@MollyJongFast @jaredlholt @donie @JuddLegum @oneunderscore__ @BrandyZadrozny @brianstelter @oliverdarcy @RMac18 @CraigSilverman @ddale8 bit.ly/33YrFbH

16/ As a note, it's important to point out that the majority of the admins in these groups are still active on Facebook.

The Candace Owens mods group for the fan group we reported on is still there. And they appear to be rebuilding.

We did not receive a response from Facebook.