The fact that John McCain didn’t want Sarah Palin at his funeral spoke volumes. Palin’s newest post-politics gig appears to be the endorsement of noxious news sites, via her Facebook page. And it is evident that she’s making money doing this. “…since May 4, Palin’s Facebook page has linked to an obscure right-wing aggregation site called Analyzing America 280 times.” And that got the attention of Judd Legum at Popular Information:
The page is owned by Joshua Riddle and David Rufful. The pair claim to have founded Analyzing America ten years ago, but only purchased the domain in 2018. The site has been criticized for “extreme right-wing bias, promotion of conspiracies and propaganda.” Last year, the site implied that Hillary Clinton might have murdered Jeffrey Epstein.
Check out the Clinton link. That references a comment made by Trevor Noah to Clinton, asking her how she managed to kill Jeffrey Epstein. The dialogue was part of a conversation wherein Noah was remarking about Clinton’s vaunted omniscience.
He says, “I have to ask you a question that has been plaguing me for a while, how did you kill Jeffrey Epstein? Because you’re not in power, but you have all the power. I really need to understand how you do what you do, because you seem to be behind everything nefarious, and yet you do not use it to become president.”
Clinton “laughed creepily” at this, we are told. Talk about a nothing burger. I report it in this level of detail to illustrate how desperate Sarah Palin has got to be to make a buck if she’s working to amplify these voices. Every time Palin’s Facebook page would link to Analyzing America it would do so with a UPM code affixed. The UPM code allows a publisher to determine precisely how much traffic is coming from a particular source. Without the UPM code, Analyzing America would see that traffic was coming from Facebook, but not from a particular page. With the UPM code, Palin’s page got identified as the source.
Identifying her Facebook page as the source of traffic is how Palin gets paid. Otherwise, why bother appending the UPM code? And Palin is not the only player in this game.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is the same method The Daily Wire, the website founded by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, used to boost its traffic. The Daily Wire was paying Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News, a noxious site that has built a huge audience on racist and violent content, to link to The Daily Wire. That scheme ended earlier this month after it was exposed by Popular Information because it violated Facebook’s rules.
Under Facebook’s policy, Facebook pages cannot “accept anything of value to post content that you did not create.” This rule, however, appears to be routinely violated by right-wing websites to artificially inflate the popularity of unreliable, low-quality content.
“After an initial investigation, we found there’s enough evidence to merit a deeper review. In the meantime, we are taking temporary enforcement action and demoting the Page posting this content,” a Facebook spokesperson told Popular Information.
What Facebook says and what it enforces are two different things. This article goes on to report in detail how various right-wing sites game Facebook on a routine basis and how Facebook is not consistent in its enforcement of its own rules. That’s the real problem.
Facebook says that “[w]hen we find domestic, non-government campaigns that include groups of accounts and Pages seeking to mislead people about who they are and what they are doing while relying on fake accounts, we remove both inauthentic and authentic accounts, Pages and Groups directly involved in this activity.” That appears to be the case here.
But Facebook has previously taken a very narrow interpretation of this policy. Last October, Popular Information exposed more than a dozen large Facebook pages that were exclusive posting content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion. Facebook said it didn’t constitute coordinated inauthentic behavior because there were “real people” operating each page. Several months later, the pages disclosed they were all owned and operated by The Daily Wire.
Facebook is a controversial player in today’s culture war. It would be good if they would clean up their act. And as for Sarah Palin, this really isn’t surprising. She has the same shock jock sensibility and disregard for consequences as Donald Trump, which makes sense, since Palin was the precursor to Trump. I’m glad that Steve Schmidt is working so hard to get Trump and other corrupt Republicans out of office, because it is some measure of atonement for having foisted Sarah Palin upon the political scene, when he was running John McCain’s campaign. Putting the national spotlight on Palin was opening Pandora’s box. Apparently, McCain viewed it as such.
Sarah P was someone to laugh at. But not funny enough to follow on any page.
and now way past her sell-by date.
So Hillary takes out a notorious child trafficker in his own cell, which does to stop the rest of his ops from getting exposed by Ghislane Maxwell’s arrest. Where’s the problem again?
The owner of the trailer park Palin lives in must have jacked up the lot rental again!
As for FB, I keep saying that what Zuckerberg will fight as hard as he can is meaningful government regulation of his site. If that means working with Trump (and the GOP, and Putin too) to keep the GOP holding enough power to wield their anti-regulatory dogma then so be it. He’s making money hand over fist and like so many addicted to money and power he will never have enough. What I’d love to see is an individual or group with legal standing to sue FB over a pattern of misinformation that’s caused harm result in a consent decree that forces FB to accept a court appointed team of computer forensics people to be installed at their HQ and continuously monitor their “efforts” to do what they only claim to do when it comes to enforcing site policy about harmful content and factually incorrect or misleading information.
I’d like to see him (and Bezos, and the rest) forced into tax brackets where they lose all about about $50 million. There’s no excuse for billionaires existing.
“corrupt Republicans”
Isn’t that redundant?
http://www.salaryapps.com