Huge, Pro-Donald Trump ‘I Love America’ Facebook Operation Run Out Of Ukraine, Investigative Report Reveals
A massive Facebook network dedicated to memes and propaganda supporting Donald Trump and attacking his political enemies, one that has received more than 31 million interactions across all of its pages in just the past 90 days, is operated primarily by people in Ukraine — even though Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post titled Preparing For Elections and published almost exactly one year ago that Facebook was dedicated to stopping foreign election interference on the world’s largest social media network.
The Facebook page, titled I Love America, even “recycles” pro-Trump memes created by The Internet Research Agency, the Russian entity that had been indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for fraudulently using Facebook to spread propaganda to influence the 2016 presidential election, according to investigative reporter Judd Legum.
Legum published the findings of his probe into the Ukranian operation on his Popular Information site.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday about allegations that he had pressured the current president of Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election by staging a bogus “investigation” of Democrat Joe Biden, Trump made an unexplained comment that appeared to reference Ukrainian operations inside the United States, as The Inquisitr reported.
“Somehow they were involved in a lot of different things that took place in our country,” Trump said in the exchange with reporters, referring to Ukraine.
But no reporter asked Trump to elaborate on what he meant by the “different things” Ukraine was doing inside the United States.
According to Popular Information, no evidence has yet been uncovered linking the I Love America Facebook operation to the Ukrainian government. But based on Legum’s findings, the operation extends well beyond the single Facebook page — with more than a million followers — bearing that title.
The viral content the page promotes, much of which contains false information and accusations — such as the fabricated claim that Hillary Clinton not only used an unsecured email server but sold access to her server to foreign governments, reaches more readers than content from some of the top U.S. media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, Legum reported.
Via his Twitter account, Legum revealed Facebook stats showing that just in the past three months, all of the pages across the Ukrainian-run pro-Trump Facebook network received 31.69 million interactions.
In that same time period, The Times received 17.65 million interactions, and The Post received 14.05 million.
In addition to the core I Love America page, the network also operated pages devoted to seemingly harmless topics, such as photos of cute dogs. But Popular Information found that visitors to those apparently innocuous pages are actively encouraged to click links sending them to pro-Trump memes and propaganda.
A Facebook spokesperson told Legum that none of the pages violated Facebook policies against “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which the social media company defines as “when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they are doing.”
