Facebook Allowed Conservative Group To Pose As Progressives To Fracture Democratic Party

New documents obtained by The Guardian reveal that a conservative group called Rally Forge was allowed to create an astroturf campaign that posed as a progressive organization to try to fracture the Democratic Party's base in both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election. Even though Facebook knew the true identity of the group, which has close ties to Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, they did nothing and said this didn't violate their rules. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Recently uncovered documents, reveal that Facebook allowed a conservative group to run an AstroTurf campaign posing as a progressive group in order to try to split the democratic party in the 2018 midterm elections. And they were also involved in some shenanigans with the 2020 election. But let's start with what this group rally forge did in the 2018 elections. Uh, they were posing as a progressive group called America progress. Now a P N. And what they did was they got on Facebook, created this page, acted like they were a real group, encouraging people to support, not just the green party, but specific green party candidates that they mentioned by name. And yes, that is important to remember. They also posted socialists means memes. They talked about the two party duopoly and how horrible it was for America. So vote green and Facebook knew that America progress now was not a legitimate organization, but that it was being run. The page was being administered by three individuals connected to this rally forge group, which also happens to be connected to Charlie Kirk's turning point USA and turning point action. There is a big web to untangle here.

So let me, you know, bear with me

On this. Uh, the first one, like I mentioned, why is it important that they mentioned green party candidates by name? Because once you start advocating for a specific politician with paid posting, suddenly you fall under the jurisdiction of the federal election commission and everything has to be reported that you're running ads to support a specific candidate, not just a political party or an issue, you have to be reported. This was not done. So they were looking at potential legal violations. That is until last year, the FEC said, now. One guy took the fall for it saying, no, that was totally my fault. I'm new at this. I didn't know what I was doing. And then of course, other people, a former FEC employee said, yeah, it's obvious this guy was made the fall guy because this group broke the law. So as I mentioned, three individuals running America progress now from rally Ford. So who were they here? They are men by the name of Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg, and Colton Duncan, who also served as Facebook page administrators for turning point USA, the right wing college group funded by founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administers administrators, excuse me for Kirk's Facebook

Page.

So these weren't just some yahoos, you know, the turning point had run in their page. No, no, no, no. They were also running Charlie Kirk's personal

Facebook page

To push out his crap while they're also operating this AstroTurf campaign again. And Facebook knew this Facebook knew who these people were, because obviously you have to register for your Facebook page with your name. They have all that information. They knew who was what, but at the time in 2018, when this was taking place, Facebook didn't have rules in place to say this was illegal. So they looked into it and they said, Nope, you're not violating our terms of service here. You get to take, you get to continue, uh, spreading this propaganda, even though we know it's propaganda. And,

Uh, because that's just how we are at Facebook

For the 2018 election. And this group clearly being unsuccessful. The America progress now page went dormant until about last summer when suddenly it re-energized after they had hired a troll farm from Phoenix, Arizona to start posting pro Trump memes and material after it was revealed several months later, I think they started the bot farm in June, 2020. Then by October, 2020, Facebook caught on and said, oh wait, oh no, you can't do that. Uh we're we have to shut you down. So they did officially get banned rally forge got banned

From Facebook. So that was the only kind of punishment they've

Had.