As protests spread, misinformation in Facebook Groups tears small towns apart

There’s an outsider in town. Charlie Farnsworth and his neighbors are sure of it. Something strange is happening. Cars won’t start, appliances stop working. A local boy tells the group that aliens must be responsible. Everyone in town panics. Charlie notices a strange, shadowy figure approaching in the distance. It must be the extraterrestrial. Charlie picks up his shotgun and fires. 

That’s the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which originally aired in March 1960. Fast-forward to 2020, throw in some social media, and you basically have Facebook Groups.

In Facebook Groups, where locals in suburbs and small towns across America hang out, news is spreading about paid antifa agitators being bussed into their community and bringing protests, looting, and rioting along with them.

This isn’t true, of course. But you might not know that if you spend too much time on Facebook.

The Monsters Are Due In Facebook Groups

“We see a lot of [misinformation] that starts locally,” said LeadStories editor-in-chief Alan Duke. The outlet, which debunks online hoaxes, is an official third-party fact-checker for Facebook. 

. Toms River, New Jersey. . Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Milan, Michigan. Media outlets all over the U.S. have reported on similar hoaxes, usually about buses or vans full of paid protesters affiliated with antifa coming to their town.

Fact-checking on Facebook isn’t exhaustive. Fake news still goes viral. But at least on Facebook’s News Feed, shared stories are public. It’s a little more complicated with Groups.

There are more than 10 million Facebook Groups, according to a report released by the company last year. The company says more than 1.4 billion people use them. They can be public, so anyone on Facebook can read what’s posted in them. Or they can be set to private, which means a user must be approved by the group’s administrators before they can see what other members posted.

“The way you spread disinformation is by getting it to spread through groups.”

“If it’s a closed group, I can’t look at it,” Duke explained, pointing out how misinfo that starts in these local Facebook communities often goes unscrutinized. “Private pages, private groups: fact-checkers don’t see.”

Facebook Frenzies and Real Vigilantes

Rumors about buses full of antifa protesters have spread through several communities via Facebook. And those kinds of rumors can have real consequences. 

In Forks, Washington — that’s right, the real-life town where the sparkly vampire series Twilight takes place — a vigilante group of gun-toting locals ran a school bus last week.

They heard rumors about protesters being in to burn down the town. Of course, were no buses full of protesters, looters, or rioters. There wasn’t even a protest. There , however, a multiracial family of four driving their bus to a nearby campground. 

A group of armed locals organized online, followed the bus to a parking lot during a trip detour and accosted them, demanding to know if they were “antifa protesters.” The family was forced to abruptly end their trip when the vigilantes continued to harass them later at the campsite.

Just one day earlier, on the opposite side of the country, a man with knives wrapped around his arm a small group of protesters in Whitestone, a town in the New York City borough of Queens. After threatening to kill the protesters, he drove off in his vehicle and then made a U-turn, jumping the curb and down the protesters with his car on the sidewalk. Numerous videos of the encounter were shared on social media.

At the time, threads about violent out-of-town protesters were being spread in local Facebook Groups.

“They’re trying to set it off in Whitestone,” said a since-deleted Facebook post by the man who attacked the protesters. “Everybody get your guns and let’s protect our neighborhood.” 

Other threats of violence remain on the Whitestone man’s personal page, along with content shared from pro-Trump Facebook Groups and conservative fan pages.

Unlike in Forks, where the campsite incident occurred, there was an actual protest in Whitestone. However, the misinformation found in Facebook Groups for both towns was very similar: “outside agitators” were invading their turf.

Some in the Whitestone Groups defended the man’s actions, saying outsiders instigated the confrontation. As a lifelong Queens resident, I saw some of these posts myself. Over the weekend, I went down to the protest site in Whitestone, where activists are now gathering on a daily basis. I spoke with some protesters. I saw some people I knew back from when they used to watch my old punk band in high school and college. From what I could tell, the protest was made up of locals, mostly teenagers and young adults from the area.

Recently, the AP analyzed records of more than 200 people arrested during the protests in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. It found that more than 85 percent of the arrestees were local residents, not outside agitators. A few were self-identified leftists, others were right wing Trump supporters. Only one was a self-described anarchist.

A protest supporter in one of the Whitestone Groups  made a remark that stuck with me. Some people in town were so blinded by rage over the protests, they didn’t even notice who was protesting. The protesters were their neighbor’s kids. Those “outside agitators” lived right next door.

In that The Twilight Zone episode, the person Charlie shoots and kills turns out to be his neighbor, Pete van Horn. So caught up in the frenzy, Charlie didn’t even recognize him in the distance.

Image: CBS via Getty Images

The Misinformation Zone

Facebook’s misinformation problem isn’t new. For Jean-Claude Goldenstein, founder and CEO of CREOPoint, a company that monitors disinformation and helps organizations manage fallout from them, the spread of fake news about the protests is reminiscent of what happened with coronavirus misinformation. Facebook Groups were integral in spreading COVID-19 conspiracies during the height of the pandemic.

“These are unprecedented times and social media platforms have a responsibility for accountability,” he said over email. “We are witnessing in real time how the boundaries between truth and lies become so blurry as to cause real damage to people.”

Researchers from George Washington University recently found that Facebook Groups were more successful at influencing vaccine skeptics than healthcare professionals. If people trust memes over doctors about their own health, imagine the power of Facebook disinformation about politically charged protests.

According to Facebook, the company does take action against Groups. It says that Groups that spread misinformation will have their distribution in users’ News Feeds reduced. The company also limits how widely a Group is recommended to users on other Group pages.

Fact-checked fake news articles that are shared within Groups are labeled as “false.” However, as LeadStories’ Alan Duke explained, if the misinfo starts in a private group, fact-checkers can’t see it, and therefore can’t fact-check it. 

As Black Lives Matter protests spread in the U.S., misinformation follows on Facebook Groups. 

“It starts with a local claim and then it starts to spread nationally,” Duke told me. “That’s how it happens.”

“Groups are very instrumental in making something go viral,” he continued, providing me with a specific example of how that works.

Combine the viral power of Groups with say… the president of the United States of America, and you have a perfect storm for spreading misinformation.

“The way you spread disinformation is by getting it to spread through groups.”

The Disinformation Pipeline

Last week, the official White House Twitter account posted a video compilation claiming the footage was proof that “antifa and professional anarchists” were leaving caches of bricks around the country for looters to utilize. 

One clip included video of a stack of bricks in front of a synagogue in Los Angeles. The synagogue later debunked the claim, saying that that the brick pile was actually a security barrier it set up more than a year ago. The White House later the video.

And then on Tuesday, Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory alleging that a 75-year-old protester who was injured by Buffalo police in a viral video was an “antifa provocateur.” 

“This is something that started locally and then it goes all the way up to the White House Twitter feed,” said Duke. “It’s a false claim that suggests that there are people on the left who are trying to make this all go violent to make the president look bad… and it’s just nonsense.”

The Outside Agitator Next Door

It’s not just happening in Facebook Groups, either. The hyperlocal social networking app, NextDoor has also played a major of misinformation among small town residents. 

NextDoor calls itself a “neighborhood hub.” It’s basically a mini-social network for people just in your community, ostensibly so you can share local news and recommendations with your neighbors. However, it’s notorious for being home to racist posts — essentially, a place where paranoid white people go to report on black people walking through their neighborhood.

When I put out an to my Twitter followers to share the local misinfo they were seeing about the protests, just as many users sent me screenshots of NextDoor as they did Facebook. 

One post making the rounds in these communities on Facebook and NextDoor shortly after the protests began was a tweet from an account called @ANTIFA_US, which called for violence in residential communities. Twitter soon suspended the user and, in a statement to NBC News, explained that the account was actually connected to the white nationalist group, Identity Evropa.

And what about antifa, who are supposedly invading small towns across the country? According to Zignal Labs, which analyzed 873,000 piece of misinformation about the George Floyd protests, antifa was mentioned in 575,800 of them.

First, antifa is not an actual organization, let alone an organized “terrorist” group like Trump claims. The term describes people who consider themselves antifascist. 

And they’re not plotting riots. In Washington, D.C., The Nation reported that federal law enforcement found no evidence of organized antifa involvement in the city’s protests. In fact, out of the 51 people facing federal charges over the protest, a total of zero have ties to any antifa movement.

“Groups are very instrumental in making something go viral.”

In Las Vegas, however, three men who are part of the far-right Boogalo movement were and indicted on federal charges for conspiracy to cause destruction at the city’s Black Lives Matter protests.

CREOPoint’s Goldenstein explained how important Groups are to boosting misinformation. When protesters outside the White House were cleared out by the police’s tear gas, the president spun the news reports as fake news. Facebook Groups, including pro-Trump communities, quickly spread an ABC News article that included Trump’s “fake news” declaration in the headline. 

On social media, where so many don’t bother to read past a headline before angrily commenting and clicking share, even real news can spread fake news.

“[The report] was shared over 190,000 times on Facebook,” Goldenstein said. “On multiple Facebook Groups.”

A World Full of Maple Streets

So, who’s responsible for spreading these hoaxes? Duke wouldn’t be surprised if there were some elements of sowing discord among Anytown, USA Facebook Groups.

But, from what he’s seen, as far as agitators are concerned, he thinks they’re mostly domestic. Fake news websites, political operatives, partisan provocateurs — all looking to cause a little trouble in the midst of an already tumultuous election year.

For example, a 2018 study on disinformation highlighted how fake profiles swarmed a local Facebook Group in an attempt to sway a mayoral election in the Philippines.

“The way you spread disinformation is by getting it to spread through Groups,” he tells me.

At the end of “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” the camera pans to reveal two alien beings in the distance, looking down on Maple Street as it descends into chaos. They reveal that they were responsible for the weird occurrences happening in the town below.

“Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern,” one says to the other. “They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find… and it’s themselves.”

“Then I take it this place… this Maple Street… is not unique,” inquires the second.

As the two ascend back to their spaceship, he replies “by no means, their world is full of Maple Streets. And we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves.”