"Biden's plan exposed on the news. Illegals voting in 2024 election. Take the poll & get your Free Trump gift! #Trump2024," a June advertisement on Facebook and Instagram from Patriot Sanctuary reads.
Accompanying the that falsely implied President Joe Biden planned to have undocumented immigrants vote for him in the 2024 election is the Newsmax video where the claim originated and a call to action—take a poll and claim your free "In God We Trust" Trump hat and gold coin before they run out.
At the end of the poll, the user is prompted to enter credit card information on a page similar to other reported scams that promise free American flags and then make unsolicited charges to users' cards.
As candidates ramp up messaging ahead of the election, both and are leaning into the influencer economy, pushing their messages about how each will lead the country if elected in November. But, another kind of influencer has been running ads on popular social networks and may have changed the way you think about political subjects without you even realizing it.
They've been dubbed "inauthentic influencers," faceless networks of pages like Patriot Sanctuary entirely unaffiliated with legitimate political campaigns. They run paid advertisements to push misleading claims and, often, scams.
analyzed the latest reports from the 's ElectionGraph project to illustrate how so-called inauthentic influencers have sought to manipulate the decisions of voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
IDJC partnered with analytics company Neo4j to analyze trends in the Facebook social graph—a map of the connections between pages, users, and personal information underlying social networks. The report draws on an analysis of advertisements run on Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. It's worth noting that Neo4j performed its analysis before Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party candidate.
Researchers described finding a "massive amount of manipulation and misinformation targeting Americans" through what it calls on social media platforms. These are not your typical influencers marketing cosmetics and sneakers. Instead, they're networks of seemingly independent accounts with names like "Liberty Defender Group" and "Truly American" running nearly identical, coordinated political advertisements with no disclaimer.
In many cases, researchers found these networks pushing factually inaccurate and misleading claims as well as outright scams. Sometimes they're linked by common credentials like phone numbers and addresses, connections that aren't obvious to the users who see their ads in their feeds.