Your Favorite Facebook Page May Be a Trojan Horse for Progressive Propaganda

On the last Friday in February, thousands of Michigan residents who checked their Facebook feeds read the same headline: The U.S. economy was “supercharged,” they were told, as evidenced by the 6.6 million jobs the country had gained during Joe Biden’s first year as president.

The post was made by A Working Michigan, a community Facebook page that describes itself as the place “to find out the latest on jobs, finance and other issues affecting the economy in Michigan.” The post linked to a “news” story from the Main Street Sentinel, a website with a name that screams small-town news, but that is actually a left-wing propaganda site that serves up a heavy dose of Democratic spin and White House talking points.

The four-paragraph article reported that “the American Rescue Plan signed by President Biden in March 2021 was a major contributor” to the strong job numbers.

Nearly 1,000 people commented on the Facebook post, and the vast majority didn’t buy the “supercharged” economy angle. One commenter called it “Lies, Lies and more propaganda.” Others called it “ridiculous” and an attempt at “brainwashing.” People going back to work after the Covid-19 shutdowns isn’t the same as creating a record number of new jobs, some wrote. One man asked who funded the Facebook page. “Was it Russia?” he asked. “DEFINITELY not Russia smarty pants,” an administrator for A Working Michigan replied.

But the question about funding was a good one. A Working Michigan is not an organic local page created and run by some community-minded do-gooder. Instead, it is part of a network of social-media pages under the umbrella of Real Voices Media, a fledgling progressive firm that recruits and trains content creators to build social-media communities generally based around seemingly nonideological topics. Advertisers, including progressive media outfits, can then pay to have their content posted on these Trojan horse pages.

The operation bears a striking similarity to the Russian troll farms that flooded Facebook feeds with divisive content ahead of the 2016 presidential election. And it shows how some ideological actors are gearing up to influence the political climate ahead of the 2022 elections.

The effort was first reported on in late March by Axios, which called Real Voices Media’s social-media network a “massive, cloaked online powerhouse.”

Tim Graham, executive editor of the media watchdog Newsbusters, said the Real Voices Media operation is part of a growing effort to disguise political ads as news.

“People are suspicious of advertising,” he said. “So, they’re creating fake news sites that look like news instead of advertising. But obviously it has the tone of advertising.”

Just having headlines championing Democrats popping up in people’s Facebook feeds is a win for the groups, Graham said. Most people will never click on the stories, which are often short, both in length and in substance. “If you’re a sophisticated person who’s trying to sell somebody in a subtle way, you’re going to say, ‘Yes, I’m going to get messaging done just with a social-media message and a link that nobody clicks on.’”

“Everybody who thinks they’re smart is saying, ‘How can we get our messaging in, in a way that looks like news,” Graham added. “And the comedy of that is, we’re always saying look at how this news really looks like advertising.”

Real Voices Media was founded in 2019 by Suzanne Turner, a progressive public-relations executive based in Washington, D.C. The company’s managing director, Heather Holdridge, is a longtime digital-content director for Planned Parenthood, according to her LinkedIn page. Holdridge told Axios that Real Voices Media received an early investment from Will Robinson, a Democratic strategist, who also is a partner with a Democrat-aligned PR firm. Holdridge declined to name other investors, according to the Axios report.

Real Voices Media leaders say their network includes more than 400 online communities and more than 5,000 video producers, with a combined audience of about 1.9 million people. But it’s not clear how many of those online communities are active. Attempts to reach Real Voices Media via phone, email, and Facebook for comment were unsuccessful.

National Review identified 70 community Facebook pages that are part of the Real Voices Media network. The number of followers ranged from as few as 50 (La Pagina de Miami) to as many as 43,238 (the We are Maine page). Most are centered around seemingly apolitical topics like women’s health, small business, aging parents, girl talk, beer, and black fatherhood. There also are several pages targeted at residents of specific states, including swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and particularly Wisconsin and Michigan.

They tend to post a lot of memes (crazy Midwest weather is always good for a laugh), as well as links to local and national news stories, and occasional job posts. Most of it seems harmless. A lot of it is inane, and that is probably the point. But from time to time, the pages start pushing out paid posts, often promoting progressive political spin.

For example, for a month starting in late February and into late March, Michigan-focused Real Voices Media Facebook pages pumped out paid content every few days from the Main Street Sentinel, a progressive outlet with shadowy backers. The headlines trumpeted Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s plan to create jobs, and her efforts to “fix the damn roads” and boost the state’s economy. They praised Biden for “investing in American manufacturing,” for taking on drug companies, and for outlining a plan “to lower Rx costs.” Other headlines blamed rising gas prices and inflation on “corporate price gouging.”

A Working Michigan, with 18,254 Facebook followers, posted at least nine paid Main Street Sentinel articles. The Stand Up 4 Michigan’s Middle Class page, with 18,941 followers, posted at least twelve paid Main Street Sentinel articles over that month, while the Michigan Black & Bougie page (3,633 followers) posted at least five, including the “Supercharged” economy story (the posts themselves don’t indicate they’re paid, but each Facebook page has a transparency section that lists the paid posts it has run).

Administrators from the Stand Up 4 Michigan’s Middle Class and A Working Michigan pages did not respond to messages sent by National Review requesting interviews.

Marc Yowell, a Michigan father who “liked” a Real Voices Media Facebook page, Space for Dads, said he assumes he was drawn to the page by either a funny meme or an algorithm-driven recommendation. He believes he’s sharp enough to identify propaganda when he sees it and pushed back on a paid Main Street Sentinel story posted on the Space for Dads page in February. The story credited Biden’s efforts for enabling the creation of millions of small businesses in 2021.

“There’s just so much garbage on Facebook,” said Yowell, who doesn’t doubt that tactics like those employed by Real Voices Media can be effective. “It’s a scary amount of people who would be influenced by something like that.”

The Michigan-focused pages aren’t the only ones that have promoted paid progressive content recently. Last fall, a veterans-focused page, Proudly Served, published several paid posts promoting stories attacking Glenn Youngkin during the Republican’s successful run for governor in Virginia, according to the page’s ad history. The stories were from the “progressive journalism” website, the American Independent, part of the Clinton-aligned True Blue Media investment firm. At least one other Real Voices Media page, Aging Parents Today, also has published content from the American Independent. And in March, the West Virginia Moms for Moms page published at least eight paid posts promoting Huffington Post stories about moms from that state advocating for the child tax credit.

Not all the paid content published by Real Voices Media pages is explicitly political. In December, the Women’s health connection page published paid content from the Obesity Care Advocacy Network. And in September, the Dollars & Sense Facebook page published several paid posts promoting credit unions.

While Real Voices Media has been publishing cloaked progressive content on otherwise apolitical social-media pages, it’s not clear that the company really is “massive,” or an “online powerhouse,” as Axios proclaimed. If it does have an online audience of 1.9 million, that’s somewhere between the number of Facebook followers of Mother Jones (1.5 million) and Rachel Maddow (2.6 million). And it’s far fewer than CNN (39 million followers), Fox News (23 million), or the main New York Times Facebook page (19 million).

Graham, with Newsbusters, said the 1.9 million audience figure is probably good for selling ads and sending the message that “this is a real thing and you should be impressed,” but local campaigns likely wouldn’t want their content on all of Real Voices Media’s pages. “If you’re trying to win an election in Michigan, you’re not going to buy on the Maine page,” he said.

It’s not even clear that most of the Real Voices Media pages are active. Of the 70 pages identified by National Review, 52 of them were created in the two-month period of August and September 2020, before the presidential election (many Real Voices Media pages ran paid ads promoting vote.org before that election). Most of the pages, or 60 of the 70, seem to be dormant now. More than half, or 39 of 70, stopped posting content between January and May 2021.

Jeffrey McGinthy, who lives in central Michigan, is one of the more than 18,000 Facebook users who have “liked” the A Working Michigan page. He also was one of the 979 people who commented on the post, writing, “This is a satire page. Funny stuff!”

McGinthy, who said he leans Republican and is definitely not a progressive Democrat, didn’t recall how he ended up “liking” the page. Many of the people who commented on the post don’t appear to have liked or followed the page.

McGinthy said he sometimes likes pages that he knows promote content that he disagrees with so he is exposed to different perspectives, and so he can express his own views.

“I think I’m pretty good at recognizing if it’s propaganda,” he said, adding that since the 2016 election he thinks most people have caught on to the Trojan-horse tactics used on social media. “There may have been more people that were naïve enough to buy it then. I think less and less by the day, if not by the hour.”