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A duo of father-son fake news editors promoting the military and a social media consultant connected to Trump are linked to pages promoting the idea of an American civil war with material presented in a way that appears to be an effort to circumvent the fact of Facebook: control system.
Comments on his Facebook pages and other materials obtained by The Guardian show that some grassroots Donald Trump supporters are enthusiastically receiving the message that they must prepare for violence against their perceived political enemies in November.
The network is comprised of websites owned and operated by Dino Porrazzo Sr and Dino Porrazzo Jr, whose company, AFF Media, is based in Pinon Hills in California. The pair have been running right-wing websites since 2013 at the latest, according to DNS website records.
The Porrazzos now run a network of websites that enthusiastically promote Trump and far-right anti-government militias like The Three Percent, offering distorted versions of current events. One of his Facebook pages, “Prepare to Take America Back” (PTTAB) at the time of the report had 794,876 followers. Analysis with the Crowdtangle social media metrics tool shows that over the past three months PTTAB’s posts have been shared over 141,000 times and, on average, 9,600 times a week.
At the time, the header of the page featured the logo of the Tres Percentros, a decentralized group that the ADL calls a “wing of the militia movement”; a group of men armed with tactical equipment; and a modified copy of the United States presidential seal.
Overall, the page promotes conspiracy theories and criminal indictments about Democratic Party politicians, liberal celebrities, and left-wing protesters, some of which, such as persistent claims that Hillary Clinton will be arrested imminently, overlap with aspects of the so-called theory of the “QAnon” conspiracy. movement.
The page makes free use of political memes, but many posts link to a small group of right-wing websites designed to appear as media. Increasingly, over the course of 2020, the page has been warning of stolen elections and suggesting that this will lead to a civil war.
Repeatedly in September, the page linked to a story on the Right Wing Tribune website, titled “The Radical Left Prepares for ‘Mass Public Unrest’, ‘Political Apocalypse’ and a Possible Civil War should be expected if Biden loses. [Opinion]”, With Facebook captions that include” the left wants war. “
In fact, the story had a limited basis, as various progressive groups had met in early September to discuss the prospect of civil unrest and political violence after the elections in the belief that the violence they anticipated would come from supporters of Trump and the far right.
However, the Right Wing Tribune article concluded with a conspiracy theory: “These groups are heavily focused on removing President Trump from office, as well as different scenarios leading to a second revolution in which they control our nation as a “New America.” “
Similarly distorted stories warning of a “white house siege” dot the page throughout September, and warnings of a post-election civil war have been posted over the past year.
Last November, the page linked to a site called Flag and Cross, and a story that he described as an “excellent opinion piece,” titled “Winning the New Civil War (OPINION).”
The article claims, based on anti-fascist protests and comments from Democratic politicians, that “we have a lot of strong indications that this is a hot war.”
The transparency page for PTTAB discloses that PTTAB is managed by Southern California-based AFF Media Inc and that Vici Media Group is “associated with this page.”
According to California records, AFF Media was incorporated on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, January 20, 2017; in other documents, Dino Porrazzo Jr is listed as CEO and CFO, and Dino Porrazzo Sr as secretary. But The Guardian has found that the Porrazzos are more involved in running a dizzying array of interconnected sites and social media pages. Annenberg’s public policy initiative lists two of its websites in its “Disinformation Directory” of “websites that have posted misleading content.”
One of the sites listed is Right Wing Tribune. But all other sites linked to the PTTAB Facebook page also appear to belong to AFF, with a similar design, shared signature, and shared source code.
The Porrazzos have previously been reported to have ties to the Tres Percentros, a decentralized national militia movement that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as anti-government extremists.
Your online empire is great. Another Parazzo site, Flag and Cross, is listed as the administrator of another Facebook page, the United States Constitution, which has 1.2 million followers.
A Guardian review of the content on that site shows a similar pattern of links to Porrazzo-connected websites and civil war warnings dating back to the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Becca Lewis researches extremism and misinformation online at Stanford University. In a telephone conversation, she said that the page and associated websites represented a sophisticated effort to circumvent Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.
“It seems they are being very strategic in their messages not to be closed off,” Lewis said, adding that viewing the ostentatious labeling of the opinion as an effort to evade fact-checking is “an absolutely reasonable assumption.”
In June, Heated reported that climate change deniers were exploiting the same loophole to “make any climate misinformation ineligible for fact-checking by considering it” opinion. “In August, NBC reported that Facebook had systematically relaxed its rules. fact-checking for conservative media and personalities.
In a phone conversation, Dino Porrazzo Jr claimed that PTTAB had had “zero fact-checking violations”, and characterized its websites as “fact-based opinion websites”. When asked if the facts were verified, Porrazzo said “no” but added: “I don’t work at Facebook.” When asked if he thought a civil war was really coming, Porrazzo accused The Guardian of “writing a successful article to get me off Facebook,” and then ended the conversation.
Facebook Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Porrazzos also have ties to Republican officials.
The company’s registered agent is an elected official in California, Ensen Mason, who was elected auditor-controller of San Bernardino County in California as a nonpartisan candidate, but is listed as a member of the San Bernardino Republican Party.
However, in an email, Ensen Mason said that in relation to the Porrazzos, the role of their accounting firm “is strictly limited to accounting services and the registered agent.”
Meanwhile, the Vici Media Group is led by Patrick Mauldin, who is a social media consultant for the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians, and his brother, Ryan.
The company was hired in 2016 by former Trump campaign manager and recently resigned campaign consultant Brad Parscale to be part of the team widely credited with Trump’s election victory. In June, Patrick Mauldin was identified as the creator of a fake Joe Biden site that was compared in New York Times reports to “disinformation spread by Russian trolls.”
In an email, Ryan Mauldin disavowed the editorial production of Porrazzos, writing: “Site administrators hired Vici Media Group for a small non-content related project.”
Mauldin added: “We have no opinion on the content posted by the various sites or the comments made on that content. We are not working for the Trump campaign. “
Mauldin did not immediately respond to attempts to further clarify the nature of his work for the Porrazzos and to clarify a New York Times report as recent as June 2020 that said Patrick Mauldin was in an advance for the Trump campaign and considered a “rising star”. ”.
Porrazzo declined to specify the nature of AFF’s relationship with Vici Media Group.
Meanwhile, the content on Porrazzo’s pages seems to trigger extreme responses from users. Hundreds of user comments on the page’s posts suggest the use of violence against perceived political enemies. In a Sept. 5 post that links to a Right Wing Tribune article suggesting that Democrats will foment civil war if Biden loses, one user commented, “A brief civil war with Democrats and those who support socialist policies will contribute to go a long way towards helping Make America Great again. “
Another connects the civil war with his belief that a loss of Trump is impossible, writing “Yes [Biden] wins, it will be due to fraud on an industrial scale, and the lesson to be taught for that will not necessarily be less industrial. “
Many welcome the prospect of an armed conflict; one writes, “Okay, open season against Democrats!” Another murder defendant, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a positive example, writing: “I think there will be more whining, crying, rioting, looting and lots of Kyles protecting their cities, towns and neighborhoods.”
When asked to comment on the apparent scope of the site and the nature of its community, Lewis, the extremism researcher, said: “This is not a dark corner of the internet, this is not something fringe, it is mainstream Republicans who they’re stoking this. “
On the links to the Trump campaign, he said that the distorted content and violent comments from users formed a kind of “feedback loop”, and that “Trump and his campaign staff have been masters at exploiting these feedback loops.” .
Meanwhile, on Tuesday night, following The Guardian’s outreach to the Porrazzos and Facebook that day, Dino Porrazzo announced on Twitter that “I HAD TO DELETE SOME ARTICLES I WRITTEN TODAY BECAUSE THEY WERE CONSIDERED FALSE BY BASEMENT LIBERAL FACT CHECKERS ”.
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