The Resisters page existed for more than a year and described itself as “online and offline feminist activism against fascism,” according to Facebook and researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which analyzes disinformation online and works with Facebook.
You may have guessed the post was from a fake page if you looked closely at the language: “Girls make rules and you follow them. If you don’t like it you live. End of the story.”
Broken English is not a sure sign that a post is part of an influence operation. But grammatical errors were a common trait among the Russian ads Facebook disclosed in 2017 — particularly the misuse of “a” and “the,” which don’t exist in the Russian language.
Although Facebook has still not tied this page to Russia, the language used in its posts and several other factors suggest a connection. For one, a Russian account that Facebook removed in 2017 had been set as an administrator of the Resisters page, though “for only seven minutes,” Facebook said. Before being shut down, a Russian account had also shared an event created by the Resisters page with its followers.
And on Twitter, an account with the name “ReSisters” and the handle “@resisteszunion” was identified this year as one created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency.
The page’s most notable activity was an effort to organize a counterprotest to a conservative rally. It created an Aug. 10 event titled “No Unite the Right 2 — DC” to protest a planned white supremacist rally in Washington. The page coordinated with administrators of other Facebook pages, and persuaded five of them to share the event with their followers.
Facebook removed the event page before the rally, and informed 3,200 users who either expressed interest in the counterprotest or said they would attend about the suspicious activity behind it.
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