Stuart Thompson collected and analyzed data from thousands of Facebook posts for this article.
On the morning of January 6, 2021, Christopher Blair’s fake news empire was going strong.
Blair had been earning up to $15,000 in some months by posting fake stories on Facebook about Democrats and the election, reaching millions of people each month.
But after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol, his growing business came to an abrupt halt. Facebook appeared to recognize its own role in fomenting an insurrection and changed its algorithm to limit the spread of political content, false or not. Blair watched as his commitment stalled.
“It just collapsed, everything political collapsed for about six months,” he said.
Today, however, Blair has made a full recovery, and then some. His fake posts, which he insists are satire intended to mock conservatives, are receiving more interactions on Facebook than ever, rising to 7.2 million interactions already this year compared to one million in all of 2021.
Blair has survived Facebook’s adjustments by moving away from politicians and toward culture war issues like Hollywood elites and social justice issues.
When Robert De Niro appeared in front of a Manhattan court last month to criticize former President Donald J. Trump, for example, Blair published a false post claiming that a conservative actor had called him “horrible” and “godless.” He received almost 20,000 shares.
Many writers like him, who post falsehoods on fringe websites and social media accounts in an attempt to get clicks that can translate into profitable advertising revenue, have also gravitated toward culture war themes. So far this year, only a quarter of Facebook content that has been published rated “false” by PolitiFacta fact-checking website, focused on politics or politicians, with nearly half focusing on topics like transgender athletes, liberal celebrities, or health alternatives.
The success of those posts underscores a growing reality on Facebook and similar platforms: Fake news still finds an audience online.
The spin has been so successful that Blair has seen a number of competitors emerge, many of whom also label his posts “satire.” They copied her content and used artificial intelligence tools to enhance her work.
“After what happened on January 6, there were some advances, and then almost immediately those advances receded,” said Paul Barrett, a law professor at New York University who studies online misinformation. “I think we’re actually more vulnerable to this today than we were in the spring of 2021.”
A spokeswoman for Meta, which owns Facebook, responded by highlighting the disinformation policy and their efforts to combat falsehoods by limiting the spread of some low quality content.
Surviving on Facebook
Blair, a 52-year-old former construction foreman, is an avowed liberal.
He doesn’t see his work as fake news. He has long defended himself, including in profiles on Washington Post and The Boston Globe, like a comedian tricking conservative Facebook users into believing news they should clearly question. He compares his work to that of Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian who frequently misleads conservative Americans in an attempt to ridicule them. Blair uses a small “satire” tag on every image he posts on Facebook.
But their headlines are often indistinguishable from many of the falsehoods posted on the social network.
Facebook allows satirical pages whether or not they use a “satire” tag. But the term has also become a popular defense for fake news operators, who typically reveal they are satire only in a dark section of their Facebook pages, or sometimes omit it altogether.
“It’s a game of cat and mouse,” said David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University who has studied misinformation. “Wherever there is a gap in law enforcement, that will be a place where activity will be directed.”
Facebook’s attempts to limit the spread of political content left Blair and his colleagues searching for a new approach.
“We used to kill Hillary Clinton every Saturday in the most ridiculous ways,” said Joe LaForm, a 48-year-old truck driver who identifies as a liberal and has contributed to Blair’s Facebook page. “You know, she would get hit by a monster truck at a monster truck rally.”
“We stopped doing that,” he added, due to Facebook’s attempts to limit the spread of political content.
Blair now posts dozens of fake social media stories each week on her main account, which has more than 320,000 followers and more than 225,000 likes. She fills her posts with a colorful cast of celebrities: actors like Tim Allen and Whoopi Goldberg or musicians like Jason Aldean and Kid Rock. She often features them in dramatic but completely fictional disputes over culture war issues. A post from April, which claimed that Beyoncé was criticized for “dressing up” when posting country music, received more than 50,000 shares and 28,000 comments.
“If it’s someone from the right, I reward them. If it’s someone from the left, I punish them,” Blair said in a telephone interview. “It’s my method.”
This was not the only turn Blair had to make. After Facebook The ranking of posts that linked to low-quality websites began to drop., Blair began posting only images and memes. Now, when a post appears to be a hit, she will add the link as a pinned comment.
“I know exactly what happened, in every situation, and why,” Blair said of the ups and downs of posting on Facebook. “I’m constantly adapting.”
Those spins have spread throughout the industry, with similar falsehoods appearing on Facebook pages with even larger audiences, such as “Donald Trump is my president,” which has more than 1.8 million followers. Some posts are shared directly with groups full of conservatives, such as the fan pages of Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters, two right-wing hosts.
Many of the accounts have described themselves as media outlets. NewsGuardA company that tracks online misinformation identified 15 such accounts, with names like “Daily News” or “Breaking News USA,” that shared falsehoods about companies like Disney, Paramount, Nike and Tyson Foods.
“Tons and tons of headlines are published every day,” said Coalter Palmer, a NewsGuard analyst who conducted the research. “It’s a lot of culture war stuff.”
Compete against AI
Today, Blair faces tougher competition from sites that use artificial intelligence tools to write fake stories about the celebrities and culture war issues she has highlighted. NewsGuard has identified almost 1,000 websites who use artificial intelligence tools to write unreliable news articles, up from 138 a year ago.
That competition includes SpaceXMania, a competing network of Facebook pages with at least 890,000 followers.
“My material, my cast of characters, my keywords, my hot spots — they take everything,” Blair said of the recent plagiarism. “They put it in an artificial intelligence program and it just generates headlines. “There is nothing original about any of this.”
When Blair recently wrote a fake story about Harrison Butker, a National Football League player who attracted national attention for his conservative views on women, SpaceXMania quickly followed suit with its own stories about Butker, garnering hundreds of thousands more comments than Mr. Blair.
The operator behind SpaceXMania is based in Pakistan and goes by the name Shabayer, according to Facebook messages with Blair that he shared with The New York Times. According to the messages, he has cited Blair as a “role model” for his new company.
“I’m a liberal social justice warrior troll serving satirical nonsense with a mission,” Blair said. “He is selling fake news to Pakistani American conservatives for profit.”
A SpaceXMania representative initially responded to an email, but stopped responding after a reporter submitted questions.
Many of the SpaceXMania articles were written entirely by artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, according to a Times analysis that used software to detect text written by AI.
“He’s probably the most effective at using my stuff,” Mr. Blair said. “He’s trying to get away from the AI, but he never will.”
