Stuart Thompson collected and analyzed data on thousands of Facebook posts for this article.
On the morning of January 6, 2021, Christopher Blair’s fake news empire was humming.
Mr Blair was earning up to $15,000 in some months posting fake stories on Facebook about the Democrats and the election, reaching millions of people each month.
But after a crowd 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 insurgency and tweaked its algorithm to limit the spread of political content, fake and otherwise. Mr. Blair attended his engagement.
“It just collapsed – everything political collapsed for about six months,” he said.
Today, however, Mr Blair has made a full recovery, and then some. His spoof posts — which he insists are satire aimed at mocking conservatives — are getting more interactions on Facebook than ever, up from 7.2 million interactions already this year compared to a million in all of 2021.
Mr Blair has survived Facebook’s tweaks by moving away from politicians and towards culture war issues such as Hollywood elites and social justice issues.
When Robert De Niro appeared outside a Manhattan courthouse last month to criticize former President Donald J. Trump, for example, Blair dismissed a false post that claimed a conservative actor had called him “horrible” and “disrespectful”. He received almost 20,000 shares.
Many writers like him – who publish falsehoods to marginalize websites and social media accounts in a bid for clicks that can translate into lucrative ad revenue – have also leaned into culture war issues. So far this year, only a quarter of Facebook content rated “fake” by PolitiFact, a fact-checking website, focused on politics or politicians, with nearly half focusing on topics such as transgender athletes, liberal celebrities or alternative health solutions.
The success of these posts underscores a growing reality on Facebook and similar platforms: fake news still finds an audience online.
The pivot was so successful that Mr Blair saw a number of competitors spring up, many also calling their posts “satire”. They have copied its content and used artificial intelligence tools to supercharge their work.
“After what happened on Jan. 6, there was some progress, and then almost immediately that progress was put on hold,” said Paul Barrett, associate director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which studies online disinformation. “I think we’re actually more vulnerable to it today than we were in the spring of 2021.”
A spokeswoman for Meta, which owns Facebook, responded by highlighting the company’s misinformation policy and its efforts to combat falsehoods by limiting the spread of certain low-quality content.
Survival on Facebook
Mr Blair, a 52-year-old former construction foreman, is an avowed liberal.
He does not see his work as fake news. He has long defended himself, including in profiles in the Washington Post and The Boston Globe, as a comedian who trolls conservative Facebook users into believing news they should clearly question. He compares his work to that of Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comic who often spoofs conservative Americans in an attempt to ridicule them. Mr Blair uses a little ‘satire’ tag on every picture he posts on Facebook.
But its headlines are often indistinguishable from many of the lies 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 purveyors, who usually only reveal that it’s satire in an obscure section of their Facebook pages, or sometimes leave it out altogether.
“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” said David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University who has studied disinformation. “Where there’s a gap in enforcement, that’s going to be a place where the activity will go.”
Facebook’s efforts to limit the spread of political content have left Mr Blair and his colleagues looking for a new approach.
“We killed Hillary Clinton every Saturday in the most ridiculous ways,” said Joe LaForme, a 48-year-old truck driver who identifies as a liberal and has contributed to Mr. Blair’s Facebook page. “You know, she would have been hit by a monster truck at a monster truck rally.”
“We stopped doing that,” he added, because of Facebook’s efforts to limit the spread of political content.
Mr Blair now posts dozens of false stories on the social network every week on his main account, which has more than 320,000 followers and more than 225,000 likes. He fills his seats with a colorful cast of celebrities: actors like Tim Allen and Whoopi Goldberg or musicians like Jason Aldean and Kid Rock. He often stages them in dramatic but entirely fictitious arguments about culture war issues. A post from April claiming Beyoncé was criticized for “playing dress-up” released country music received more than 50,000 shares and 28,000 comments.
“If it’s someone on the right, I reward them. If it’s someone on the left, I punish them,” Mr. Blair said in a telephone interview. “It’s my method.”
This was not the only pivot Mr Blair had to make. After Facebook began downgrading posts that linked to low-quality websites, Mr Blair began posting only images and memes. Now, when a post appears to be successful, it will add the link as a pinned comment.
“I know exactly what happened, in any case, and why,” Mr Blair said of the ups and downs of the Facebook post. “I’m constantly adapting.”
Those axes have rippled through 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 to groups full of conservatives, such as the fan pages of Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters, two right-wing anchors.
Many of the accounts have described themselves as news outlets. NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation on the Internet, identified 15 such accounts, with names like “Daily News” or “Breaking News USA,” that shared lies about companies such as Disney, Paramount, Nike and Tyson Foods .
“There’s just tons and tons and tons of headlines that come out every day,” said Coalter Palmer, an analyst at NewsGuard who conducted the survey. “It’s a lot of culture war stuff.”
Competing against AI
Today, Mr Blair faces stiffer competition from pages that use AI tools to write fake stories about the celebrities and culture war issues he has highlighted. NewsGuard has identified nearly 1,000 websites that use artificial intelligence tools to write unreliable news articles, up from 138 a year ago.
This contest features SpaceXMania, a competitive network of Facebook pages with at least 890,000 followers.
“My material, my cast of characters, my keywords, my hot buttons — they’re taking it all,” Mr. Blair said of the recent plagiarism. “They put it in an AI program and it just makes headlines. There is nothing original about any of this.”
When Mr. Blair recently wrote a false story about Harrison Butker, a National Football League player who gained national attention for his conservative views on women, SpaceXMania quickly followed suit with its own stories about Mr. Butcher — earning hundreds of thousands more comments than Mr. Blair.
The operator behind SpaceXMania is based in Pakistan and identifies himself as Shabayer, according to Facebook messages with Mr Blair shared with The New York Times. He cited Mr Blair as a “role model” for his start-up, according to the messages.
“I’m a liberal social justice troll warrior serving up satirical nonsense with a mission,” Mr Blair said. “Selling Fake News to American Conservatives from Pakistan for Profit.”
A representative for SpaceXMania initially responded to an email, but stopped responding after a reporter sent questions.
Many of the SpaceXMania articles were written entirely by AI tools like ChatGPT, according to a Times analysis that used software to detect AI-written text.
“He’s probably the most efficient user of my stuff,” Mr Blair said. “It’s trying to escape AI, but it never will.”
