After CBS announced it was canceling Late Night with Stephen Colbert, dozens of Facebook pages began pumping out hoaxes and AI slop about the departing host.
A page called Rachel Unfiltered generated over 200,000 reactions, comments, and shares for a false claim that Colbert and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow plan to launch a new show. Other pages spread a hoax about Colbert starting a show with Rep. Jasmine Crockett and the false claim he’d adopted “abandoned” twins. Other pages racked up engagement by posting static videos that showed a single image with no sound, a deceptive tactic that exploits the popularity of video content on Facebook.
Colbert is just the latest obsession for the loose network of pages, which appears to be primarily based in Vietnam. Since January, it has published hoaxes and AI slop about public figures across hundreds of Facebook pages with tens of millions of followers, according to reporting by Indicator and research by disinformation expert Marc Owen Jones.
The operation’s goal appears to be to generate engagement that drives clicks to affiliated, ad-funded websites. One of its pages scored a huge hit with a static video that repeats a false rumor about Vanessa Bryant, the widow of basketball star Kobe Bryant, and that added a link to a related article in the comments. The post generated over 36 million “views” in four days:
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