It turns out Colin wasn’t the only user affiliated with Rumble that’s pushing the convoy on Facebook. Though, the user that shared it, a woman from Calgary named Zuzana Janosova-Den Boer, is both the admin of the group and, according to her Twitter, on the board of the directors for the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta.īut the Rumble connection with all of this wasn’t random. Unhinged Canadian nonsense, sure, but also it was shared by a real person. The second biggest referral to Irnie’s video was Ted Nugent, so not really mystery what’s going on there, but the third biggest was from the group “Alberta Separatism,” which is a community with 43,000 members dedicated to the province of Alberta succeeding from Canada. For what it’s worth, Colin’s video does have a COVID misinfo warning on it, which is good, I guess.

Colin’s post that linked to Irnie’s video was a live video, which is the new algorithm hack that the gross food magicians are using, as well.

The top referral to the video was a page called “La revue de presse de J.Colin,” which is run by a right-wing French-language influencer named J.Colin who has a show on Rumble, the conservative YouTube clone that’s been trying to poach Joe Rogan from Spotify. Irnie’s video seemed like the more obscure piece of content of the two videos, so I fed that into CrowdTangle, hoping to get a deeper look at what kind of users are sharing this stuff. Irnie’s video was watched 1.4 million times. The second most-shared YouTube video on the list is titled, “Freedom Convoy ADDRESS TO THE NATION - Feb.6, 2022 ‘State of Emergency Update’ | IrnieracingNews” and it was posted by a YouTube user named Marcel Irnie, a “superbike racer” who vlogs. The most-shared of these links is a video titled, “Truckers Convoy: Why The Mainstream Media Blackout?!” and it’s by a little-known vlogger named… Russell Brand, the British “comedian”. YouTube links including the search term “convoy” are responsible for almost 3 million engagements over the last month. But, as you can see above, the bulk of the convoy content on Facebook is actually YouTube content. The most-shared piece of convoy content overall right now is a Daily Wire story titled, “DeSantis Announces Florida Will Investigate GoFundMe After Company Shut Down Freedom Convoy” published on February 5th, which has 265,000 total engagements on the platform. From what I can see, it’s a movement built almost entirely by sharing video links.Īccording to Buzzsumo, a large chunk of convoy content on Facebook is coming from the usual suspects - right-wing publishers like Breitbart, Daily Wire, and Rebel News. It doesn’t give you a complete view of everything on Facebook, but combined with CrowdTangle, another social analytics dashboard which is better at monitoring the content that Facebook pages and groups are sharing, I was able to piece together exactly what convoy supporters are doing on Facebook right now. I did some analysis with Buzzsumo, a social analytics dashboard that is especially good at tracking third-party links being shared on Facebook. So I decided to dig into convoy Facebook content, just to get a sense of how real this whole thing is. Also, very fishy! But there really aren’t any conservative movements that don’t include hackers, security breaches, the exploitation of senior citizens, and other assorted grifters. (Boomers are weird and obsessive posters.)Ĭoloring in more details, however, Grid News published a great investigation yesterday which found that five groups with a combined 340,000 members were all administered by a same account - one belonging to a woman from Missouri who claims that someone hacked her account and is now using it to run groups involved with the right-wing Canadian truckers protest. It’s definitely fishy, but, one of the problems with proving that astroturfing around right-wing movements is happening is that conservative internet users tend to look like bots or sock puppets from afar.

Astroturfing is what platforms call “inauthentic coordinated behavior” and in the case of the freedom convoy, according to tweets from Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist at the University of Maryland, many of the groups and pages currently pushing the convoy were all started on the same day and basically immediately filled up with thousands of users. On Monday, I wrote about how much astroturfing appeared to be happening inside of the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” movement on Facebook.

Ifood monark