A disinformation campaign through a Facebook page was detected in North Carolina

A Facebook page that was supposedly sharing local news in North Carolina was exposed as a disinformation campaign. The Administrators of the page were allegedly students at North Carolina State University, but the University denied the existence of such a project within their student body. A spokesperson for Facebook reported that they had taken down the page because it violated their company policies. Expert Claire Wardle and director of First Draft said that the page had all the hallmarks of disinformation and that it was even curated to fool some of the mechanisms created by Facebook to reduce disinformation on the platform. Wardle highlighted the importance of educating users since “the fight in 2020 ahead of the US election is going to be at local level in battleground states such as North Carolina.”