A politically conservative mom from north carolina, from wilmington, north carolina, she expressed in her facebook profile an interest in politics, and parenting and christianity and followed just a few other facebook accounts, including fox news, and president trump: and that s it. just sort of a bare bones profile, and this fake account, this carol smith account never expressed any interest in conspiracy theories of any kind. but nevertheless it only took two days that facebook recommended that that person, carol smith should join groups dedicated to qanon, that democrats are a secret cabal of satan worshipping pedophiles and will be executed in a mass public execution at guantanamo, really, carol, so soon, and even though the researcher running the fake account did not engage with those groups, with those
Followed just a few other facebook accounts, including fox news and president trump, and that s it. just sort of a bare bones profile, and this fake account, this carol smith account never expressed any interest in conspiracy theories of any kind. but nevertheless it only took two days that facebook recommended that that person, care smith, should join groups dedicated to qanon, that democrats are a secret cabal of satan worshipping pedophiles and will be executed in a mass public execution at guantanamo, really, carol, so soon, and even though the researcher running the fake account did not engage with those groups, with those recommendations to join the qanon groups, within a week, carol smith s feed was filled with groups and pages that violated facebook s own rules because they were filled with hate speech and disinformation. that researcher published the story of that dummy account s journey in a 2019 internal report of facebook called