Though the official Obamacare Facebook page looks in demand and engaging with users, a closer investigation by the Washington Times proved that the page’s popularity had been falsely inflated.
According to the paper’s analysis, conducted with an outside data analytics team, 60 percent of the site’s 226,838 comments generated from September 2012 to early October 2014 can be attributed to fewer than 100 unique profiles. Of those 100, a significant number were multiple profiles and aliases belonging to an even smaller number of people.
The top poster is a California woman named Cindi Huynh. The Washington Times found that she posted about 59 times a day on the site.
And that’s just on one account. She told the Times that she has at least four Facebook profiles that she uses to promote the law.
She is a supporter of Obamacare and the California Democratic Party. Though Huynh was approached to become an Obamacare patient advocate, she said she felt she could better spread the message online.
Another woman, Wanda Milner, posted 4,695 during the studied period. Milner is Canadian, but told the Washington Times that she is “passionate” about the issue. Eileen A. Wolf, from North Dakota, posted 5,870 times in the entire period evaluated. She uses the account of her husband, James Wolf, to post as well.
There are some anti-Obamacare profiles that also post prolifically, but it skews heavily toward the pro-Obamacare side, the investigation found.
None of the top posters contacted by the Washington Times said they were paid for their posts.
The official Obamacare page is controlled by Organizing for Action, the president’s former political action committee and now a nonprofit group. It has more than 771,000 Facebook “likes” and is updated every day with some form of promotion for the healthcare law.
While inflating the popularity of site is seemingly harmless, the reason it matters is because it impacts how information about Obamacare appears in Google searches. Basically, these few posters are able to drive the page to be a top result when people search for information about the law, even though there is a distinct ideological bias.
“There have been smear campaigns since Adams and Jefferson in the early 1800s and we’re seeing the same thing here, with just a new set of tools,” Richard Levick, chairman and chief executive officer of communications firm Levick, told the Washington Times.
“Where do undecided voters, journalists go to get their information? Google. So controlling the search engine is hugely important. We need to know who is our audience, how do we reach them, how do we engage them, and then, how do we control the territory?”
P. Takis Metaxas, a computer science professor at Wellesley College who studied social media manipulation in the 2012 election cycle, told the paper that this is a way for small groups of people to “effectively attack the democratic process.”
“As social animals, we are influenced by our peers’ opinions in many ways. In our research we have seen political zealots interested in the electoral results, time and time again,” he said. “They do not want to let chance, or their enemies, determine an electoral outcome. So they try to create content that would fool social networks into promoting their own candidates and, in some cases, into spreading lies to the detriment of their opponents.”
