ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This story was reported in collaboration with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.
Reporting Highlights
- Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.
- Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.
- Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.
Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.
In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”
There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.
Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”
Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.
The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish.