Readers of this blog will be familiar with Charlie Kirk, the Trump wonder boy who co-founded Liberty University’s Falkirk Center and is the president of an organization he co-founded called Turning Point USA.
The self-proclaimed evangelical Christian is known for tweets like this:
It now seems like Kirk and his gang have created fake pro-Trump accounts on Facebook.
Here is The Washington Post:
Facebook said Thursday that it will permanently ban from its platform an Arizona-based marketing firm running what experts described as a domestic “troll farm” following an investigation of the deceptive behavior prompted by a Washington Post article last month.
The firm, Rally Forge, was “working on behalf” of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA, the prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix, Facebook concluded. The inquiry led to the removal of 200 accounts and 55 pages on Facebook, as well as 76 Instagram accounts — many of them operated by teenagers in the Phoenix area.
The fake accounts, some with either cartoonlike Bitmoji profiles or images generated by artificial intelligence, complemented the real accounts of users involved in the effort, which largely entailed leaving comments sympathetic to President Trump and other conservative causes across social media.
Facebook stopped short of penalizing Turning Point USA or its president, Charlie Kirk, 26, saying it could not determine the extent to which the group’s leaders were aware of the specific violations carried out on their behalf, such as the use of fake accounts. Twitter also acted against the operation on Thursday, suspending 262 accounts involved in “platform manipulation and spam” — in addition to the several hundred accounts already removed last month following questions from The Post — but similarly did not boot Turning Point USA, a tax-exempt nonprofit group founded in 2012, or its affiliates from the online platform.
The decision not to punish the group financing the activity drew criticism from experts in disinformation, who said the limited action would signal to well-heeled organizations that they can get away with social media manipulation so long as they farm the operation out to vendors.
Read the rest here.
Kirk’s religion is essentially Trumpism. Yet he regularly speaks at evangelical megachurches on the weekends. For example, a Chattanooga church turned all of their weekend services over to Kirk. The same church is running a multi-week course on “Christian civics” A good place to start: don’t invite Charlie Kirk to your church.