Stuart Thompson collected and analyzed data on thousands of Facebook posts for this article.
On the morning of January 6, 2021, Christopher Blair's fake news empire was running smoothly.
Blair reached millions of people each month by posting false news about the Democratic Party and the election on Facebook, making as much as $15,000 in one month.
But his growing business came to an abrupt halt after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Facebook, seemingly acknowledging its role in inciting the riots, tweaked its algorithms to limit the spread of political content, fake or not. Blair saw his engagement plummet.
“It just collapsed. Everything politically collapsed for about six months,” he said.
But now Mr Blair is fully recovered and even better: False posts he claims are satirical and mocking Conservatives are attracting more attention than ever on Facebook, having already soared to 7.2 million so far this year, compared with 1 million for all of 2021.
Blair weathered the Facebook adjustment by pivoting away from politics and toward culture war topics like Hollywood elites and social justice issues.
For example, when Robert De Niro appeared before a Manhattan courthouse last month to criticize former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Blair rushed to publish a false post alleging that the conservative actor had called Mr. De Niro “horrible” and “ungodly.” The post was shared nearly 20,000 times.
Many of the writers like him who post false stories on fringe websites and social media accounts to drive clicks and advertising revenue also lean into culture war topics: So far this year, only a quarter of Facebook content rated “false” by the fact-checking website PolitiFact was about politics or politicians, while nearly half was about issues like transgender athletes, liberal celebrities or alternative medicine.
The success of these posts highlights a growing reality on Facebook and similar platforms: fake news still finds an audience online.
The shift has been so successful that Blair has seen a host of competitors emerge, many of which are calling their posts “satire,” copying his content and using artificial intelligence tools to enhance their own posts.
“There was some progress after the events of January 6, but then that progress was quickly reversed,” said Paul Barrett, associate director of New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, who studies online disinformation. “I actually think we're more vulnerable to this now than we were in the spring of 2021.”
A spokesperson for Meta, which is owned by Facebook, responded by highlighting the company's misinformation policy and efforts to combat false information by limiting the spread of certain low-quality content.
Surviving on Facebook
Mr Blair, 52, a former construction foreman, describes himself as a liberal.
Blair doesn't consider his work fake news; he has long defended himself as a comedian who goads conservative Facebook users into believing clearly questionable news, including through profiles in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He likens his work to that of Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian who frequently mocks conservative Americans. Blair puts a small “satire” label on every image he posts to Facebook.
But his headlines are often indistinguishable from the many falsehoods posted on social networks.
Facebook allows satirical pages, whether or not they use the “satire” label, but the term has also become a popular defense for fake news operators, who typically identify themselves as satirical only in a discreet section of their Facebook pages, or sometimes omit it entirely.
“It's a game of cat and mouse,” said David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University who studies disinformation. “If there are loopholes in enforcement, that's where activity will go.”
Facebook's attempts to limit the spread of political content have prompted Blair and his contributors to seek a new approach.
“We were killing Hillary Clinton every Saturday in the most ridiculous way,” said Joe LaForme, a 48-year-old truck driver who identifies as a liberal and contributes to Blair's Facebook page. “She was being run over by a monster truck at a monster truck rally.”
“We stopped doing that because Facebook is trying to limit the spread of political content,” he added.
Blair currently posts dozens of false stories to social networks every week on his main account, which has more than 320,000 followers and 225,000 likes. The posts feature a wide variety of celebrities, including actors such as Tim Allen and Whoopi Goldberg, and musicians such as Jason Aldean and Kid Rock. They often stage dramatic but completely fictitious feuds around the culture wars. One April post, which claimed Beyoncé was criticized for “dressing up” by releasing country music, was shared more than 50,000 times and generated 28,000 comments.
“If they're on the right, I reward them. If they're on the left, I punish them,” Blair said in a telephone interview. “That's the way I operate.”
This isn't the only pivot Blair has had to make. After Facebook began down-ranking posts that linked to low-quality websites, Blair started posting only images and memes. Now, if a post is likely to be a hit, he adds the link as a pinned comment.
“In every situation, I know exactly what happened and why it happened. I'm always adjusting,” Blair said of the ebbs and flows of his Facebook posts.
This shift in policy has rippled across the industry, with similar falsehoods appearing on Facebook pages with larger audiences, such as “Donald Trump is My President,” which has more than 1.8 million followers. Some of the posts are being shared directly to groups filled with conservatives, including fan pages for right-wing anchors Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters.
Many of these accounts describe themselves as news organizations: NewsGuard, a company that tracks online disinformation, identified 15 accounts with names like “Daily News” and “Breaking News USA” that are sharing false information about companies like Disney, Paramount, Nike and Tyson Foods.
“There's a ton of headlines being generated every day,” said Coulter Palmer, an analyst at NewsGuard, which conducted the survey. “There's a ton of culture war stories.”
Racing with AI
Now Blair faces stiff competition from websites that use AI tools to write fake stories about the public figures and culture war issues he covers: NewsGuard has identified nearly 1,000 websites that use AI tools to write unreliable news articles, up from 138 a year ago.
The competition also includes SpaceXMania, a competing network of Facebook pages with at least 890,000 followers.
“My material, my characters, my keywords, my hot buttons, they take it all,” Blair said of the latest plagiarism. “They just feed it into an AI program and it spits out a headline. There's nothing original about it.”
When Blair recently wrote a false article about NFL player Harrison Butker, who has attracted national attention for his conservative views on women, SpaceX enthusiasts quickly followed up with their own article about Butker, garnering hundreds of thousands more comments than Blair.
The operator of SpaceXMania is based in Pakistan and goes by the name Shabayah, according to Facebook messages between him and Blair shared by The New York Times, in which he cited Blair as a “role model” for his startup.
“I'm a liberal troll and social justice warrior who spreads satirical nonsense on a mission,” Blair said. “He's peddling fake news from Pakistan to American conservatives for profit.”
A SpaceXMania representative initially responded to the email but stopped responding after a reporter sent him questions.
A Times analysis, using software to detect AI-written text, found that many of the SpaceXMania articles were written entirely by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT.
“He's probably using mine most effectively,” Blair said. “He's trying to get away from the AI, but he's never going to get away from it.”