A
Washington Times analysis of the official Obamacare Facebook page found that 60 percent of the page’s 226,838 comments generated between September 2012 and early October 2014 actually came from fewer than 100 unique profiles.
“Many of those profiles belong to just one person who created multiple aliases or personas to widen her influence and multiply her voice,” according to the Times, which conducted the analysis with an outside data analytics teams.
The page, which currently has 771,871 “likes,” is controlled by
Organizing for Action, President Barack Obama’s former political action committee-turned-nonprofit. The group updates it daily to promote the healthcare legislation.
The group declined to comment to the Times about whether it paid people to post on the site.
In October 2013, the
Los Angeles Times reported that Organizing for Action officials were asking supporters to tweet about Obamacare and to “like” the Obamacare page on Facebook.
Obamacare supporter Cindi Huynh of California posted an average 59 times a day on the site in 60 days, the Washington Times reports.
"She posted only during work hours — as is the trend of the top 25 posters on the site — and never on weekends," the Times said
Canadian resident Wanda Milner posted 4,695 times during the period evaluated. Milner denied having any aliases and said she was not paid for her posts. She’s merely “passionate about the issue” and wanted to get involved, she said.
A North Dakota woman, Eileen A. Wolf, posted 5,870 times, including 325 posts in 60 days, the Times reports. Wolf also used her husband’s account to post under his name.
This summer, a California computer security company found that nearly half of Obama’s 43 million Twitter followers appeared to be fake. His Twitter feed is also handled by Organizing for Action, who would not comment on the allegation.
Social media robots, known as socialbots, are becoming increasingly popular, according to the Times. Software programmers build the socialbot and political campaigns use it to "block Twitter feeds, build support for otherwise unpopular opinions and create a flood of content for their own agendas that hopefully will end up in someone’s Facebook or Twitter feed and then be liked or reposted by a real individual."
Wellesley College computer science professor P. Takis Metaxas described the phenomenon as "hijacking social media to effectively attack the democratic process."
Facebook last year estimated that between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of its 1.35 billion monthly users were fake. Twitter estimates that fewer than 5 percent — or about 12 million — of its 240 million users represent fake or alias accounts.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.