Profile of Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who catalogues questionable Facebook Pages, some with millions of followers and links to Russia and Iran
Kris Goldsmith has become the cybersleuth for the Vietnam Veterans of America, hunting fake Facebook pages that sow discord and often have roots overseas Tweets: @dnvolz , @carter_pe , @mattyglesias , @zeynep , @kevinroose , @dseetharaman , @craigsilverman , and @dseetharaman Tweets: Dustin Volz / @dnvolz : New: Kris Goldsmith spends up to 40 hours a week hunting fake Facebook pages that target military veterans like himself. Dozens of pages he has tracked have been suspended, including Vets Before Illegals, which until last week had 1.4 million followers. https://www.wsj.com/... Phillip Carter / @carter_pe : Army veteran Kris Goldsmith (@KrisGoldsmith85) has made it his mission to hunt fake Facebook pages that target military veterans like himself in order to sow political discord http://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ @dnvolz @bkesling Matthew Yglesias / @mattyglesias : It's too bad Facebook doesn't have enough free cash flow to hire someone to do this work. http://twitter.com/... Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : “He was seeking last year to gauge the popularity of the Facebook page for his employer, Vietnam Veterans of America. The first listing was an impostor account called ‘Vietnam Vets of America’ that had stolen his group's logo and had more than twice as many followers.” http://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : Something's off when an unpaid vet has to do a $500 billion company's work for it. http://twitter.com/... Deepa Seetharaman / @dseetharaman : He's found about 100 questionable pages with millions of followers; two dozen have been deleted so far. He keeps extensive notes & spreadsheets on how pages might be connected & their possible origin. https://www.wsj.com/... Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : Another person who does not work at Facebook but whose job now involves policing Facebook. https://twitter.com/... Deepa Seetharaman / @dseetharaman : Great story from @bkesling + @dnvolz about an army veteran who trawls Facebook for fake pages + accounts related to veterans — with very little support from the company. https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Goldsmith's one-man operation is the sharpest case study in a pattern the coverage has been building since August, when BuzzFeed reported two volunteers had reported roughly 2,000 fake accounts posing as US military in their spare time and questioned whether Facebook's own tools would ever catch them. What changed with this profile is scale and attribution: Goldsmith tracks about 100 questionable Pages for the Vietnam Veterans of America, keeps spreadsheets on each, and some carry links to Russia and Iran — foreign information operations wearing veteran-community branding.
First-order effects
- Facebook has suspended dozens of Pages Goldsmith tracked, including Vets Before Illegals with its roughly 1.4 million followers — an enforcement outcome driven by a volunteer's spreadsheet rather than the platform's own detection.
Second-order effects
- The profile sharpens criticism that Facebook provides little support to volunteers doing its integrity work, pressure that compounds alongside reporting on the company's failure to police identity-fraud accounts using other people's photos.
Third-order effects
- If platform detection stays this dependent on outsiders, influence operations scale through unpaid human review loops — a gap Facebook's own later internal report made structural, finding Eastern European troll farms reached 140 million US users a month before the 2020 election, with 75% of that reach coming from users who never followed the Pages at all (internal report via MIT Technology Review).
The trend: Platform content moderation is quietly being supplemented by volunteer investigators whose findings expose how far behind automated detection runs against coordinated inauthentic behavior.