Profile of Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who catalogues questionable Facebook Pages, some with millions of followers and links to Russia and Iran
please subscribe to the all of the media that you can afford. If you can't, Google has all answers. http://www.wsj.com/... Kristofer Goldsmith / @krisgoldsmith85 : Thread: For over a year, on behalf of @VVAmerica, I've been quietly waging war against foreign elements who seek to target American troops and veterans with disinformation and politically divisive content. @bkesling and @dnvolz break it down in @WSJ today 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/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Goldsmith's work extends a volunteer pattern already visible in the corpus: back in August, two people reporting some 2,000 fake accounts posing as US military flagged how much of this detection burden falls on individuals rather than Facebook's own tools. What the WSJ profile adds is institutional backing — Goldsmith runs his catalogue on behalf of Vietnam Veterans of America, and about two dozen of the Pages he has flagged, some with millions of followers and links to Russia and Iran, have been deleted.
The profile also lands mid-arc between those early volunteer reports and what came later: an [[a:970794|internal Facebook report finding Eastern European troll farms reached 140M US users per month before the 2020 election]], with most exposure coming through shares rather than Page follows — meaning page-level takedowns like Goldsmith's address only part of the distribution problem.
First-order effects
- Facebook has deleted roughly two dozen Pages from Goldsmith's catalogue, so the immediate effect is removal of foreign-linked Pages that had accumulated follower bases in the millions.
- Vietnam Veterans of America now holds a documented, named case file of Pages targeting veterans, giving the organization standing to press Facebook and regulators rather than anecdote.
Second-order effects
- The BuzzFeed volunteers' parallel effort shows the workload is replicable by any motivated group, pushing Facebook toward handling a growing volume of veteran-community reports it cannot easily dismiss as fringe complaints.
- Advertisers and political campaigns buying reach on large veteran-audience Pages face authenticity risk, since the audience counts may sit on Pages later deleted as foreign-linked.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform integrity becomes co-produced by civil-society investigators like Goldsmith and VVAmerica, with companies reacting to external catalogues instead of detecting first — a structural inversion of how moderation was supposed to work.
- The later internal finding that troll-farm content reached users mostly through shares and non-followers suggests takedown-by-catalogue will keep undercounting exposure, pressuring platforms toward distribution-level controls rather than Page-level enforcement.
The trend: Content moderation is shifting toward civil-society investigators documenting foreign influence operations faster than platform tools catch them, forcing platforms into reactive takedowns.