[Update] Serious kudos to Jake Tapper for updating his post about the serious skepticism about ForAmerica's claims.
Matt Lewis is a right-wing "reporter" for the daily caller. He used to work for AOL but left at least partly because the Huffington Post was bought out by AOL. He's previously written for Townhall.com and Human Events. If you're not familiar with Townhall.com or Human Events, you should check them out, they are the fever swamp of the right-wing Republicans. They're not known for accurate political reporting; they tend to be where right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter go to write their screeds. And ofcourse you have all the conspiracy theories of the far right from birtherism to climate denial. Yesterday afternoon Matt Lewis printed completely without any verification that the Facebook page of a right-wing group shut down the comments section of President Obama's Facebook chat this afternoon because conservatives were so energized that they clicked through the link and went to the Facebook page for the Whitehouse townhall driving so much traffic and comments that Facebook's page went offline.
It seems far-fetched right? A Facebook group (called ForAmerica) produces enough traffic to take down another Facebook page (Obama's national townhall) by itself while the first Facebook page is still up and running and directing traffic to second page. The problem isn't that the Daily Caller or Matt Lewis should have any credibility discussing the power of a conservative group or new media, but that Lewis' story on the Daily Caller was picked up by other reporters, most notably Jake Tapper at ABC News.
Here's how easy it is to quickly debunk Lewis' article.
The ForAmerica Facebook group has 957,000 members. As of the time the shutdown was announced the post that caused the Facebook 'shutdown' had 2,000 likes on Facebook page,; it currently has 2,500 likes on Facebook. You'll have to take my expert knowledge, my day job is consulting on Democratic online campaigns, but on average a Facebook link drives about 4-10 times as many clicks as likes on Facebook. That means that the link drove at least 10,000-25,000 pageviews to Obama's Facebook page. But let's assume for the sake of argument that instead of 4 times as many page views, it drove 10 times as much. 100,000 page views in an hour. In fact we should be very generous, let's assume every person who is a fan of the ForAmerica Facebook page clicked on the link twice and they each posted a question on the wall of the Facebook page. That would mean it drove 2.8 million impressions to Obama's Facebook page. Here’s how generous that is, there were only about 175,000 people on the event page and most of those fans were driven by marketing Facebook and the Whitehouse did for the event.
But let's give ForAmerica the benefit of the doubt. 2.8 million Impressions on a Facebook page. Facebook currently has 500+ million active users worldwide. Facebooks ad tool says that I can target 141 million Americans in a given day. Facebook's pageviews in on any given day are estimated to be approximately 1/4 of all pageviews in the United States on any given day. Google's Doubleclick last year said that Facebook had 260 billion page views a month. That would come out to about an average of 8 billion page views a day in a 31 day month, or 333 million page views an hour. That means that ForAmerica's traffic under the most generous circumstances is more than 118 times smaller than Facebooks normal hourly traffic accounting for .08% of Facebooks average hourly traffic. Realistically ForAmerica’s normal traffic under the best circumstances is 1/13,320 the size of Facebook’s hourly traffic.
So, you can't take down Facebook. Even if you tried to instigate a very illegal Denial-of-service attack against Facebook, you can't take down Facebook. It's partly why you never see hackers or Anonymous try to take down Amazon, Google and Facebook. Their infrastructure is too large and redundant to take offline.
These numbers are easily verifiable either by talking to Facebook, doing research on Google or talking to anyone who works in the online space. The problem here isn't that Matt Lewis lies, — he comes from Townhall and Human Events, we know he's a right-wing activist not a real reporter. The problem is that he has enough credibility in Washington, DC for Jake Tapper and Mike Memoli from the LA Times to take him seriously.
Update: Lewis has posted a response on the Daily Caller website. The crux of the response is that he didn't lie, some group said they did it and he just reported it and the Facebook page did at some point go offline. I made the decision to use the specific word lie in the post this morning and I can back up why I did it. He's essentially saying that the story he wrote "wasn't intended to be a factual statement."
First, Lewis has been writing about online politics for years. While I don't expect him to be knowledgeable about all things internet he certainly must have sources who can explain to him that a Facebook page can't knock another Facebook page offline mainly because ForAmerica can't drive that much traffic and Facebook's infrastructure is too robust.
Second, when right-wing activists promote something that isn't true they often just say that they're reporting something someone else said. Remember the 2 million strong tea party protests that never existed? Here's the deal, Lewis' entire article is based on a premise so far fetched that he couldn't possibly think it was true. It's as though on the day of the 2009 inauguration a group of 50 conservatives held a protest and took credit for the Secret Service shutting down Pennsylvania ave. Just because the group of Republicans put up press release doesn't mean that anyone should report it as something that was plausible. And that's partly why the Facebook story Lewis pushed is a lie, it's based on a premise that Lewis tried to mainstream that's just not true and easily verifiably untrue.
Finally, because Jake Tapper and Mike Memoli trusted Lewis' reporting they printed the far fetched claim online as fact and they haven't at this point updated their stories. And I think most damning as of this morning he was concern trolling that other media outlets, beyond the LA Times and ABC news, hadn't picked up on his story from yesterday.
That's why I called it a lie, because it was so egregious and so easily verifiably untrue. Lewis and The Daily Caller just wanted to get the story out there that the president's Facebook town hall had been been tarnished by a right-wing avalanche that didn't exist. Someone says something, Matt Lewis reports it but he doesn't really care that it's never intended to be a factual statement. Rinse, repeat.
[Update 4]: I made one bad assumption about the LA times and ABC in writing this post that doesn't change its validity. I assumed that the Daily Caller was the reason that others picked up the story which was actually faulty. That was wrong.