Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Here’s how a Courier photo was used to help shape the American election

A fake Twitter account used our photo of Vancouverite Cate Simpson to retweet political messages
Cate Simpson fake Twitter account
This fake Twitter account for "Cheryl Montgomery" uses a Vancouver Courier photo of Cate Simpson who has since asked Twitter to delete the account.

A few weeks ago, Cate Simpson got a phone call from a graduate student in Columbia University’s journalism program. Francis Carr introduced himself and said he was doing a story about the proliferation of social media bots in America’s political debate.

Do you know, Carr asked Simpson, that your photo is being used on a fake Twitter account?

It was a photo that the Vancouver Courier’s Dan Toulgoet had taken of Simpson for a story last spring. Someone had used it to create an @cherry_mgm Twitter account under the name Cheryl Montgomery.

Cate Simpson in Courier
This photo of Cate Simpson accompanied an article about her anger over the City of Vancouver's decision to cut down cherry trees on the seawall. - Dan Toulgoet

Since Vancouver's Cate Simpson could indeed look like a Cheryl Montgomery from Marlton, New Jersey, many people might have been fooled into believing it was a completely legitimate profile.

Then @cherry_mgm started tweeting about the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“Montgomery’s” viewpoint was neither crazy right nor left, Simpson says. It leaned Democrat — as long as the Democrat wasn’t presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. There was no love lost for Donald Trump either.

The Courier reached out to Francis Carr to talk about how his research led him to contact to Simpson, who owns a Vancouver public relations firm.

Carr was first tweaked to the story by @likingonline, an anonymous Twitter account.

 

 

@likingonline posted his findings online.

“If you have ever had the misfortune of arguing with @SallyAlbright under the assumption of good faith, you have probably been shocked at how inane some of her statements can be,” the Sanders supporter says on a Shareblue Astroturf blog. “Perhaps more shocking is the fact that there seems to be many people online that actually agree with her horrible tweets.”

The post includes a graph of Twitter accounts that retweeted Sally Albright’s deluge of anti-Sanders tweets. (She once went on a 101-tweet rant.) “Cheryl Montgomery” was one of them.

@liking list of Sally Albright retweeters
Source: @likingonline

The blog alleges that Albright, a political strategist who loves Twitter even more than Trump, had 50 fake Twitter accounts that she’d use to spread her message. “She gaslights and supresses opposition while amplifying messages such as: free college is racist, Bernie Sanders is a Russian agent, Hillary Clinton is a superior private citizen (leave her alone), Russian bots gave us Trump, an old cop is defending democracy, and that political dynasties are good,” @likingonline writes.

 

 

Carr did a Google reverse image search of photos used in some of the accounts that @likingonline mentions. He came across Simpson’s Courier photo as well as photos of a Chilean fashion model, Spanish figure skater and several dead people.

There’s nothing illegal about it, he says. “If a picture’s online it’s fair game.”

Carr tried to reach out to Albright but she didn’t return her calls. She did, however, respond to reporter Paul Blumenthal who, unbeknownst to Carr, was researching a similar story for the Huffington Post.

“Albright told HuffPost that the accounts were voluntarily handed over by their original users to an unnamed client of hers to be automated in ‘an analytics program,’” Blumenthal writes in his March 14 story, which goes into greater depth about the accounts. “She said she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement and could not disclose who was collecting and automating these accounts or for what purpose.”

Carr says that while Albright has been employed by the Democratic Party, she’s also worked on conservative campaigns, such as one for Newt Gingrich. “She seems to be a political mercenary ideologically.”

There’s no way to know what the purpose of using the fake accounts was, he says.

“The main take home is these types of practices are becoming a norm. If consultants like Sally Albright are embracing these strategies, it’s a sign it’s just become part of the fabric of political discourse and campaign related messages.”

 

 

However, there is movement to force online resources to be as open about political financing as campaign advertisements have to be — a movement that’s been bolstered by the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal.

Once Simpson learned that her photo was being used on a fake Twitter account, it took Simpson two weeks and repeated communications to force Twitter to delete the account. At one point, she had to send Twitter a photocopy of her driver’s licence and passport to prove that she was the real person in this story.

The experience has taught a normally security-conscious Cate Simpson to be even more cautious about what she reads on the internet.

“It goes to show you that unless you actually know the person, you can’t believe anything you see [on social media],” she says.