A Bangladeshi firm appears to have played a key role in promoting the Canada ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest online, bdnews24.com reports citing Grid News.
Grid, a digital news start-up, has found increasing evidence of fringe conspiracies and violent extremism throughout the movement.
The report found that a Bangladeshi digital marketing firm was behind two of the largest Facebook groups related to the Canadian Freedom Convoy — at least until Facebook’s parent company, Meta, removed them Thursday following inquiries from Grid.
The groups, ‘Freedom Convoy 2022’ and ‘Convoy to Ottawa 2022’, attracted a combined membership of more than 170,000 since the firm created them on Jan 27 and Jan 30, respectively.
Administrators for these Facebook groups included accounts tied to the Bangladeshi firm, as well as an apparently fraudulent ‘public figure’ page claiming to belong to Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich. The page was among many deactivated by Meta. Lich did not respond to Grid’s requests for comment.
The Facebook groups tied to the Bangladeshi firm promoted calls for donations to the Ottawa organisers’ GiveSendGo campaign and pointed members to convoy-related events in Canada.
Grid reached a man Thursday who said he was Jakir Saikot, the founder of the firm. Saikot agreed to an interview on the condition that the reporter conduct it by video call so Saikot could confirm the reporter’s identity. Saikot did not make himself visible during the call.
Saikot said he was not involved in the fake Lich page, but confirmed he was behind the “Freedom Convoy 2022″ and “Convoy to Ottawa 2022″ groups.
“It was my own choice because I believe in freedom,” he said. “We have a right to talk freely.”
Saikot said he started the groups because he believes in the mission of the protesters. He said he received no payment to conduct his social media activity supporting a protest on the other side of the world.
“The big reason is freedom, and otherwise nothing,” he said. “No one paid us.”
Nazmul Ahasan, a reporter at the Investigative Reporting Programme at the University of California-Berkeley, said he separately contacted Saikot last week and Saikot told him a different version of events.
Ahasan said Saikot told him he charged the equivalent of $23 per day to promote Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, and indicated that he worked with organisers of the protests in Canada on the Freedom Convoy Facebook groups.
“I asked about whether [he was] contacted by someone in Canada,” Ahasan said. “He said ‘Yeah.’”
The Ottawa action is not the only convoy effort that has received purported Bangladeshi support. In Australia, one major Facebook group promoting the “Convoy to Canberra” is reportedly controlled by a single Bangladeshi administrator. The same report found another Aussie convoy group controlled by an account using an AI-generated face as its profile picture.
Online groups on platforms like Facebook and Telegram, together with fundraising campaigns on the GiveSendGo site, have formed digital lifelines for the ongoing Canadian protest. They funnel moral support, supplies, manpower and money to the effort, even as they help spread baseless conspiracy theories and toxic rhetoric.
The report reviewed the membership and content of those forums, spoke with extremist experts and conducted a comprehensive review of over 80,000 recorded donations to the convoy’s primary online fundraiser.
Combined, they show how QAnon adherents and fringe, even supremacist, ideologies pervade the movement.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is 'surging additional staff' to California ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday, in a bid to stop disruptions from potential trucker protests against COVID-19 vaccinations - mirroring the ones currently taking place in Canada, Daily Mail reports.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that the DHS had sent 500 additional people to Los Angeles for the sporting event, as Facebook took down foreign-run groups urging protest.
Fake accounts linked to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and several other countries were found to be promoting the convoys, Facebook officials told NBC News on Friday.
Yet the White House said the threat of disruption was real, and on Facebook many people angry with the US vaccine rules and recommendations were also calling for convoys similar to those which have paralysed parts of Canada.