A Chinese company bought thousands of Facebook ads to promote election-themed t-shirts and merchandise with the promise to “donate 100 percent of the proceeds” to political causes, campaigns, and PACs supporting both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It is illegal for foreign corporations to donate money to American political organizations and campaigns, though there is no evidence that the company is actually donating any money and, more likely, is simply lying to Facebook users about where their money will be going on one of the largest and most important social media platforms on the internet immediately before one of the most important and tightest presidential elections in the history of the United States.
Some of the t-shirts are advertised to veterans and others promote the assassination of Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Joe Biden, and say “100% of all profits from the sale will be donated to support the cause.”
There are thousands of ads selling t-shirts and other merch that have pro-Kamala Harris messages (these include things like “We’re Not Going Back,” “Harris/Walz 2024,” “blue wave,” “childless cat lady,” and with ad copy that states “We donate 100% of the proceeds to ActBlue. Every purchase supports the blue cause and helps keep the conversation going!” ActBlue is one of the largest democratic SuperPACs. More than a hundred other ads are selling merch with ad copy that says “100% of all profits from the sale of this series of shirts will be donated to support the H & W campaign!”
Merch targeting Trump voters say things like “Only you can prevent Kamunism,” “Relax it’s just a red hat,” “The Outlaw and the Hillbilly,” and “Trump 2024.” Alarmingly, there are several shirts that allude to wanting to assassinate Harris, Walz, and Biden. A series of shirts being advertised say things like “It’s time to take the hoe to the train station” and “It’s time to take Kamala to the train station,” which is a location in the show Yellowstone where people are executed. The ad copy for many of these shirts say things like “100% of all profits from the sale will be donated to support the cause” or “become the radical fighter who take [sic] out the Democrats! 100% of all profits from the sale will be donated to support the cause.” Another ad says “100% of all profits from the sale of this collection will be donated to support the T&V campaign!”
ActBlue told 404 Media that it is aware that bad actors try to misuse its name and brand on social media without its permission. The Federal Election Commission declined to comment. Neither the Harris campaign nor the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment.
Many of the ads were not properly labeled as political advertisements on Facebook but ran anyway. Some of them were identified as improperly labeled political advertisements by Meta’s content moderators and were deleted, but the pages behind them have been allowed to buy new ads for months even after those violations. Meta declined to comment for this story. After 404 Media reached out to Meta for comment, hundreds of ads were deleted from the platform and records of them have been put behind a clickthrough disclaimer in its ad library:
In recent days, the Chinese company, called 广州时维网络科技有限公司 (Guangzhou Shivei Network Technology Co., Ltd), also began selling and advertising merch designed to show solidarity with Palestine (with the language “we use 60 percent of our profit to support the Palestinian people”), and North Carolina and Florida-themed merch that promises “we will be giving 100% of the proceeds from sales of our clothes to the people of Western NC delivering essential supplies, hot meals, and support to communities significantly impacted by the storm.” Other shirts are specifically targeting veterans and say that “a portion of every sale will be donated to veteran support organizations, so you can wear your pride while giving back!" Others claim that the creators of the shirts are veterans and say "I am a veteran who lost my job due to the economic downturn. I now earn a living making patriotic clothing in my workshop with my wife."
The network of ads was discovered by Kristofer Goldsmith of Task Force Butler, a nonprofit organization made up of veterans that uses open source investigative techniques to fight domestic extremism and antidemocratic activity online. Goldsmith found 30 different Facebook pages that have bought ads advertising political t-shirts, hats, and other merch. All of these Facebook pages link to websites controlled by Guangzhou Shivei Network Technology Co., Ltd, a Guangzhou, China-based clothing and ecommerce company.
The information panels for these Facebook pages show that the people running the Facebook accounts are based in the United States, China, Russia, Iran, Malaysia, France, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Philippines, and Australia.
Some of the Facebook pages publicly list a U.S. address seemingly to give it legitimacy, but none of the addresses listed that I looked up correspond to any commercial location. Many of them do not exist, such as “2685 Joy Lane, Los Angeles, CA,” or, in one case, correspond to a random public school building in New York City.
“There are two possible scenarios here,” Goldsmith told 404 Media. “This foreign company is making illegal campaign donations, or this foreign company is fraudulently advertising that it will make (illegal) campaign donations and then keeping the money.”
There is no evidence that the company is actively trying to interfere in the election, but the fact is that it has been allowed to inject itself into and profit from an electoral environment that is fiercely divided and where campaigns and political groups are scratching and clawing for every dollar they can get. These ads have the effect of making people think they are financially supporting a campaign or cause when they actually aren’t. These ads are also running during an election cycle in which Meta has been actively trying to distance itself from political content and in which Americans trying to reach their friends and followers have seen posts that contain words like “vote” perform poorly on Meta platforms; meanwhile, it is possible for foreign companies to share political messages with Meta’s users by paying to promote ads in their feeds.
“This sort of thing highlights that foreign entities, even when not seeking to interfere in American elections, can flood the environment that takes advantage of political moments in the United States,” Tim Harper, an election disinformation expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told 404 Media. “In this instance, they’re using it as an opportunity to defraud folks using issues that get high emotional reactions.”
Anna Massoglia, editorial & investigations manager at the money-in-politics research group OpenSecrets told 404 Media, “I've seen a decent number of Facebook ads by entities hawking counterfeit campaign gear but the claim about giving the proceeds to ActBlue takes this to another level. The fact that they are not classified as ‘political’ ads makes it harder to track as well.”
A large number of the political shirts also target veterans, Goldsmith said, because veterans come with “instant credibility.”
“If a veteran is wearing one of these shirts, people want to know where they got it, and they’re going to want to buy it too,” he said.
Darren Linvill, codirector of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, told 404 Media that “this type of fraud is entirely too common on social media and seems to spike around elections.”
Linvill pointed to a situation he studied in 2020 where fake Twitter accounts posing as Black people supporting Trump appeared, sold t-shirts, then vanished. ”It's very difficult to police this type of thing and the platforms dedicate what I believe are too few resources to doing so,” Linvill said. “T-shirt sales, specifically, cause a variety of issues. I've often jokingly said that if we could ban cryptocurrency and t-shirt sales we would eliminate 90% of the fake social media accounts on the internet.”
It is incredibly difficult to calculate how many people have seen these ads or how much money it has given to Meta because Meta’s ad library provides this information only in vague terms—many of the ads have been seen by less than 1,000 people, but others have been viewed far more often, do not have information about views, or have run in many different versions over the course of the last few months.
“The first post that I saw organically shared into my feed had 40,000 likes. Facebook can say ‘Well these ads were maybe only a dollar and only one person saw each one, right?” Goldsmith said. “But the overall impact is that the organic content is immeasurable because there are too many of these fucking pages to count them all.”
Many of these pages have bought ads that have been taken down by Meta because they did not have required disclaimers or because they violated Facebook’s rules on political ads. Yet all of the identified pages have been allowed to continue running ads, and many of the ads are still active.
Facebook pages implicated in the scheme include shops with names like “Vitalcloths,” “Restvivid.shop,” “Lunabuys,” “Structurlly,” “Holidaygiftt,” and “Roselimes.” One of them, LuckyBeity, directs buyers to an online shop full of AI-generated people behind slogans like “Use Your Rights,” and a note that says “ALL PROFITS WILL GO TO SUPPORT THE HARRIS-WALZ CAMPAIGN.”
Many of the Facebook pages aren’t just advertising political t-shirts. n recent days they have pivoted to selling shirts profiting off of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Liam Payne’s death, and more run-of-the-mill Halloween and fall-themed clothes.
A website recruiting for Guangzhou Shiwei Network Technology Co., Ltd. notes that it “focuses on multi-channel operations in cross-border e-commerce.” The site has images of the company’s office and its staff riding bikes, grilling skewers, and sightseeing. A job listing for the company shows that it is hiring graphic designers to create more t-shirts.
Goldsmith said that, over the years, he has repeatedly found and done reports about extremism and foreign influence on Facebook, and that he’s shocked he has continued to be able to find networks like this operating in the open.
“It’s like I’ve been an unpaid consultant for Facebook for almost a decade—they should be detecting this on their own,” Goldsmith said. “With this, a lot of the messages are pretty divisive, and they’re making their business through Facebook ads. Facebook is making money from it.”
“If they can’t detect this pattern when a foreign company is electioneering but it’s such a simple thing that human beings like myself can very easily detect,” he added, “then how is Meta one of the most valuable companies in the world?”