Occupy Democrats

Occupy Democrats is a United States-based, left-wing media outlet built around a Facebook Group and corresponding website. Established in 2012, it publishes false information, hyperpartisan content, and clickbait. Posts originating from the Occupy Democrats Facebook Group are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.
History.
Occupy Democrats was established as a Facebook Group in 2012 by Rafael and Omar Rivero, a pair of twin brothers. A corresponding website was later created.
Its objective is to provide a "counterbalance to the Republican Tea Party".
Influence.
In a 2017 feature on partisan news, BuzzFeed News analyzed weekly Facebook engagements "since the beginning of 2015 and found that Occupy Democrats on the left and Fox News on the right are the top pages in each political category." The article added that the pages "consistently generate more total engagement than the pages of major media outlets." 
Occupy Democrats was named the "Most Influential Progressive Facebook Page" by CrowdTangle in 2015 and by 2017 surpassed 7 million followers. During the year 2017, Occupy Democrats was among the 30 sources most frequently shared on Facebook. In May 2020, almost half of the 40 top-performing videos that mentioned “Trump” on Facebook originated from Occupy Democrats.
In a paper presented at the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Argha Ray and Joey George concluded that disinformation propagated by Occupy Democrats "has the potential to further deepen the cracks in an already divided society".
2016 U.S presidential election.
The organization received wide attention during the 2016 presidential primaries of the Democratic Party, and was credited for having helped build support for Bernie Sanders' candidacy. The site shifted its support to Hillary Clinton, following her nomination as Democratic Party presidential candidate.
2020 U.S. presidential election.
According to Rafael Rivero, he was "plugged in" with the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign and the campaign worked directly with the outlet to disseminate political messaging. In October 2020, Occupy Democrats experienced a significant drop in its reach on Facebook, which Rivero attributed to action taken by Facebook to throttle traffic, a claim Facebook denied.
Content.
Subject matter.
Occupy Democrats posts memes and content primarily about United States politics. Its content is hyperpartisan, left-oriented and built around clickbait and hyperbole. Comments to posts shared on Occupy Democrats tend to be hallmarked by "greater anger and incivility" than those of mainstream media Facebook pages and groups.
Accuracy.
Evaluation by academia.
The Asan Institute for Policy Studies has said that Occupy Democrats "share[s] both real and fake news ... further blurring the line between fact and fiction". 
According to the University of Iowa library, Occupy Democrats "has been known to show misleading, fake, or exaggerated partisan content".The Valencia College library includes Occupy Democrats on a list of sources that "cannot usually be accepted at face value and need further verification from other sources to determine if information is credible". In a 2017 poster session developed by the library staff of the University of California at Merced, Occupy Democrats was rated "questionable" for its factual reporting and was noted for not having "a very good fact check record".
Evaluation by media.
According to "The Atlantic", Occupy Democrats' posts are "studded with straightforwardly fake news". The "Los Angeles Weekly" reports that its posts are "free from the constraints of objectivity and, in some cases, facts". A 2016 Buzzfeed News analysis found it was "the least accurate left-wing page" of several Facebook pages it reviewed and cited one instance where it published a satirical story as fact. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the "New York Times" reported that Occupy Democrats "twisted facts to push a critical narrative about Republicans". 
In 2017, PolitiFact included Occupy Democrats in its list of fake news. In 2017 however, PolitiFact removed Occupy Democrats from its list of fake news sites and, according to the "Miami New Times", "admitted Occupy Democrats should never have been on the list in the first place." As of December 2020, PolitiFact classified 62% of 16 posts shared by Occupy Democrats it had evaluated as "not accurate". A further 31% it considered "half-true".
In 2021, a post shared by Occupy Democrats claimed Nikki Haley had changed her first name to sound more "white" in order to further her political career. A fact check column by "USA Today" reported that Nikki was her legal middle name, she had used it as a given name since childhood, and that it was of ethnic Punjabi origin. The same year, Snopes rated "False" a claim by Occupy Democrats that "Republican Congress members had abjectly failed to applaud Biden’s stated goal of drastically reducing the rate of child poverty in the United States" during that year's State of the Union address.
Popular perception.
In a 2017 survey among US readers, Occupy Democrats was voted the "least trusted news source" among American readers, just below Breitbart and BuzzFeed. In 2018, the English Wikipedia deprecated Occupy Democrats as a source of fact, "due to its unreliability".