Demi Vollering is pregnant, and being cheated on by her partner. Jonas Vingegaard has no time for LGBTQ+ recognition. Mathieu van der Poel has adopted an orphan. Tadej Pogačar is in a feud with Greta Thunberg, telling her to “sit down, Barbie”, live on television.
None of that is true – but if these headlines sound familiar, it might be because you’ve come across them on Facebook, where a coordinated network of ‘news’ pages has been spreading misinformation about professional cycling and its practitioners.
When one such story popped up in my feed the other day, I was mostly confused and annoyed – but then, I became curious about why this was happening, and who was behind it. What is the motivation behind putting rubbish like this out into the world? Who benefits? And what is the process?
So, I started looking into it all, half-expecting to find some shit-stirring troll hard at work. But what looked like spam or slop turned out to be something much stranger: a sprawling infrastructure churning out hundreds of articles a day across multiple languages and multiple subjects beyond cycling, feeding traffic into two obscure websites.
The stories might be fake, but the business behind them is real.
Chapter 1: The pages
We should probably start with the Facebook pages. The first example I came across was a post from a page called Cycling Squad (10,000 followers), but my engagement with that post meant that others soon followed. In total, by following trails of breadcrumbs around Facebook and Google, I’ve now identified 20 such Facebook ‘news pages’ publishing in five languages (English, Dutch/Flemish, French, Spanish, and Italian), with a combined follower count approaching 200,000.
| Cycling page title | Followers (thousands) | Primary language |
|---|---|---|
| Cycling Squad | 10k | English |
| Ciclismo Elite Pro | 10k | Spanish |
| World Cycle Pulse | 11k | French |
| Cycling Pulse | 16k | English |
| Cycle Pulse | 12k | English |
| Sprint Cycle | 6.2k | Italian |
| Cycling Weekly | 14k | French |
| Cycling Central | 6.4k | Dutch |
| Cycling Pro | 15k | French |
| Dutch Cycling Legends | 5.6k | Italian, weirdly |
| Race Cycling | 7.3k | French |
| Cycling Empire | 4.8k | Dutch |
| Revved Riders | 6.5k | Dutch |
| Cycling Race Insider | 5.7k | Dutch |
| World Cycling Races | 6.5k | French |
| Rycling Velocity (not a typo) | 7.9k | French |
| Cycling Velocity Hub | 4.4k | Dutch |
| The Cycling Scoop | 17k | French |
| Cycling Signal | 5.3k | Dutch |
| Two Wheels Tribe | 23k | French |
Each of the pages bears some obvious similarities. Firstly, they all have an AI-generated profile picture and header banner – not my jam, personally, but this is the world we live in. As if to bolster their legitimacy, many list addresses in the United States (usually in California, but sometimes Nevada and in one case, Maine). Some also have US phone numbers listed.
At this point, it’s important you don’t get too excited – as I did, plotting them on a map of the US, looking for a pentagram or something. But there is something they have in common: None of them are in fact home to a Facebook news site, because all of the addresses are hotels (some two-star, some three-star), seemingly plucked at random like the phone numbers.
The posts that each profile publishes are, likewise, similar, and in most cases feel calculated to fuel engagement with tabloid-esque language and clickbait content. But they feel familiar enough: race photos of faces you recognise with emotional headlines, and a steady stream of updates calibrated to blend into the feeds of cycling fans.
Did we do a good job with this story?
