Occupy Democrats is a left-wingFacebook page describing itself as a political organization based in the United States, founded in 2012 by twin brothers Omar Rivero and Rafael Rivero. The motto of the organization is to provide a "counterbalance to the Republican Tea Party". On social media, Occupy Democrats was named the "Most Influential Progressive Facebook Page" by CrowdTangle in 2015 and by 2017 surpassed 7 million followers. 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." 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. In a 2017 survey among US readers, it was voted the "least trusted news source" among American readers, just below Breitbart and BuzzFeed. In their news reporting, they shared a story on Facebook and other social media platforms about Senator Mitch McConnell's polio treatment that was unverified. In the same year, PolitiFact included Occupy Democrats in its list offake 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." In 2018, the English Wikipedia deprecated Occupy Democrats as a source of fact, "due to its unreliability". CNN mentioned Occupy Democrats in an online article about identifying misleading news, citing it as an example of a website using unverified photographs and videos. The example purported to show a female being ejected by police from a restroom for "not looking like a woman" due to a controversial law passed by North Carolina in March 2016, but Snopes found that the footage dated from at least 2015 and provided no context as to where the woman is and why she was ejected.
