Martosko's aim was to connect with animal rights activists as Facebook friends to collect intelligence on their plans and activities. Later in the deposition, Martosko said that he didn't remember how many activists he friended using the Davis account. Although animal rights activists had long suspected that Martosko was behind the Davis Facebook account, the deposition marked the first time he acknowledged the scheme. Martosko appears to have created the Facebook account in 2009, according to an exhaustive 2011 analysis of Davis' online activities published by HumaneWatch.info, a website created to track CCF's work. The profile for this account, according to the site, was "a two-dimensional caricature of a vegan activist, with a few superficially liberal interests and a political affiliation listed as 'dope-smoking commie.'" As Gregory Davis, Martosko posted about stereotypically lefty, vegan, and animal activist subjects, such as "living in a wood hut" and hanging out with his "freegan crew," and friended progressive activists and groups such as PETA, the Humane Society of the United States, Mercy for Animals, Sea Shepherd, and Stop Humane Watch, a group that aimed to monitor and push back on Martosko's outfit. Many of the individuals Gregory Davis friended were later profiled on a CCF website devoted to monitoring animal rights activists. "Davis wanted people to think he was a real extreme animal rights advocate or like a vegan abolitionist. He kind of invented a cover story for himself," one of the women who moderated the Stop Humane Watch Facebook page in 2010 told Mother Jones. (She asked that she not be identified, citing job concerns.) "I didn't think much of it at the time," she noted. "When people posted abolitionist or extreme stuff, we dealt with it. We weren't about doing away with farms altogether; we were about changing the practices." She recalled a particular incident in May 2010 when Gregory Davis posted a comment advocating violent action against Conklin Dairy—an Ohio farm that was the target of protests after animal rights campaigners released a video of a worker abusing livestock. READ MORE
