12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review articles, either. They push out Live videos and run Instagram accounts, which they monetize directly or use to drive more traffic to their sites. Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it’s AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation. Many clickbait farms today now monetize with both Instant Articles and AdSense, receiving payouts from both companies. And because Facebook’s and YouTube’s algorithms boost whatever is engaging to users, they’ve created an information ecosystem where content that goes viral on one platform will often be recycled on the other to maximize distribution and revenue. “These actors wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the platforms,” Rio says. In response to the detailed evidence we provided to each Related Story company of this behavior, Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne disputed our core findings, saying we’d misunderstood the issue. “Regardless, we’ve invested in building new expertdriven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so,” he said. Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows “This is not normal. This is not healthy.” Google confirmed that the behavior violated its policies and terminated all of the YouTube channels MIT Technology Review identified as spreading misinformation. “We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information,” YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi said. Clickbait farms are not just targeting their home countries. Following the example of actors from Macedonia and Kosovo, the newest operators have realized they need to understand neither a country’s local context nor its language to turn political outrage into income. MIT Technology Review partnered with Allen, who now leads a nonprofit called the Integrity Institute that conducts research on platform abuse, to identify possible clickbait actors on Facebook. We focused on pages run out of Cambodia and Vietnam—two of the countries where clickbait operations are now cashing in on the situation in Myanmar. We obtained data from CrowdTangle, whose development team the company broke up earlier this year, and from Facebook’s Publisher Lists, which record which publishers are registered in monetization programs. Allen wrote a custom clustering algorithm to find pages posting Subscribe content in a highly coordinated manner and targeting speakers ofSign languages used primarily 2 free stories remaining in outside the countries where the operations are based. We then analyzed which clusters had at https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ 10/27