12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review but they’re different. Conflating them doesn’t help anyone.” Osborne repeated that we were conflating the two groups in response to our findings. But disinformation experts say it’s misleading to draw a hard line between financially motivated spammers and political influence operations. There is a distinction in intent: financially motivated spammers are agnostic about the content they publish. They go wherever the clicks and money are, letting Facebook’s news feed algorithm dictate which topics they’ll cover next. Political operations are instead targeted toward pushing a specific agenda. But in practice it doesn’t matter: in their tactics and impact, they often look the same. On an average day, a financially motivated clickbait site might be populated with celebrity news, cute animals, or highly emotional stories—all reliable drivers of traffic. Then, when political turmoil strikes, they drift toward hyperpartisan news, misinformation, and outrage bait because it gets more engagement. The Macedonian page cluster is a prime example. Most of the time the content promotes women’s and LGTBQ rights. But around the time of events like the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, and the passage of Texas’s antiabortion “heartbeat bill,” the cluster amplified particularly pointed political content. Many of its articles have been widely circulated by legitimate pages with huge followings, including those run by Occupy Democrats, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Women’s March Global. 2 free stories remaining https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ Sign in Subscribe 16/27