12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review “It’s a strategy of ‘death by a thousand cuts’—a chipping away at facts, using half-truths that fabricate an alternative reality by merging the power of bots and fake accounts on social media to manipulate real people,” she wrote. In 2019, Facebook finally took down 220 Facebook pages, 73 Facebook accounts, and 29 Instagram accounts linked to Twinmark Media. By then, Facebook and Google had already paid the farm as much as $8 million (400 million Philippine pesos). Neither Facebook nor Google confirmed this amount. Meta’s Osborne disputed the characterization that Facebook had influenced the election. An evolving threat Facebook made a major effort to weed clickbait farms out of Instant Articles and Ad Breaks in the first half of 2019, according to Allen’s internal report. Specifically, it began checking publishers for content originality and demonetizing those who posted largely unoriginal content. But these automated checks are limited. They primarily focus on assessing the originality of videos, and not, for example, on whether an article has been plagiarized. Even if they did, such systems would only be as good as the company’s artificial-intelligence capabilities in a given language. Countries with languages not prioritized by the AI research community receive far less attention, if any at all. “In the case of Ethiopia there are 100 million people and six languages. Facebook only supports two of those languages for integrity systems,” Haugen said during her testimony to Congress. Rio says there are also loopholes in enforcement. Violators are taken out of the program but not off the platform, and they can appeal to be reinstated. The appeals are processed by a separate team from the one that does the enforcing and performs only basic topical checks before reinstating the actor. (Facebook did not respond to questions about what these checks actually look for.) As a result, it can take mere hours for a clickbait operator to rejoin again and again after removal. “Somehow all of the teams don’t talk to each other,” she says. This is how Rio found herself in a state of panic in March of this year. A month after the military had arrested former democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi and seized control of the government, protesters were still violently clashing with the new regime. The military was sporadically cutting access to the internet and broadcast networks, and Rio was terrified for the safety of her friends in the country. She began looking for them in Facebook Live videos. “People were really actively watching these videos because this is how you keep track of your loved ones,” she says. She wasn’t concerned to see that the videos were coming from pages with credibility issues; she believed that the streamers were using fake pages to protect their anonymity. Subscribeit because Then impossible happened: she saw the same Live video twice. 2 free the stories remaining SignShe in remembered it was horrifying: hundreds of kids, who looked as young as 10, in a line with their hands on https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ 19/27