12/22/21, 10:01 PM
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review
The materials show how the Cambodian operators gather research on the best-performing
content in each country and plagiarize them for their clickbait websites. One Google Drive
folder shared within the community has two dozen spreadsheets of links to the most popular
Facebook groups in 20 countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, India, France, Germany,
Mexico, and Brazil.
The tutorial video also shows how they find the most viral YouTube videos in different
languages and use an automated tool to convert each one into an article for their site. We found
29 YouTube channels spreading political misinformation about the current political situation in
Myanmar, for example, that were being converted into clickbait articles and redistributed to
new audiences on Facebook.
One of the YouTube channels spreading political misinformation in Myanmar. Google ultimately took it down.
After we brought the channels to its attention, YouTube terminated all of them for violating its
community guidelines, including seven that it determined were part of coordinated influence
Subscribeserving
2
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remaining
Sign in also stopped
operations
linked
to Myanmar. Choi noted that YouTube had previously
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