12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review The LGBT News and Women's Rights News pages on Facebook post identical content from five of its own affiliated sites monetizing with Instant Articles and Google AdSense, as well as from other news outlets that it appears to have paid partnerships with. Osborne said Facebook is now investigating the accounts after we brought them to the company’s attention. Choi said Google has removed AdSense ads from hundreds of pages on these sites in the past because of policy violations but that the sites themselves are still allowed to monetize based on the company’s regular reviews. While it’s possible that the Macedonians who run the pages do indeed care about US politics and about women’s and LGBTQ rights, the content is undeniably generating revenue. This means what they promote is most likely guided by what wins and loses with Facebook’s news feed algorithm. The activity of a single page or cluster of pages may not feel significant, says Camille François, a researcher at Columbia University who studies organized disinformation campaigns on social media. But when hundreds or thousands of actors are doing the same thing, amplifying the same content, and reaching millions of audience members, it can affect the public conversation. “What people see as the domestic conversation on a topic can actually be something completely different,” François says. “It’s a bunch of paid people pretending to not have any relationship with one another, optimizing what to post.” Osborne said Facebook has created several new policies and enforcement protocols in the last two years to address this issue, including penalizing pages run out of one country that behave as if they are local to another, as well as penalizing pages that build an audience on the basis of one topic and then pivot to another. But both Allen and Rio say the company’s actions have failed to close fundamental loopholes in the platform’s policies and designs—vulnerabilities that are fueling a global information crisis. “It’s affecting countries first and foremost outside the US but presents a massive risk to the US long term as well,” Rio says. “It’s going to affect pretty much anywhere in the world when there are heightened events like an election.” Disinformation for hire In response to MIT Technology Review’s initial reporting on Allen’s 2019 internal report, which we published in full, David Agranovich, the director of global threat disruption at Facebook, tweeted, “The pages referenced here, based on our own 2019 research, are financially motivated spammers, not overt influence ops. Both ofSign these challenges, Subscribe 2 free stories remaining in are serious https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ 15/27