12/22/21, 10:01 PM Italian 1 Indonesian 1 How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review 3 86.4K 3K 3 469.3K 42K Page data pulled from CrowdTangle Oct 3 Oct 10 2021 Monetization data pulled from Oct 25 When MIT Technology Review sent Facebook a list of these pages and a detailed explanation of our methodology, Osborne called the analysis “flawed.” “While some Pages here may have been on our publisher lists, many of them didn’t actually monetize on Facebook,” he said. Indeed, these numbers do not indicate that all of these pages generated ad revenue. Instead, it is an estimate, based on data Facebook has made publicly available, of the number of pages associated with clickbait actors in Cambodia and Vietnam that Facebook has made eligible to monetize on the platform. Osborne also confirmed that more of the Cambodia-run clickbait-like pages we found had directly registered with one of Facebook’s monetization programs than we previously believed. In our analysis, we found 35% of the pages in our clusters had done so in the last two years. The other 65% would have indirectly generated ad revenue by heavily promoting content from the registered page to a wider audience. Osborne said that in fact about half of the pages we found, or roughly 150 more pages, had directly registered at one point with a monetization program, primarily Instant Articles. Shortly after we approached Facebook, operators of clickbait pages in Myanmar began complaining in online forums that their pages had been booted out of Instant Articles. Osborne declined to respond to our questions about the latest enforcement actions the company has taken. Facebook has continuously sought to weed these actors out of its programs. For example, only 30 of the Cambodia-run pages are still monetizing, Osborne said. But our data from Facebook’s publisher lists shows enforcement is often delayed and incomplete—clickbait pages can stay within monetization programs for hundreds of days before they are taken down. The same actors will also spin up new pages once their old ones have demonetized. Allen is now open-sourcing the code we used to encourage other independent researchers to refine and build on our work. To support MIT Technology Review's journalism, please consider becoming a subscriber. 2 free stories remaining https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ Sign in Subscribe 13/27