12/22/21, 10:01 PM hate speech. Now the man who built them can't fix the problem. How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review could insert ads into the publisher’s stories and take a 30% cut of the revenue. Instant Articles quickly fell out of favor with its original cohort of big mainstream publishers. For them, the payouts weren’t high enough compared with other available forms of monetization. But that was not true for publishers in the Global South, which Facebook began accepting into the program in 2016. In 2018, the company reported paying out $1.5 billion to publishers and app developers (who can also participate in Audience Network). By 2019, that figure had reached multiple billions. Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform’s design also didn’t sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages—in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy—one they still use today. 2 free stories remaining https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ Sign in Subscribe 5/27