12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review Political operatives will sometimes also pay financially motivated spammers to broadcast propaganda on their Facebook pages, or buy pages to repurpose them for influence campaigns. Rio has already seen evidence of a black market where clickbait actors can sell their large Facebook audiences. In other words, pages look innocuous until they don’t. “We have empowered inauthentic actors to accumulate huge followings for largely unknown purposes,” Allen wrote in the report. This shift has happened many times in Myanmar since the rise of clickbait farms, in particular during the Rohingya crisis and again in the lead-up to and aftermath of this year’s military coup. (The latter was precipitated by events much like those leading to the US January 6 insurrection, including widespread fake claims of a stolen election.) In October 2020, Facebook took down a number of pages and groups engaged in coordinated clickbait behavior in Myanmar. In an analysis of those assets, Graphika, a research firm that studies the spread of information online, found that the pages focused predominantly on celebrity news and gossip but pushed out political propaganda, dangerous anti-Muslim rhetoric, and covid-19 misinformation during key moments of crisis. Dozens of pages had more than 1 million followers each, with the largest reaching over 5 million. The same phenomenon played out in the Philippines in the lead-up to president Rodrigo Duterte’s 2016 election. Duterte has been compared to Donald Trump for his populist politics, bombastic rhetoric, and authoritarian leanings. During his campaign, a clickbait farm, registered formally as the company Twinmark Media, shifted from covering celebrities and entertainment to promoting him and his ideology. At the time, it was widely believed that politicians had hired Twinmark to conduct an influence campaign. But in interviews with journalists and researchers, former Twinmark employees admitted they were simply chasing profit. Through experimentation, the employees discovered that pro-Duterte content excelled during a heated election. They even paid other celebrities and influencers to share their articles to get more clicks and generate more ad revenue, according to research from media and communication scholars Jonathan Ong and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes. In the final months of the campaign, Duterte dominated the political discourse on social media. Facebook itself named him the “undisputed king of Facebook conversations” when it found he was the subject of 68% of all election-related discussions, compared with 46% for his next closest rival. Three months after the election, Maria Ressa, CEO of the media company Rappler, who won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for her work fighting disinformation, published a piece describing how a concert of coordinated clickbait and propaganda on Facebook “shift[ed] public opinion on key issues.” Subscribe 2 free stories remaining Sign in https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ 18/27