12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review their heads, being loaded into military trucks. When she dug into it, she discovered that the videos were not live at all. Live videos are meant to indicate a real-time broadcast and include important metadata about the time and place of the activity. These videos had been downloaded from elsewhere and rebroadcast on Facebook using third-party tools to make them look like livestreams. Related Story She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story. Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it. There were hundreds of them, racking up tens of thousands of engagements and hundreds of thousands of views. As of early November, MIT Technology Review found dozens of duplicate fake Live videos from this time frame still up. One duplicate pair with over 200,000 and 160,000 views, respectively, proclaimed in Burmese, “I am the only one who broadcasts live from all over the country in real time.” Facebook took several of them down after we brought them to its attention but dozens more, as well as the pages that posted them, still remain. Osborne said the company is aware of the issue and has significantly reduced these fake Lives and their distribution over the past year. Ironically, Rio believes, the videos were likely ripped from footage of the crisis uploaded to YouTube as human rights evidence. The scenes, in other words, are indeed from Myanmar—but they were all being posted from Vietnam and Cambodia. Over the past half-year, Rio has tracked and identified several page clusters run out of Vietnam and Cambodia. Many used fake Live videos to rapidly build their follower numbers and drive viewers to join Facebook groups disguised as pro-democracy communities. Rio now worries that Facebook’s latest rollout of in-stream ads in Live videos will further incentivize clickbait actors to fake them. One Cambodian cluster with 18 pages began posting highly damaging political misinformation, reaching a total of 16 million engagements and an audience of 1.6 million in four months. Facebook took all 18 pages down in March but new clusters continue to spin up while others remain. For all Rio knows, these Vietnamese and Cambodian actors do not speak Burmese. They likely do not understand Burmese culture or the country’s politics. The bottom line is they don’t need to. Not when they’re stealing their content. Rio has since found several of the Cambodians’ private Facebook and Telegram groups (one with upward of 3,000 individuals), where they trade tools and tips about the best moneymaking strategies. MIT Technology Review reviewed the documents, images, and videos she gathered, and hired a Khmer translator to interpret a tutorial video that walks viewers step by step through a clickbait workflow. Subscribe 2 free stories remaining Sign in https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ 20/27