12/22/21, 10:01 PM How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review Karen Hao @_KarenHao Wild. An invoice from Facebook to a member of the clickbait troll farm community in Myanmar. “They are posting these to their profiles with pride,” says @riovictoire. twitter.com/riovictoire/st… 10:26 AM · Sep 20, 2021 Read the full conversation on Twitter 11 Reply Copy link to Tweet Read 1 reply An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019. The author, former Facebook data scientist Jeff Allen, found that these exact tactics had allowed clickbait farms in Macedonia and Kosovo to reach nearly half a million Americans a year before the 2020 election. The farms had also made their way into Instant Articles and Ad Breaks, a similar monetization program for inserting ads into Facebook videos. At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said. Allen, bound by a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, did not comment on the report. Despite pressure from both internal and external researchers, Facebook struggled to stem the abuse. Meanwhile, the company was rolling out more monetization programs to open up new streams of revenue. Besides Ad Breaks for videos, there was IGTV Monetization for Instagram and In-Stream Ads for Live videos. “That reckless push for user growth we saw—now we are seeing a reckless push for publisher growth,” says Victoire Rio, a digital rights researcher fighting platform-induced harms in Myanmar and other countries in the Global South. MIT Technology Review has found that the problem is now happening on a global scale. Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook’s payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale. They’re no longer limited to publishing Subscribe 2 free stories remaining Sign in https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/ 9/27