Since May, a network of at least 500 Facebook pages, mostly from Vietnam, has been generating millions of clicks with plagiarized articles and dubious distribution strategies and generating advertising revenue with complete impunity. Even if his practices violate several rules of this social network. In addition, the large audience could be abused for political purposes, fear a former Meta employee familiar with how the platform works and an expert interviewed by the decryptors.
The focus of this program is purchasing thousands of Facebook ads. These serve to build an audience for these hundreds of pages that specialize in various areas of interest such as animals, religion, cars, sports, paranormal phenomena and women in bikinis. The sites then publish fully plagiarized articles that focus on the same topics to generate maximum clicks and advertising revenue. Some of the articles also appear to be generated by chatbots like ChatGPT.
If you like dogs click the thumb below, if you like sports cars click the thumb below or if you like Jesus click the thumb below: The ads all use the same formula in English to attract an audience.
Since May, we’ve seen tens of thousands of active ads using this style in Facebook’s ad library (New Window), not to mention that hundreds of new ads – and dozens of new pages – continue to appear every day.
And they’re easy to find: just do a search using the words “fingers crossed” in the advertising library to get thousands of results.
In May alone, 75 of the Vietnamese websites that make up this network generated more than 9 million clicks, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb. And this is just a very incomplete portrait of the network, which could actually be much larger.
Additionally, links to these articles will not be blocked by Meta in Canada, while links from local and foreign media will be blocked in response to the federal government’s Online News Act.
Meta did not respond to our request for an interview and has apparently taken no action to remedy the situation since we contacted the firm.
Photo album: example article
Same strategy as troll farms
When we mentioned this situation to a former employee of Meta’s integrity team, his first reaction was to draw a parallel between this network and the troll farms of Eastern Europe, which successfully reached over 140 million Americans ahead of the 2020 presidential election (New Window) with political and social issues.
Before the 2020 campaign, these were pages that posted links to websites that reported news on specific topics, such as religion or dogs. “What we see here is very similar,” testifies this former member of the team responsible for detecting malicious content and influencing operations on meta-platforms and ensuring compliance with the rules.
As Election Day got closer, these pages began to convert into pro-Trump pages or pro-Biden pages, he continues.
Data scientist Jeff Allen, another former Meta integrity team member, raised the alarm about these troll farms in an internal report published by MIT Technology Review in September 2021 (New Window). Specifically, he explained that the most popular Christian and African American sites in the United States in 2019 were actually troll factories managed from Eastern Europe.
It is not normal. That’s not healthy, Jeff Allen wrote in his report. We have enabled actors with fraudulent behavior to attract large audiences for largely unknown reasons.
In his document, Jeff Allen complained that Facebook had failed to take necessary steps to prevent foreign actors from reaching large American audiences with political content.
The basic tactics of troll farms have changed little since they were discovered in 2016, he wrote, noting that they are less about politics than before. Fundamentally, we have not yet implemented a comprehensive solution to reduce their success.
Open in full screen mode
These screenshots of religious troll farm pages come from Jeff Allen’s leaked report and are similar to religious pages on the Vietnamese network.
Photo: screenshot
A question of priorities
The report found that the goal of most of these sites was probably not to influence public opinion, but to make money by exploiting people’s political interest.
Advertising revenue from articles was a way for these sites to generate income, but they could also sell goods, such as hats with the image of a politician. The fact remains that these sites may well have been used to influence public opinion and that the administrators of some of them were in contact with the Internet Research Agency (IRA) (New Window), the famous Russian troll factory, it is said move forward in the report without drawing final conclusions about their objectives.
The researcher regretted that the platform did not fundamentally change the way it distributed content in its news feed after the 2016 presidential election. According to him, Facebook gave more visibility to the content that generated the most attention. Interactions without having a system in place to ensure that sources are credible and original, as Google has done.
The other former Meta integrity team member we spoke to says that certain measures implemented after the 2020 election should prevent a repeat of such a scenario: If Facebook discovers that content about local politics is being produced abroad, In theory it should limit their scope. However, because the Vietnamese network’s hundreds of pages do not cover political topics, they are currently beyond the reach of Meta’s teams, he believes.
I don’t think anything will happen to these sites for now. There are not enough people on the integrity team to take action against this. It’s not that employees don’t care: it’s just that you have to prioritize your time ruthlessly. However, the focus is on the socio-political content.
According to him, those responsible for these sites could face difficulties if they decided to turn to political content as a result of these new measures. However, there are no guarantees as the team responsible for integrity at Meta made significant cuts last spring (New Window).
Malicious actors eventually figure out how to bypass the measures. Once they adapt, there may be no one left to stop them, the former Meta employee fears.
Basically, the alarm should be raised if these sites change their vocation and become political, he says. But I don’t know if these systems are still active, efficient and up to date. Many of the people who developed them no longer work for this company.
Launch of the Youtube widget. Skip widget?
End of Youtube widget. Return to the top of the widget?
Like today’s meta, says expert
Camille Alloing, director of the Laboratory on Influence and Communication (Labfluens) at UQAM, also believes that the most dangerous aspect of this network of pages and websites is that it could take a political turn.
The concrete risk is that these pages will be resold to political parties, political activists or states, or even that they will be created for this purpose, he believes, recalling that such scenarios do not always occur.
Nevertheless, this network is certainly spam, i.e. repetitive, mass-published content of low quality that should not exist on Facebook, emphasize Mr. Alloing and the former Meta employee we spoke to. . Given the publishing tools used by the managers of this network, Camille Alloing assumes that the operation is semi-automated.
Although the pages violate several of Facebook’s rules, Meta benefits from having them on its platform, says Camille Alloing.
Facebook is less interested in content and more interested in whether content provokes reactions. It generates clicks, it generates attention and it ensures that people who interact with the pages are seen as active users, he explains. This allows for more targeted advertising and gives investors the impression that the platform is “alive,” not to mention that the sites pay Meta to distribute their thousands of ads.
So it’s all “good” – in quotes – as long as no one complains about it. And what I mean by “nobody” is this: when too many advertisers complain about it or when too many users decide to leave the platform out of boredom, explains Camille Alloing. This matter says a lot about the platform economy and digital economy we currently find ourselves in.
