21 ms·

Almost All of Facebook’s Top Christian Pages in 2019 Run by Foreign Troll Farms

577 points by mhoad 5y ago

yesenadam 5y ago
> https://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-gaming/almost-all-of-facebooks-top-christian-pages-are-run-by-foreign-troll-farms/ https://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-gaming/almost-... Why not link instead to the article this article links to and is based on, which is far more informative: Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  I find that number so shocking that I question the methodology behind it. 140 million is nearly half of all Americans. I can see nearly half of all Americans regularly engaging with SOME Facebook property, if you include Instagram and WhatsApp, etc. But the original old Facebook itself? In the 2020’s? I don’t know a single person who still uses that.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    I've heard that some online accounts don't actually represent real human beings. Perhaps they counted some of those "fake" accounts?
  - tylerrobinson 5y ago
    Perhaps your perspective is based on your demographics or location? In my anecdotal experience I know vanishingly few people who are not on “original old Facebook”. Male, 30s, southeast US.
    - StevePerkins 5y ago
      There's a difference between "having an account" (I do too), versus "being any kind of active user". I am responding to a quote claiming that troll fake news "reached 140 million on Facebook". Clearly, this is speaking to the latter. You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms. That's not "I login once in a blue moon to spy on my ex", or "I have Messenger on my phone because a group that I'm in uses it to announce events". That is "I actively choose to consume angry and dumb political content on a regular basis". Perhaps I overestimate people, but 140 million seems high.
      - pwinnski 5y ago
        > You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms. I think you are missing the point of this research. The entire point is that 19 of the top 20 Christian pages, for example, are produced by offshore troll farms, and until recently, this was generally not known. So no, you do not need to be a fairly active user, not at all. Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide.
        tylerrobinson 5y ago
        > Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide. That's my take, too. I know exactly the sort of mass-produced garbage content they're talking about, since I see things that my friends interacted with in my Feed. Therefore I am part of the 140 million people who was exposed to the media produced by these operations.
  - peterthehacker 5y ago
    300M Americans are on FB[0] 7/10 Americans are Christian[1] So, there are around 210M American Christians on FB. So, these posts reached roughly 60% of Christians. Sounds feasible to me. Top brands in a niche like Christians can get broad reach. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_S...
mlang23 5y ago
Yes? Hit me for that, but I'd say most religions are a troll farm in some way or another, so no surpise there...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  Do you, per chance, "fucking love science"?
  - adenozine 5y ago
    Wow, you hit the nail on the head. Struck too many nerves, I suppose. I voted you up. I'm glad you wrote it.
    - orwin 5y ago
      (I'm not in the US, i don't understand the reference, care to explain?)
      - paulgb 5y ago
        There was (is?) a popular Facebook page called I Fucking Love Science https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/03/dont-trust-that-facebook-page-you-love.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/03/dont-trust-that-face...
- 4gotunameagain 5y ago
  As a counter argument, it's much better for people to believe in Jesus than the Kardashians, and any entity willing to destabilize a society knows it very well.
  - Retric 5y ago
    I don’t know the Kardashians are very American. Successful recent immigrants who then leveraged fame into substantial wealth. It’s not a flattering look at the American dream, but it’s not a bad thing to aspire to either.
mypastself 5y ago
The original report doesn’t actually mention misinformation campaigns as the linked article claims. The motivation seems to be exclusively monetary (ads, links, selling pages etc.). Nation states hostile to the U.S. might hypothetically have been involved, but I’ve seen no such conclusions made in the report.
- croon 5y ago
  It would be interesting if your information campaign against another nation had a net negative cost.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  It would be interesting to see the motivations. But the effect is the same: spreading discontent, fake news and extremism is bad whether people do it for profit or geopolitical advantages...
cable2600 5y ago
A lot of top pages are run by Foreign Troll Farms. They are paying customers for Facebook advertising so Facebook refuses to ban them.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  Like, this seems unlikely. Given their business model (get cheap clicks from FB, sell for slightly more) it's vanishingly unlikely that these pages have a FB rep in any real sense, and even less likely that said reps have any pull within the company. Now, if you'd said FB refuse to ban violating game advertisers, that would be a much more likely state of affairs.
netcan 5y ago
It's a little odd that the article focuses on "american" christianity. Don't these pages have global audiences? A lot of the "truth crisis" of online media relates to online media usage of the "invisible half." Facebook went orbital around the same time that the internet went universal. Smartphones made the internet available to all those people who hadn't been using it in the 1990s & 2000s. Around 2010, your uncle Dave got his first smartphone and started blasting hourly messages from mafia wars achievements. The average Angela & Gabriel from Manilla got connected to free, Facebook-only internet. No one pays much attention to the laggards directly. I mean, they are noticeable in FBs DAUs, amazon's gross sales and such. They're just rarely noticed as disaggregated people. Facebook, or any distant tech company, has no idea what kind of impact they are have on this vast sea of people. Billions of people go from non computer users to using their smartphones for their media and communications, and no one close to Zuck speaks the language or has any idea what's going on. We learn in retrospect. For most of the arab spring, social media was the official headquarters of dozens of active rebels, revolutionaries, political movements and everything in between. They had recruited armies on social media before the companies paid much attention to it. Trump, Brexit, most political events of the last decade have been heavily tied to this phenomenon. It will keep happening. Consider this. The current religious makeup of the world is the legacy of various religious explosions where a belief system "went viral," one way or another. From now on, this happens online. The next vatican will be built in Zuck's front yard. From his perspective, he'll just discover one day that facebook now hosts the world's largest religion.
- pjc50 5y ago
  The way I phrase this is that Twitter is a revolutionary technology: it'll give your country a revolution whether it needs it or not.
  - netcan 5y ago
    Kind of agree, but I think it should be twitter, not FB. Twitter is inherently more "revolutionary" in aesthetics. Lots of politics, shrill arguments and such. It's also popular among journalists, politicians, and such. It represents a relatively elite user base. FB is the populist social media site. Your Uncle who never had a computer until he got a smartphone in 2013, he's a facebook user. The fisherman who got a smartphone before home electricity, he's a facebook user. The dichotomy isn't necessarily FB-Twitter, but a lot of social media's political stuff in the west (Brexit, Trump...) has come from the non elite parts of social media. It was neither mainstream nor fringe, which hints at the populism of it. Religion is a great candidate for revolution. Major power shifts could happen in broad daylight and journalists, politicians and social media execs probably wouldn't even notice.
vintermann 5y ago
It's a simple thing, but many who write about propaganda don't seem to get it: Propaganda can be divided into positioning and payload. Positioning is what is written to attract an audience. Payload is what the propagandist actually cares about. There's very little payload. These farms aren't trying to "spread chaos" for its own sake. It's just a side effect of trying to gain an audience; clickbait media at its height was exactly the same. Don't think the payload has anything to do with cultural issues. It's either narrow political stuff (I.e. getting people to believe Syrian rebels staged deadly attacks on themselves) or simply profit.
- dgudkov 5y ago
  I would argue that not having a payload makes it even more dangerous. At least, when there is a payload you know what you're dealing with. When there usually is no payload, it may suddenly appear and be very surprising in its reach and effect.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  For me the disappointment is Facebook. It seems to be all propaganda, possibly for clicks not payload, but very little actual content. Or really anything organic. Just a weird mish-mash of gamed blah.
  - snarf21 5y ago
    Very true but the reason for it is that it is insanely profitable. This is the real ends for everything on FB. I always say "ain't no one convincing nobody about nothing" on FB. It is faux outrage for profit and until we start taxing digital advertising revenue, this will continue to be the world we live in.
    - MandieD 5y ago
      “Start taxing digital advertising revenue” That’s it. Not profits (too many games possible), but the revenue itself. Call your senators and representatives.
pjc50 5y ago
This is an outrage. They should be run by American troll farms. (Joking, but a huge part of the reformation wars that consumed Europe for at least a hundred years was the question of foreign influence through the pulpit vs. domestic political loyalty/propaganda; you can still occasionally hear people denouncing "papism")
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  American Christianity has deeply influenced the remnants of Christianity that are left in Western Europe, the Evangelical movement first crossed the Atlantic all the way back in the 1920s. And we so easily forget that countries like Poland and Hungary are deeply Christian conservative countries with links to American republicans. Yes the foreign American influence is real.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    European Christians are either catholic (Poland comes to mind), Orthodox (maybe Hingary, not sure. Russia definetly is) or Protestant (which have nothing whatsoever to do with US Evangelicals). That these groups have some overlap regarding abortion, LGBTQ rights, feminism or Islam doesn't change the fact they disagree on a lot of other things.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  I have not heard this, and certainly not as a major cause, but don’t forget the greed of the princes who supported the Reformation. The lust for church property and unchecked power. In England this is especially visible where the trigger was not a theological dispute and the looting of church property was widespread.
- Gunax 5y ago
  I don't think that should be a joke. The publication conflates being foreign with trolling. It seems they care more about the speaker than the content. At this point, trolling as a term has lost all meaning. It basically means anything that isn't standard left-wing-lite inclusivity.
doitLP 5y ago
From the linked MIT article: > In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. Why wouldn’t this article mention the Black American content as well? Certainly this is newsworthy, given the crucial implication here: foreign actors were pushing opposite views on many topics in order to manufacture division.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  A surprising number of Black Americans are Christians, too. Maybe they just got conflated.
  - haldunud 5y ago
    > A surprising number of Black Americans are Christians, too. Why's does that surprise you? Christianity is most popular in poor black southern regions. Black people are more likely to be Christians than white people. Christianity is also much stronger in Africa than in the West. I think it's possible in the near future Christianity will become a predominantly black 'thing' worldwide. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/23/black-americans-are-more-likely-than-overall-public-to-be-christian-protestant/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/23/black-ameri...
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      They don't appear much in mainstream media, though. You're more likely to hear about the Nation Of Islam or the Black Hebrew Israelites.
      - haldunud 5y ago
        > They don't appear much in mainstream media, though. Not sure if you're joking? The black evangelical Christian church is a media trope. It's a huge part of many black communities in the US, especially in the south.
      - 5y ago
iamben 5y ago
I'd very much like to see the same research with regards to the top alternative health / anti-vax pages.
- tgv 5y ago
  Quite likely that troll farms are active there. Most likely on identity and environmental issues, too. I still have some hope that Zuckerberg will come out soon and say that it was all a big practical joke to see how much people are willing to put up with, after which he pulls the plug. Well, one can dream.
- pixl97 5y ago
  "Prayer Warriors Unite" Even more interesting would be Christian anti-vax since this would seem to involve many of the already existing networks discussed here. I've been following the Herman Cain Awards for some time now and you notice a consistency in the memes among particular groups of users. Same with phrasing and messaging. How much discourse is actually affected by these troll farms would be very interesting indeed as it has real life impact, such as huge numbers of needless deaths.
- jerf 5y ago
  You don't need to. There are troll farms everywhere there is a critical density sufficient to pay for them to exist through ads. That condition is sufficient. It's not even just about politics. There are multiple large troll farms unbelievably dedicated to producing completely bullshit "life hack" videos that blatantly don't work as posted. This is non-trivially expensive content to produce (not Hollywood-level expensive, of course, but the video content is beyond "point an iPhone at it" level by quite a ways), and it is produced by the bucketload, because the ad viewership is there. These are parasites that attack any sufficiently-sized interest group of any kind.
yosito 5y ago
Turns out tribal identity groups are easily hijacked.
- angelzen 5y ago
  If only humans could somehow thrive outside tribal identity groups. If only atomized unbounded skepticism turned cynicism were a long term solution.
  - yosito 5y ago
    Taking evolutionary psychology into account, probably the best long term solution is an organized religion that is strong enough not to be hijacked by troll farms. It seems that the easily hijacked Christian groups are due to weakened Christian institutions.
dgudkov 5y ago
Apparently, foreign state actors have been actively building competence and skills how to attract and manipulate large audiences on social networks. If you think you're smarter that those followers of Christian groups and you can't be manipulated, well, I have bad news for you.
tester34 5y ago
I think focusing on religion/christianity is missing the point here - it's irrelevant probably, the point is that on global web 2.0 websites there may be manipulation That's kinda weakness of english language itself, because when everybody is capable of using it, then it's hard to distinguish actual native speakers from foreign actors (and genuine users too) that are proficient at it, meanwhile let's say that you have group of people only using some not so popular language like X, then it's way harder to pretend to be X user, so at worst you're being trolled by people from your country which may not have as bad intentions. Or maybe I'm too optimistic about my not so popular language :)
- datavirtue 5y ago
  It is not irrelevant. It is a suceptible pool of people who "believe." Ripe for whatever con you want to operate at internet scale.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    And you don't believe? As the saying goes, atheists don't believe nothing, they believe anything. Your insinuation that Christianity implies credulity and unfounded wishful thinking says a lot.
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      == Your insinuation that Christianity implies credulity and unfounded wishful thinking says a lot.== It says almost as much as you insulting someone for having different beliefs than you. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing “believers” should do.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  Consider the source of the article. Religion is very much the point for a website with a "Faith" heading.
gigatexal 5y ago
Who’s got a worse spam problem: Facebook or Amazon?
shp0ngle 5y ago
I tried to find the listed pages and they are all down now. The research is from 2019.
nikkinana 5y ago
Almost all top pages on Facebook are run by foreign bot or troll farms. This isn't news.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Well, yes, platforms will be trolled. Facebook and co don't care who submitted the content or the truth value, the revenue is made elsewhere. Facebook is full of personal opinions and misleading articles, it will never qualify as journalism, it's wide open to such abuse.
logicalmonster 5y ago
I have a few questions that may have some reasonable answers, but would hopefully spur some thoughtful discussion. 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link. 2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues. 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content? 4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll? 5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people.
- mistermann 5y ago
  My question is whether the location could be spoofed using a VPN or something like this...could it not?
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Pretty sure FB doesn't rely on just IP address to locate its users.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      I am interested in the means by which they DO identify user location, and whether the ones they use can be spoofed. And for those who cannot help but ask "But why would....", while that is an interesting and valid question, it is orthogonal to this specific question.
Brendinooo 5y ago
> Troll farms—professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks How is this any different than what BuzzFeed or Upworthy were doing ten years ago to build their audiences? It's frustrating that we're not shown content from these groups. Hard to imagine that stuff from "Happiness Is In Your Mind" or "Positive Quotes" lines up with the kind of stuff you'd imagine when you see the words "troll farm".
kongin 5y ago
>These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia So the two poorest countries in Europe. And ones with incredibly pro-US stances, to the point where they don't have a foreign policy beyond whatever the US ambassador tells them to do. What the article says without realizing it is that making a living off journalism is impossible in the first world. The rent extracted from monopoly advertising by Facebook and Google has made the majority of journalism and editorial jobs and all the distribution jobs that were part of newspapers untenable. So you need to find the cheapest English(ish) speakers you can to both write the articles and be the equivalent of the news paper boy. If I were a younger man I'd head to Nigeria and start a troll farm there because the living standard is even lower than that of Macedonia and the number of English speakers higher.
- angelzen 5y ago
  It's not the rent per se, it's the scale. FB/G outcompeted traditional media by having lower margins, compensated by scale. Alas, turns out healthy social systems are sustained through better information nutrition than mass-produced low cost soylent.
paunthony 5y ago
There are also a lot of Facebook political pages that are run by paid trolls.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
I find the headline to be incomplete to the point of incomprehensibility. Both Facebook and Christianity are international in scope – what on Earth makes a Christian page on Facebook "foreign"?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pmlnr 5y ago
I ran into one of these many years ago. Reported them as obviously fake, nothing happened.
InfiniteRand 5y ago
I think this is an interesting part "For the most part, the people who see and engage with these posts don’t actually “like” the pages they’re coming from. Facebook’s engagement-hungry algorithm is simply shipping them what it thinks they want to see." Correct me if I'm wrong but this seems like the issue is that content farms are able to successfully target Facebook's algorithm. (At least for certain topics)
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  All of these posts are feeding off the FB's "share" functionality. Almost no one is engaging with these posts on the page. These posts spread like wildfire because someone will be scrolling through FB, see a meme they get a chuckle out of or agree with, then hit the share button, never taking into account the source of that material. With this sharing, the post spreads like wildfire from timeline to timeline.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  That's just how recommendations work on social media platforms these days... If you only saw posts from people/pages you've explicitly followed then discoverability becomes a challenge
jablongo 5y ago
It’s interesting that the accounts would be originating from Kosovo and (north) Macedonia. I assume these are just Russians routing thru Kosovar IPs for more deniability, or alternatively this could be tacitly sanctioned by Serbian govt. Anyhow, Kosovo relies heavily on the US, exists only because of a US bombing campaign, and is one of the only places in the world to have a 10ft statue of Bill Clinton in the capitol. I know less about (North) Macedonia, but it is a NATO member and also another state resulting from the dissolution of Yugoslavia; not sure if it is seen as a US puppet state in the same way as Kosovo is but there is some similarity. The origins of the accounts appear to be making a statement about American hegemony...
- desireco42 5y ago
  No, not really, they developed business in Macedonia mostly and now clearly Albanian gangs are joining in. It is quite lucrative to post about anything controversial and they specialize in that kind of business. Albanians do care about US, but as much as they can extract favors. For example, Hillary was very popular (kind of not what you would expect) and they were able to make a lot on posting things about her for a long time, elections and after.
  - tlogan 5y ago
    This is more like ice crem joke … Question: Do you know why near every ice cream shop in Croatia is run by Albanians? Answer: money
    - jablongo 5y ago
      Oh man. I was just there, so true :) - Albanians are industrious af.
    - desireco42 5y ago
      They do that well :) And you know, maybe if you get on their turf you disappear. So there is that part as well.
- cedilla 5y ago
eigengrau5150 5y ago
Matthew 7:15 comes to mind. > Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-15.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-15.htm I guess this verse doesn't get much love in sermons, though. It might lead the flock to suspect their shepherds.
jrochkind1 5y ago
A friend asked some questions I wasn't sure what my answers to were, and am curious what people here think: What is the definition of a "troll"? What makes these pages different than any other large social media page, almost all of which are presumably run by people for eyeball-click-generating financial purposes, just like these?
sly010 5y ago
> “We have empowered inauthentic actors to accumulate huge followings for largely unknown purposes.” So, almost like a religion?
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Outrage is hugely profitable. Of course, the media eventually converged on this method after their golden goose of classified ads got pulled from under their feet by craigslist Facebook eBay etc. I wonder how future historians will view this; in hindsight, will we be able to say it was an accident of economics that drove the outrage of today? It’s no surprise that economically disadvantaged countries would have some subset of people taking advantage of the situation. It is no different than how the mafia takes advantage of gambling, etc.
JasonFruit 5y ago
This would be such a relief to me, as it would suggest that many of the trivial, shallow, grossly unchristian things that circulate from those groups don't reflect what Christians think and believe, but instead follow what games Facebook and serves foreign interests. I understand it's not good news in general, but it's reassuring to people who expect more of Christianity.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This would be such a relief to me, as it would suggest that much of the trivial, shallow, grossly unchristian things that circulate from those groups doesn't reflect what Christians think and believe, but instead what games Facebook and serves foreign interests. I understand it's not good news in general, but it's reassuring to people who expect more of Christianity. Its not reassuring, IMO, because the reason it effectively games Facebook and serves foreign interest in is because American Christians lap it up and relay it.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    That's true, but I'd still rather American Christians be susceptible to the same manipulation as everyone else than that they originate such drivel.
    - ftio 5y ago
      What's the difference? My family members who repost these things don't feel manipulated at all, by any of this. They agree with it, passionately.
anm89 5y ago
I did a free "birthright" style trip to Israel when I was younger. One of the events during the trip was a presentation from some business executive that was also a hasidic jew that founded and ran a holding company that actually appeared to be a pretty seriously large business. I'll always remember though when he was going through all the businesses they owned that one was some media company that owned major networks and production companies for televangelism. I always thoughts that was hilarious.
spoonjim 5y ago
“Why are these other countries posting Christian content! That’s American!”
OJFord 5y ago
'Foreign' to Christianity? Just 'by troll farms' is sufficient, surely. (Or else 'Christian page' is under-qualified.)
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
The point is, these trolls are stirring up discontent between Americans. Playing “both sides” against each other.

577 points by mhoad 5y ago

> https://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-gaming/almost-all-of-facebooks-top-christian-pages-are-run-by-foreign-troll-farms/ https://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/tech-gaming/almost-... Why not link instead to the article this article links to and is based on, which is far more informative: Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

StevePerkins 5y ago
I find that number so shocking that I question the methodology behind it. 140 million is nearly half of all Americans. I can see nearly half of all Americans regularly engaging with SOME Facebook property, if you include Instagram and WhatsApp, etc. But the original old Facebook itself? In the 2020’s? I don’t know a single person who still uses that.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  I've heard that some online accounts don't actually represent real human beings. Perhaps they counted some of those "fake" accounts?
- tylerrobinson 5y ago
  Perhaps your perspective is based on your demographics or location? In my anecdotal experience I know vanishingly few people who are not on “original old Facebook”. Male, 30s, southeast US.
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    There's a difference between "having an account" (I do too), versus "being any kind of active user". I am responding to a quote claiming that troll fake news "reached 140 million on Facebook". Clearly, this is speaking to the latter. You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms. That's not "I login once in a blue moon to spy on my ex", or "I have Messenger on my phone because a group that I'm in uses it to announce events". That is "I actively choose to consume angry and dumb political content on a regular basis". Perhaps I overestimate people, but 140 million seems high.
    - pwinnski 5y ago
      > You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms. I think you are missing the point of this research. The entire point is that 19 of the top 20 Christian pages, for example, are produced by offshore troll farms, and until recently, this was generally not known. So no, you do not need to be a fairly active user, not at all. Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide.
      - tylerrobinson 5y ago
        > Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide. That's my take, too. I know exactly the sort of mass-produced garbage content they're talking about, since I see things that my friends interacted with in my Feed. Therefore I am part of the 140 million people who was exposed to the media produced by these operations.
- peterthehacker 5y ago
  300M Americans are on FB[0] 7/10 Americans are Christian[1] So, there are around 210M American Christians on FB. So, these posts reached roughly 60% of Christians. Sounds feasible to me. Top brands in a niche like Christians can get broad reach. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-facebook-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_S...

mlang23 5y ago

Yes? Hit me for that, but I'd say most religions are a troll farm in some way or another, so no surpise there...

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
Do you, per chance, "fucking love science"?
- adenozine 5y ago
  Wow, you hit the nail on the head. Struck too many nerves, I suppose. I voted you up. I'm glad you wrote it.
  - orwin 5y ago
    (I'm not in the US, i don't understand the reference, care to explain?)
    - paulgb 5y ago
      There was (is?) a popular Facebook page called I Fucking Love Science https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/03/dont-trust-that-facebook-page-you-love.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/03/dont-trust-that-face...
4gotunameagain 5y ago
As a counter argument, it's much better for people to believe in Jesus than the Kardashians, and any entity willing to destabilize a society knows it very well.
- Retric 5y ago
  I don’t know the Kardashians are very American. Successful recent immigrants who then leveraged fame into substantial wealth. It’s not a flattering look at the American dream, but it’s not a bad thing to aspire to either.

mypastself 5y ago

The original report doesn’t actually mention misinformation campaigns as the linked article claims. The motivation seems to be exclusively monetary (ads, links, selling pages etc.). Nation states hostile to the U.S. might hypothetically have been involved, but I’ve seen no such conclusions made in the report.

croon 5y ago
It would be interesting if your information campaign against another nation had a net negative cost.
LatteLazy 5y ago
It would be interesting to see the motivations. But the effect is the same: spreading discontent, fake news and extremism is bad whether people do it for profit or geopolitical advantages...

cable2600 5y ago

A lot of top pages are run by Foreign Troll Farms. They are paying customers for Facebook advertising so Facebook refuses to ban them.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Like, this seems unlikely. Given their business model (get cheap clicks from FB, sell for slightly more) it's vanishingly unlikely that these pages have a FB rep in any real sense, and even less likely that said reps have any pull within the company. Now, if you'd said FB refuse to ban violating game advertisers, that would be a much more likely state of affairs.

netcan 5y ago

It's a little odd that the article focuses on "american" christianity. Don't these pages have global audiences? A lot of the "truth crisis" of online media relates to online media usage of the "invisible half." Facebook went orbital around the same time that the internet went universal. Smartphones made the internet available to all those people who hadn't been using it in the 1990s & 2000s. Around 2010, your uncle Dave got his first smartphone and started blasting hourly messages from mafia wars achievements. The average Angela & Gabriel from Manilla got connected to free, Facebook-only internet. No one pays much attention to the laggards directly. I mean, they are noticeable in FBs DAUs, amazon's gross sales and such. They're just rarely noticed as disaggregated people. Facebook, or any distant tech company, has no idea what kind of impact they are have on this vast sea of people. Billions of people go from non computer users to using their smartphones for their media and communications, and no one close to Zuck speaks the language or has any idea what's going on. We learn in retrospect. For most of the arab spring, social media was the official headquarters of dozens of active rebels, revolutionaries, political movements and everything in between. They had recruited armies on social media before the companies paid much attention to it. Trump, Brexit, most political events of the last decade have been heavily tied to this phenomenon. It will keep happening. Consider this. The current religious makeup of the world is the legacy of various religious explosions where a belief system "went viral," one way or another. From now on, this happens online. The next vatican will be built in Zuck's front yard. From his perspective, he'll just discover one day that facebook now hosts the world's largest religion.

pjc50 5y ago
The way I phrase this is that Twitter is a revolutionary technology: it'll give your country a revolution whether it needs it or not.
- netcan 5y ago
  Kind of agree, but I think it should be twitter, not FB. Twitter is inherently more "revolutionary" in aesthetics. Lots of politics, shrill arguments and such. It's also popular among journalists, politicians, and such. It represents a relatively elite user base. FB is the populist social media site. Your Uncle who never had a computer until he got a smartphone in 2013, he's a facebook user. The fisherman who got a smartphone before home electricity, he's a facebook user. The dichotomy isn't necessarily FB-Twitter, but a lot of social media's political stuff in the west (Brexit, Trump...) has come from the non elite parts of social media. It was neither mainstream nor fringe, which hints at the populism of it. Religion is a great candidate for revolution. Major power shifts could happen in broad daylight and journalists, politicians and social media execs probably wouldn't even notice.

vintermann 5y ago

It's a simple thing, but many who write about propaganda don't seem to get it: Propaganda can be divided into positioning and payload. Positioning is what is written to attract an audience. Payload is what the propagandist actually cares about. There's very little payload. These farms aren't trying to "spread chaos" for its own sake. It's just a side effect of trying to gain an audience; clickbait media at its height was exactly the same. Don't think the payload has anything to do with cultural issues. It's either narrow political stuff (I.e. getting people to believe Syrian rebels staged deadly attacks on themselves) or simply profit.

dgudkov 5y ago
I would argue that not having a payload makes it even more dangerous. At least, when there is a payload you know what you're dealing with. When there usually is no payload, it may suddenly appear and be very surprising in its reach and effect.
rich_sasha 5y ago
For me the disappointment is Facebook. It seems to be all propaganda, possibly for clicks not payload, but very little actual content. Or really anything organic. Just a weird mish-mash of gamed blah.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Very true but the reason for it is that it is insanely profitable. This is the real ends for everything on FB. I always say "ain't no one convincing nobody about nothing" on FB. It is faux outrage for profit and until we start taxing digital advertising revenue, this will continue to be the world we live in.
  - MandieD 5y ago
    “Start taxing digital advertising revenue” That’s it. Not profits (too many games possible), but the revenue itself. Call your senators and representatives.

pjc50 5y ago

This is an outrage. They should be run by American troll farms. (Joking, but a huge part of the reformation wars that consumed Europe for at least a hundred years was the question of foreign influence through the pulpit vs. domestic political loyalty/propaganda; you can still occasionally hear people denouncing "papism")

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
American Christianity has deeply influenced the remnants of Christianity that are left in Western Europe, the Evangelical movement first crossed the Atlantic all the way back in the 1920s. And we so easily forget that countries like Poland and Hungary are deeply Christian conservative countries with links to American republicans. Yes the foreign American influence is real.
- hef19898 5y ago
  European Christians are either catholic (Poland comes to mind), Orthodox (maybe Hingary, not sure. Russia definetly is) or Protestant (which have nothing whatsoever to do with US Evangelicals). That these groups have some overlap regarding abortion, LGBTQ rights, feminism or Islam doesn't change the fact they disagree on a lot of other things.
bobthechef 5y ago
I have not heard this, and certainly not as a major cause, but don’t forget the greed of the princes who supported the Reformation. The lust for church property and unchecked power. In England this is especially visible where the trigger was not a theological dispute and the looting of church property was widespread.
Gunax 5y ago
I don't think that should be a joke. The publication conflates being foreign with trolling. It seems they care more about the speaker than the content. At this point, trolling as a term has lost all meaning. It basically means anything that isn't standard left-wing-lite inclusivity.

doitLP 5y ago

From the linked MIT article: > In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. Why wouldn’t this article mention the Black American content as well? Certainly this is newsworthy, given the crucial implication here: foreign actors were pushing opposite views on many topics in order to manufacture division.

zozbot234 5y ago
A surprising number of Black Americans are Christians, too. Maybe they just got conflated.
- haldunud 5y ago
  > A surprising number of Black Americans are Christians, too. Why's does that surprise you? Christianity is most popular in poor black southern regions. Black people are more likely to be Christians than white people. Christianity is also much stronger in Africa than in the West. I think it's possible in the near future Christianity will become a predominantly black 'thing' worldwide. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/23/black-americans-are-more-likely-than-overall-public-to-be-christian-protestant/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/23/black-ameri...
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    They don't appear much in mainstream media, though. You're more likely to hear about the Nation Of Islam or the Black Hebrew Israelites.
    - haldunud 5y ago
      > They don't appear much in mainstream media, though. Not sure if you're joking? The black evangelical Christian church is a media trope. It's a huge part of many black communities in the US, especially in the south.
    - 5y ago

iamben 5y ago

I'd very much like to see the same research with regards to the top alternative health / anti-vax pages.

tgv 5y ago
Quite likely that troll farms are active there. Most likely on identity and environmental issues, too. I still have some hope that Zuckerberg will come out soon and say that it was all a big practical joke to see how much people are willing to put up with, after which he pulls the plug. Well, one can dream.
pixl97 5y ago
"Prayer Warriors Unite" Even more interesting would be Christian anti-vax since this would seem to involve many of the already existing networks discussed here. I've been following the Herman Cain Awards for some time now and you notice a consistency in the memes among particular groups of users. Same with phrasing and messaging. How much discourse is actually affected by these troll farms would be very interesting indeed as it has real life impact, such as huge numbers of needless deaths.
jerf 5y ago
You don't need to. There are troll farms everywhere there is a critical density sufficient to pay for them to exist through ads. That condition is sufficient. It's not even just about politics. There are multiple large troll farms unbelievably dedicated to producing completely bullshit "life hack" videos that blatantly don't work as posted. This is non-trivially expensive content to produce (not Hollywood-level expensive, of course, but the video content is beyond "point an iPhone at it" level by quite a ways), and it is produced by the bucketload, because the ad viewership is there. These are parasites that attack any sufficiently-sized interest group of any kind.

yosito 5y ago

Turns out tribal identity groups are easily hijacked.

angelzen 5y ago
If only humans could somehow thrive outside tribal identity groups. If only atomized unbounded skepticism turned cynicism were a long term solution.
- yosito 5y ago
  Taking evolutionary psychology into account, probably the best long term solution is an organized religion that is strong enough not to be hijacked by troll farms. It seems that the easily hijacked Christian groups are due to weakened Christian institutions.

dgudkov 5y ago

Apparently, foreign state actors have been actively building competence and skills how to attract and manipulate large audiences on social networks. If you think you're smarter that those followers of Christian groups and you can't be manipulated, well, I have bad news for you.

tester34 5y ago

I think focusing on religion/christianity is missing the point here - it's irrelevant probably, the point is that on global web 2.0 websites there may be manipulation That's kinda weakness of english language itself, because when everybody is capable of using it, then it's hard to distinguish actual native speakers from foreign actors (and genuine users too) that are proficient at it, meanwhile let's say that you have group of people only using some not so popular language like X, then it's way harder to pretend to be X user, so at worst you're being trolled by people from your country which may not have as bad intentions. Or maybe I'm too optimistic about my not so popular language :)

datavirtue 5y ago
It is not irrelevant. It is a suceptible pool of people who "believe." Ripe for whatever con you want to operate at internet scale.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  And you don't believe? As the saying goes, atheists don't believe nothing, they believe anything. Your insinuation that Christianity implies credulity and unfounded wishful thinking says a lot.
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    == Your insinuation that Christianity implies credulity and unfounded wishful thinking says a lot.== It says almost as much as you insulting someone for having different beliefs than you. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing “believers” should do.
dfxm12 5y ago
Consider the source of the article. Religion is very much the point for a website with a "Faith" heading.

gigatexal 5y ago

Who’s got a worse spam problem: Facebook or Amazon?

shp0ngle 5y ago

I tried to find the listed pages and they are all down now. The research is from 2019.

nikkinana 5y ago

Almost all top pages on Facebook are run by foreign bot or troll farms. This isn't news.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Well, yes, platforms will be trolled. Facebook and co don't care who submitted the content or the truth value, the revenue is made elsewhere. Facebook is full of personal opinions and misleading articles, it will never qualify as journalism, it's wide open to such abuse.

logicalmonster 5y ago

I have a few questions that may have some reasonable answers, but would hopefully spur some thoughtful discussion. 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link. 2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues. 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content? 4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll? 5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people.

mistermann 5y ago
My question is whether the location could be spoofed using a VPN or something like this...could it not?
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Pretty sure FB doesn't rely on just IP address to locate its users.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    I am interested in the means by which they DO identify user location, and whether the ones they use can be spoofed. And for those who cannot help but ask "But why would....", while that is an interesting and valid question, it is orthogonal to this specific question.

Brendinooo 5y ago

> Troll farms—professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks How is this any different than what BuzzFeed or Upworthy were doing ten years ago to build their audiences? It's frustrating that we're not shown content from these groups. Hard to imagine that stuff from "Happiness Is In Your Mind" or "Positive Quotes" lines up with the kind of stuff you'd imagine when you see the words "troll farm".

kongin 5y ago

>These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia So the two poorest countries in Europe. And ones with incredibly pro-US stances, to the point where they don't have a foreign policy beyond whatever the US ambassador tells them to do. What the article says without realizing it is that making a living off journalism is impossible in the first world. The rent extracted from monopoly advertising by Facebook and Google has made the majority of journalism and editorial jobs and all the distribution jobs that were part of newspapers untenable. So you need to find the cheapest English(ish) speakers you can to both write the articles and be the equivalent of the news paper boy. If I were a younger man I'd head to Nigeria and start a troll farm there because the living standard is even lower than that of Macedonia and the number of English speakers higher.

angelzen 5y ago
It's not the rent per se, it's the scale. FB/G outcompeted traditional media by having lower margins, compensated by scale. Alas, turns out healthy social systems are sustained through better information nutrition than mass-produced low cost soylent.

paunthony 5y ago

There are also a lot of Facebook political pages that are run by paid trolls.

Mordisquitos 5y ago

I find the headline to be incomplete to the point of incomprehensibility. Both Facebook and Christianity are international in scope – what on Earth makes a Christian page on Facebook "foreign"?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pmlnr 5y ago

I ran into one of these many years ago. Reported them as obviously fake, nothing happened.

InfiniteRand 5y ago

I think this is an interesting part "For the most part, the people who see and engage with these posts don’t actually “like” the pages they’re coming from. Facebook’s engagement-hungry algorithm is simply shipping them what it thinks they want to see." Correct me if I'm wrong but this seems like the issue is that content farms are able to successfully target Facebook's algorithm. (At least for certain topics)

_fat_santa 5y ago
All of these posts are feeding off the FB's "share" functionality. Almost no one is engaging with these posts on the page. These posts spread like wildfire because someone will be scrolling through FB, see a meme they get a chuckle out of or agree with, then hit the share button, never taking into account the source of that material. With this sharing, the post spreads like wildfire from timeline to timeline.
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
That's just how recommendations work on social media platforms these days... If you only saw posts from people/pages you've explicitly followed then discoverability becomes a challenge

jablongo 5y ago

It’s interesting that the accounts would be originating from Kosovo and (north) Macedonia. I assume these are just Russians routing thru Kosovar IPs for more deniability, or alternatively this could be tacitly sanctioned by Serbian govt. Anyhow, Kosovo relies heavily on the US, exists only because of a US bombing campaign, and is one of the only places in the world to have a 10ft statue of Bill Clinton in the capitol. I know less about (North) Macedonia, but it is a NATO member and also another state resulting from the dissolution of Yugoslavia; not sure if it is seen as a US puppet state in the same way as Kosovo is but there is some similarity. The origins of the accounts appear to be making a statement about American hegemony...

desireco42 5y ago
No, not really, they developed business in Macedonia mostly and now clearly Albanian gangs are joining in. It is quite lucrative to post about anything controversial and they specialize in that kind of business. Albanians do care about US, but as much as they can extract favors. For example, Hillary was very popular (kind of not what you would expect) and they were able to make a lot on posting things about her for a long time, elections and after.
- tlogan 5y ago
  This is more like ice crem joke … Question: Do you know why near every ice cream shop in Croatia is run by Albanians? Answer: money
  - jablongo 5y ago
    Oh man. I was just there, so true :) - Albanians are industrious af.
  - desireco42 5y ago
    They do that well :) And you know, maybe if you get on their turf you disappear. So there is that part as well.
cedilla 5y ago

eigengrau5150 5y ago

Matthew 7:15 comes to mind. > Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-15.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-15.htm I guess this verse doesn't get much love in sermons, though. It might lead the flock to suspect their shepherds.

jrochkind1 5y ago

A friend asked some questions I wasn't sure what my answers to were, and am curious what people here think: What is the definition of a "troll"? What makes these pages different than any other large social media page, almost all of which are presumably run by people for eyeball-click-generating financial purposes, just like these?

sly010 5y ago

> “We have empowered inauthentic actors to accumulate huge followings for largely unknown purposes.” So, almost like a religion?

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Outrage is hugely profitable. Of course, the media eventually converged on this method after their golden goose of classified ads got pulled from under their feet by craigslist Facebook eBay etc. I wonder how future historians will view this; in hindsight, will we be able to say it was an accident of economics that drove the outrage of today? It’s no surprise that economically disadvantaged countries would have some subset of people taking advantage of the situation. It is no different than how the mafia takes advantage of gambling, etc.

JasonFruit 5y ago

This would be such a relief to me, as it would suggest that many of the trivial, shallow, grossly unchristian things that circulate from those groups don't reflect what Christians think and believe, but instead follow what games Facebook and serves foreign interests. I understand it's not good news in general, but it's reassuring to people who expect more of Christianity.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> This would be such a relief to me, as it would suggest that much of the trivial, shallow, grossly unchristian things that circulate from those groups doesn't reflect what Christians think and believe, but instead what games Facebook and serves foreign interests. I understand it's not good news in general, but it's reassuring to people who expect more of Christianity. Its not reassuring, IMO, because the reason it effectively games Facebook and serves foreign interest in is because American Christians lap it up and relay it.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  That's true, but I'd still rather American Christians be susceptible to the same manipulation as everyone else than that they originate such drivel.
  - ftio 5y ago
    What's the difference? My family members who repost these things don't feel manipulated at all, by any of this. They agree with it, passionately.

anm89 5y ago

I did a free "birthright" style trip to Israel when I was younger. One of the events during the trip was a presentation from some business executive that was also a hasidic jew that founded and ran a holding company that actually appeared to be a pretty seriously large business. I'll always remember though when he was going through all the businesses they owned that one was some media company that owned major networks and production companies for televangelism. I always thoughts that was hilarious.

spoonjim 5y ago

“Why are these other countries posting Christian content! That’s American!”

OJFord 5y ago

'Foreign' to Christianity? Just 'by troll farms' is sufficient, surely. (Or else 'Christian page' is under-qualified.)

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

The point is, these trolls are stirring up discontent between Americans. Playing “both sides” against each other.