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Crucially, though, the report concludes that the farms’ motivations seem to be monetary. It points out that their content did not focus solely on divisive conte

Crucially, though, the report concludes that the farms’ motivations seem to be monetary. It points out that their content did not focus solely on divisive content, but on whatever generates clicks. Outrage bait is naturally a part of it, but the controversial content seems to be a means rather than the end goal.

dannyr 5y ago
So Facebook paid these troll farms and these payments went on to fund operation of these troll farms (I assume). It's a never-ending cycle that benefits both parties.
rattray 5y ago
How do they make money?
- mypastself 5y ago
  Ads, links, and page sales.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Produce content for idiots who'll believe ads and click on them
rich_sasha 5y ago
One way or the other, Facebook now seems to be a pipeline for spreading propaganda: for ad clicks (marketing), ideological reasons, or worse. It’s social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero, while its negative effects are worse than ever.
- mypastself 5y ago
  Oh, no argument there. And the report does point out potential relationships with political actors. I’m just amused by the irony of these types of articles making exaggerations and unfounded conclusions.
- WallyFunk 5y ago
  > It’s social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero Unless you live entirely in their Messenger app, which I do. The timeline is full of contraganda, spam, and things like `Tell me your favorite color without saying it` bullshit
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I’d argue that’s not really Facebook anymore than Instagram or WhatsApp are.
  - croon 5y ago
    This is 99% of my Facebook use too. I'd argue that the only meaningful benefit (to me at least) of Facebook is as a contact list and finder. I would delete my Facebook instantly if I felt fairly confident that I wouldn't lose out on any outreach from less-than-weekly acquaintances.
  - corpdronejuly 5y ago
    Just hide every content farm I find, and my feed is my old school friends day to day lives, local marketplace ads, and DnD Mini-painting groups. The worst thing I see are ads that are irrelevant, or my uncles deranged rants about his local politics. Took me about 2 weeks of hitting hide from content farms to train the algo to steer me away from that junk.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      I've been doing this for a few days and things are getting better. However I still spend a lot of time hitting hide all from...
    - nonfamous 5y ago
      Hmm, I wonder if Facebook could do that automatically? Like, write an algorithm to detect content farms and automatically hide them from your newsfeed. I wonder why they’ve never done that…
      - corpdronejuly 5y ago
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > One way or the other, Facebook now seems to be a pipeline for spreading propaganda: Facebook's overt business model is to be a platform for advertising (not just via overt ads, but also through paid reach of what looks like organic content). “Advertising” is just another word for “propaganda”. So, you've noticed that Facebook “now seems to be” exactly what Facebook overtly is.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    I don't mind ads interspersed with content. Like, I google something, I get some outright ads, and some higher-placed, paid-for links. But it's still a useful service for finding things. Facebook appears to be nothing but clickbaity ads, which if I'm lucky, is trying to get me to buy something I don't need. If I'm unlucky, it's ideological poison for hire fueling culture wars or foreign agents meddling in elections. I basically never use Facebook now, except if a friend asks me to post something, but whenever I do, and scroll through the timeline, I always end up depressed. Oh and yes, bombarded with all the weird stuff discussed in this thread.
- stevespang 5y ago
  Indeed, the internet has degraded into pure garbage.
- toyg 5y ago
  > social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero That's not true. It's actually the most effective grassroots-politics tool out there, for "regular people". Everyone has an account already, so signing up to this or that group takes seconds and you can get down to the business of actually organising. I saw it recently in my neighbourhood: local authority wanted to push a stupid change in road layout, a couple of guys set up a FB group, and in less than a month it had hundreds of members - the road change was protested so vigorously that it had to be scrapped, something rare around this town. Am I annoyed by this state of things? Heck yeah, I hate FB, but realistically, it's often a force for good for "normal people".
everdrive 5y ago
This is pretty interesting. We should all know this by now, but it's a nice reminder. Outrage sells, and when sites must increase clicks and "engagement," they will necessarily be generating outrage.
- Lamad123 5y ago
  Did these websites and social networks just discover that "outrage sells" or they've conditioned us to get more and more outrageous?!! It's kinda hard to tell!
- slivanes 5y ago
  I use the phrase "engagement or enragement, they still get you".
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> Crucially, though, the report concludes that the farms’ motivations seem to be monetary. It points out that their content did not focus solely on divisive content, but on whatever generates clicks. And who would be behind it if they followed the money? My money is on parties like the Heritage Foundation, which is a quite open front for rich conservatives to pump money into certain goals, and I'm sure there's plenty more that have escaped the spotlight for now. I mean yeah it's a conspiracy, but since it's in broad daylight nobody cares - it's not shady if it's out in the open.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  I don’t think Heritage Foundation is nearly hip enough or digitally savvy enough to make money this way. Their business model is to spend money on digital platforms like Facebook, fundraise from rich conservatives to enable that, and take a cut to pay for staff and overhead. This is more likely Eastern European scammers who are just looking to build an audience any way they can.
- paulgb 5y ago
  > And who would be behind it if they followed the money? Advertisers, probably. I worked in adtech doing fraud detection back in ~2013 and “fake news” sites were already prevalent, but their business model was usually boring old advertising. They were also big on ad fraud (e.g. serving ads in hidden iframes). That’s not to say that the Kremlin/IRA were not behind some of it, but Occam’s razor is that most fake news is just a result of sites with no incentive to do honest journalism trying to drive clicks.
api 5y ago
This really does show something though, namely how financial motives drive outrage and polarization as much if not more than political ones. On the YouTuber front there were more than one who jumped on the alt-right shock jock bandwagon back then for the same reason. It brought clicks both from the people attracted to that stuff and from the people outraged by it or just gawking at it.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I missed that on my read, thanks! Did you get that from the MIT Tech Review article, or the original Facebook report, or what? Can you post a quote?
- mypastself 5y ago
  I looked at the original report. Here are some quotes: “The content isn't violating or borderline. It does skew very hard towards clickbait and engagement bait, however.” “The religious pages tend to be a mixture of the heavy engagement bait like the meme from “Light of the World” and sensational click bait stories about children, animals, and police officers.” “Why Do They Do It? Money is definitely a big reason. There are a few ways to monetize an FB page. 1. Link to a domain where you show ads 2. Enter into our partnership programs 1. Instant Articles 2. Ad Breaks 3. Do sponsored posting and sharing 4. Sell the Page after it reaches a large size.” “Mostly, they seem to want to skim a quick buck off of their audience. But there are signs they have been in contact with the IRA... If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there.” The last quote is the one talking about potential political links. There are some serious concerns, but not as concrete as the claims made by the article.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Thanks! Seems like that report mostly just has speculation without much evidence about their motives, either way. I appreciate your caution about jumping to assume the motives are political, when financial motives on the internet are of course so common.
    - mypastself 5y ago
      True, I guess my interpretation also erred in favor of the other explanation, but the political motivations as interpreted by the article are far from clear-cut.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Unfortunately I don't find that FB is in decline. I've found that groups organized on FB on any particular hobby topic are much more successful and active than on other platforms. Recently formed a group for discussion of DIY electric farm equipment. 70 members joined in 1 day. FB feels like it should be a public utility. It is clearly filling a niche that people feel is needed. The barrier to entry to use is very low. I've encountered so many people who simply don't use other parts of the Internet much at all, and expect almost all content to be mediated through Facebook.
- SamBam 5y ago
  The thing is, because of Facebook's algorithm, even a hobby DIY group doesn't get treated as a completely-neutral public utility space. FB will still prioritize things that generate interactions. So if little bits of controversy slip into the DIY discussions, that's still what bubbles to the top of everyone's feed. It hasn't necessarily happened to your group, it may not necessarily happen, but the point is that this is what the algorithm was optimized to do.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    That is why I left all facebook hobby groups - the algorithm makes it hard to find interesting content.
omginternets 5y ago
I seem to recall the FSB making extensive use of financially-motivated troll farms. I’ll try to dig up a ref when I get home.
_fat_santa 5y ago
If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth. Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. I have a few thoughts on all of this. First off in a way I sympathize with all the folks running content farms abroad. You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I also think that much of this fake news is on Americans for eating the shit up. One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information.
- satellite2 5y ago
  > we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy I see your point but I don't necessarily agree. A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Navigating a trustless information landscape is incredibly time consuming as looking for sources and invalidating information is much more time consuming than producing it. Requiring people to stop acting on their "outrage" feeling is also extraordinary damageing to society as it also stops people from reacting to actual issues. Finally, if you look at the savvy people do you really believe that they are actually better at detecting fakes? It seems that they are better at identifying information sources that can be trusted, but once trust is established I'm pretty sure they don't spend all their cognitive resources trying to disprove everything they read (well some probably are). So a bit like with malware being more abundant on more popular OS, even if everyone moved to reputable sources, the trolls would move as well.
  - ashleyn 5y ago
    Censorship with little justification, all on top of sneering mockery of everything you may believe in, doesn't exactly strike me as the best way to promote trust.

dannyr 5y ago

So Facebook paid these troll farms and these payments went on to fund operation of these troll farms (I assume). It's a never-ending cycle that benefits both parties.

rattray 5y ago

How do they make money?

mypastself 5y ago
Ads, links, and page sales.
mavhc 5y ago
Produce content for idiots who'll believe ads and click on them

rich_sasha 5y ago

One way or the other, Facebook now seems to be a pipeline for spreading propaganda: for ad clicks (marketing), ideological reasons, or worse. It’s social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero, while its negative effects are worse than ever.

mypastself 5y ago
Oh, no argument there. And the report does point out potential relationships with political actors. I’m just amused by the irony of these types of articles making exaggerations and unfounded conclusions.
WallyFunk 5y ago
> It’s social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero Unless you live entirely in their Messenger app, which I do. The timeline is full of contraganda, spam, and things like `Tell me your favorite color without saying it` bullshit
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I’d argue that’s not really Facebook anymore than Instagram or WhatsApp are.
- croon 5y ago
  This is 99% of my Facebook use too. I'd argue that the only meaningful benefit (to me at least) of Facebook is as a contact list and finder. I would delete my Facebook instantly if I felt fairly confident that I wouldn't lose out on any outreach from less-than-weekly acquaintances.
- corpdronejuly 5y ago
  Just hide every content farm I find, and my feed is my old school friends day to day lives, local marketplace ads, and DnD Mini-painting groups. The worst thing I see are ads that are irrelevant, or my uncles deranged rants about his local politics. Took me about 2 weeks of hitting hide from content farms to train the algo to steer me away from that junk.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I've been doing this for a few days and things are getting better. However I still spend a lot of time hitting hide all from...
  - nonfamous 5y ago
    Hmm, I wonder if Facebook could do that automatically? Like, write an algorithm to detect content farms and automatically hide them from your newsfeed. I wonder why they’ve never done that…
    - corpdronejuly 5y ago
dragonwriter 5y ago
> One way or the other, Facebook now seems to be a pipeline for spreading propaganda: Facebook's overt business model is to be a platform for advertising (not just via overt ads, but also through paid reach of what looks like organic content). “Advertising” is just another word for “propaganda”. So, you've noticed that Facebook “now seems to be” exactly what Facebook overtly is.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  I don't mind ads interspersed with content. Like, I google something, I get some outright ads, and some higher-placed, paid-for links. But it's still a useful service for finding things. Facebook appears to be nothing but clickbaity ads, which if I'm lucky, is trying to get me to buy something I don't need. If I'm unlucky, it's ideological poison for hire fueling culture wars or foreign agents meddling in elections. I basically never use Facebook now, except if a friend asks me to post something, but whenever I do, and scroll through the timeline, I always end up depressed. Oh and yes, bombarded with all the weird stuff discussed in this thread.
stevespang 5y ago
Indeed, the internet has degraded into pure garbage.
toyg 5y ago
> social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero That's not true. It's actually the most effective grassroots-politics tool out there, for "regular people". Everyone has an account already, so signing up to this or that group takes seconds and you can get down to the business of actually organising. I saw it recently in my neighbourhood: local authority wanted to push a stupid change in road layout, a couple of guys set up a FB group, and in less than a month it had hundreds of members - the road change was protested so vigorously that it had to be scrapped, something rare around this town. Am I annoyed by this state of things? Heck yeah, I hate FB, but realistically, it's often a force for good for "normal people".

everdrive 5y ago

This is pretty interesting. We should all know this by now, but it's a nice reminder. Outrage sells, and when sites must increase clicks and "engagement," they will necessarily be generating outrage.

Lamad123 5y ago
Did these websites and social networks just discover that "outrage sells" or they've conditioned us to get more and more outrageous?!! It's kinda hard to tell!
slivanes 5y ago
I use the phrase "engagement or enragement, they still get you".

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> Crucially, though, the report concludes that the farms’ motivations seem to be monetary. It points out that their content did not focus solely on divisive content, but on whatever generates clicks. And who would be behind it if they followed the money? My money is on parties like the Heritage Foundation, which is a quite open front for rich conservatives to pump money into certain goals, and I'm sure there's plenty more that have escaped the spotlight for now. I mean yeah it's a conspiracy, but since it's in broad daylight nobody cares - it's not shady if it's out in the open.

snowwrestler 5y ago
I don’t think Heritage Foundation is nearly hip enough or digitally savvy enough to make money this way. Their business model is to spend money on digital platforms like Facebook, fundraise from rich conservatives to enable that, and take a cut to pay for staff and overhead. This is more likely Eastern European scammers who are just looking to build an audience any way they can.
paulgb 5y ago
> And who would be behind it if they followed the money? Advertisers, probably. I worked in adtech doing fraud detection back in ~2013 and “fake news” sites were already prevalent, but their business model was usually boring old advertising. They were also big on ad fraud (e.g. serving ads in hidden iframes). That’s not to say that the Kremlin/IRA were not behind some of it, but Occam’s razor is that most fake news is just a result of sites with no incentive to do honest journalism trying to drive clicks.

api 5y ago

This really does show something though, namely how financial motives drive outrage and polarization as much if not more than political ones. On the YouTuber front there were more than one who jumped on the alt-right shock jock bandwagon back then for the same reason. It brought clicks both from the people attracted to that stuff and from the people outraged by it or just gawking at it.

jrochkind1 5y ago

I missed that on my read, thanks! Did you get that from the MIT Tech Review article, or the original Facebook report, or what? Can you post a quote?

mypastself 5y ago
I looked at the original report. Here are some quotes: “The content isn't violating or borderline. It does skew very hard towards clickbait and engagement bait, however.” “The religious pages tend to be a mixture of the heavy engagement bait like the meme from “Light of the World” and sensational click bait stories about children, animals, and police officers.” “Why Do They Do It? Money is definitely a big reason. There are a few ways to monetize an FB page. 1. Link to a domain where you show ads 2. Enter into our partnership programs 1. Instant Articles 2. Ad Breaks 3. Do sponsored posting and sharing 4. Sell the Page after it reaches a large size.” “Mostly, they seem to want to skim a quick buck off of their audience. But there are signs they have been in contact with the IRA... If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there.” The last quote is the one talking about potential political links. There are some serious concerns, but not as concrete as the claims made by the article.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Thanks! Seems like that report mostly just has speculation without much evidence about their motives, either way. I appreciate your caution about jumping to assume the motives are political, when financial motives on the internet are of course so common.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    True, I guess my interpretation also erred in favor of the other explanation, but the political motivations as interpreted by the article are far from clear-cut.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Unfortunately I don't find that FB is in decline. I've found that groups organized on FB on any particular hobby topic are much more successful and active than on other platforms. Recently formed a group for discussion of DIY electric farm equipment. 70 members joined in 1 day. FB feels like it should be a public utility. It is clearly filling a niche that people feel is needed. The barrier to entry to use is very low. I've encountered so many people who simply don't use other parts of the Internet much at all, and expect almost all content to be mediated through Facebook.

SamBam 5y ago
The thing is, because of Facebook's algorithm, even a hobby DIY group doesn't get treated as a completely-neutral public utility space. FB will still prioritize things that generate interactions. So if little bits of controversy slip into the DIY discussions, that's still what bubbles to the top of everyone's feed. It hasn't necessarily happened to your group, it may not necessarily happen, but the point is that this is what the algorithm was optimized to do.
- bluGill 5y ago
  That is why I left all facebook hobby groups - the algorithm makes it hard to find interesting content.

omginternets 5y ago

I seem to recall the FSB making extensive use of financially-motivated troll farms. I’ll try to dig up a ref when I get home.

_fat_santa 5y ago

If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth. Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. I have a few thoughts on all of this. First off in a way I sympathize with all the folks running content farms abroad. You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I also think that much of this fake news is on Americans for eating the shit up. One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information.

satellite2 5y ago
> we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy I see your point but I don't necessarily agree. A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Navigating a trustless information landscape is incredibly time consuming as looking for sources and invalidating information is much more time consuming than producing it. Requiring people to stop acting on their "outrage" feeling is also extraordinary damageing to society as it also stops people from reacting to actual issues. Finally, if you look at the savvy people do you really believe that they are actually better at detecting fakes? It seems that they are better at identifying information sources that can be trusted, but once trust is established I'm pretty sure they don't spend all their cognitive resources trying to disprove everything they read (well some probably are). So a bit like with malware being more abundant on more popular OS, even if everyone moved to reputable sources, the trolls would move as well.
- ashleyn 5y ago
  Censorship with little justification, all on top of sneering mockery of everything you may believe in, doesn't exactly strike me as the best way to promote trust.