Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Karen Hao
@_KarenHao
On the eve of the 2020 election, troll farms were running vast page networks on FB targeting Christian, Black, & Native Americans. An internal report tracking the situation described it as "genuinely horrifying." Some of the pages remain two year later.

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report...
“This is not normal. This is not healthy.”
technologyreview.com
6:14 PM · Sep 16, 2021

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

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. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook’s own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.

The report, written in October 2019 and obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it, found that after the 2016 election, Facebook failed to prioritize fundamental changes to how its platform promotes and distributes information. The company instead pursued a whack-a-mole strategy that involved monitoring and quashing the activity of bad actors when they engaged in political discourse, and adding some guardrails that prevented “the worst of the worst.”

But this approach did little to stem the underlying problem, the report noted. Troll farms were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages, with their content reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook’s content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.

“Instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors, it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach,” wrote the report’s author, Jeff Allen, a former senior-level data scientist at Facebook.

*snip*

[canuckledragger]

1. Of course FB barely did anything to stem the tide.

They were making too many rubles from the troll farms!

[mahina]

2. How can you discern a troll from a trumpist?

I keep trying to persuade
I’m told daily our President has dementia, vaccines kill, trump was great, he won, all that shit.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Our foreign enemies are trying to destroy us by dividing us

It's pretty freaking obvious.

[Irish_Dem]

5. Yep. Divide and conquer. Age old strategy. I don't know why few can see this.

And we know who is doing it or we should.

Where is the FBI and CIA? Why aren't they protecting national security?

[Champp]

4. "Ha ha. Excellent." - Republicans and their Russian dark-ops bot buds

[lagomorph777]

6. But Facebook is fine; I can see pictures of my grandkids' breakfast!

I don't care that it's destroying the country! I wanna see grandkid photos!



Who cares if Fuckerberg is making billions by fucking us all?