The social network, which has been under fire for facilitating foreign interference in U.S. politics, has found that domestic actors have also been creating fake pages and accounts to attract people with shocking political news, the way they have in the past with celebrity news or health news. Their motivation is mostly financial, the company said.“The people behind the activity also post the same clickbait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites,” the company said Thursday in a blog post. “And they often use their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares. This artificially inflates engagement for their inauthentic pages and the posts they share, misleading people about their popularity and improving their ranking in news feed.”
In the past, Facebook has pulled hundreds of fake pages spreading political misinformation from countries including Russia and Iran. Those types of posts had the aim of sowing discord in the U.S., setting up protest events and moments of outrage.The domestic actors, in contrast, are trying to generate revenue by getting more people to click on their accounts, pages or advertisements, according to Facebook. One thing in common, though, is the use of fake identities and accounts to artificially increase the popularity of certain news, gaming the company’s algorithm in the process.
Since the global crisis began in late December, coronavirus misinformation remains widespread on Facebook and its other digital platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp, often fueled by people’s desperate efforts to protect themselves from a global pandemic that, so far, has left more than 265,000 dead.
