Thread by @profcarroll

Troll farms are still thriving on Facebook.
140M monthly users
100M weekly users (US)
360M weekly users (global)
Successfully targeting the same groups as RU IRA in 2016.
Facebook is too big to not fail.

https://twitter.com/_KarenHao/status/1438672616970194947

REPORT: 8 of 12 top African American FB pages are troll farms technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/103… via @_KarenHao

REPORT: 2 of 8 Top Native American Facebook pages are troll farms. technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/103… via @_karenhao

REPORT: ALL THE TOP CHRISTIAN FACEBOOK PAGES ARE TROLL FARMS technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/103…

REPORT REVELATIONS
Download PDF: s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2106…
Via technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/103… via @_KarenHao

Fraudsters are simply using Facebook as it was designed. Allowing anyone to target anyone else for almost any is reason is the core value proposition of Facebook. Advertisers get all the privacy and we get none.

https://twitter.com/_KarenHao/status/1438674225733283844

How facebookers talk to each other about their products and services. I marvel at how they go to such great lengths to sugar coat it.

Isn’t it cute that our company is essentially an epic fraud machine that is deceptively extracting capital from Black people?

Facebook monetizes the mass theft of intellectual property belonging to Black people and their communities so that scammers in another country can easily extract their share of the stolen revenue in a few clicks.

RE: the hellscape of garbage fire Christian content on Facebook’s troll farm infested feeds, the Oct19 report’s author admits:

“It is sad that this type of content ecosystem is rewarded by our platform.”

Jesus.

There’s a reason Zuck wants you to abandon his dorm room creation for his nightmarish metaverse, while colonizing Rest of World. He knows deep down that his service has become a bloated, clotted, fraud-filled spaghetti code of self-destructing A/B tests optimized for scams.

In the lead up to the 2020 election, Facebook feeds were an absolute cesspool of fake content. Fraudulent content beat Walmart by 40% for the top position. Many of these giant content fraud operations still thrive today. Facebook’s own algos apparently optimized for fraud.

“go viral” in the passive voice as if they did not engineer the system to optimize engagement at any cost

Facebook knows fraudsters are even stealing engagement metrics from other platforms to re-monetize proven pilfered content. The moment you publicly quantify something as valuable you create a vector that incentivizes fraud and abuse. Precious ad data is skewed with counterfeit.

‘We should not be surprised that bad actors became expert Facebook marketers because Mark’s mission is to bring Facebook marketing tools to every corner of the earth and make every single business a paying Facebook Advertiser.’

“IANAL…But in my experience, the legal situation here is a mess.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

‘tbh if you want to be good at facebook then just run a troll farm bc our platform basically prefers that you do that’

Some people just want to be lied to. Facebook makes it easy to target and optimize. Extract the attention of your marks with our dashboards so you can drive traffic to your junk news sites to monetize the rest of the adtech stack. Dumping toxic waste into the minds of millions.

‘I mean like it’s no wonder we destroyed journalism but I love Macedonians as much as anyone. Mother Theresa was from Skopje. I’m totally down with Americans being targeted by Macedonians. Just not with scraped engagement data ok so “fuck right off” with that obvious exploit’

Ok ok here’s the standard company PR to these leaks:
— cherrypicked leak out of context from Oct 2019
— we have since done more, are doing more, will do more to make our platform safe*
— small businesses rely on our targeting tools (enjoyed by troll farms)
— AI
*for advertisers

Coda: For some temporal context, last year this time, @Channel4 released #DeterringDemocracy, leaked Trump 2016 campaign voter database derived from Cambridge Analytica, exposing a deliberate deterrence campaign against Black voters in battlegrounds.
channel4.com/news/revealed-…

https://twitter.com/_karenhao/status/1438672616970194947

If guilty feeling people were not out there leaking to reporters then our worst fears would remain speculations rather than accurate accusations. Where would we be without whistleblowers? #DataRights