1/ A few quick thoughts on reporting that equates clickbait farms with foreign troll farms seeking to manipulate public debate ahead of an election. The pages referenced here, based on our own 2019 research, are financially motivated spammers, not overt influence ops. 🧵 
2/ Both of these are serious challenges, but they’re different. Conflating them doesn’t help anyone and plays into the hands of IO actors seeking to appear like they’re everywhere. You also can’t stop spammers w/defenses designed to counter overt IO, and vice-versa.
3/ We — and others across industry and research community — have built systems to tackle both of these issues. There is more to do, but there’s been important progress since this internal report.
4/ We discussed our findings about troll farms in our IO Threat Report, including our joint investigation with CNN and researchers at Graphika and Clemson into the Ghana NGOs ahead of the 2020 election about.fb.com/news/2021/05/i…
5/ But these actors don’t operate like Macedonian spammers. You don’t beat clickbait farms with bespoke investigations because they don’t hide — they rely on volume to overwhelm defenders. You beat them at scale.
6/ Financially motivated spam has been around since the beginning of the internet. But instead of selling fake viagra and sunglasses, this newest iteration relies on tabloid-style clickbait on whatever the hot-button issue of the day is.
8/ In 2019, my team created the Inauthentic Behavior policy to address this type of often higher volume spammy activity: about.fb.com/news/2019/10/i…
9/ We’ve removed thousands of Pages and Groups run by spam networks like this trying to latch on to political themes to sell t-shirts or get ad clicks using low-quality content about.fb.com/news/2020/10/i…
10/ There’s been important progress made, and there’s much more work to be done both to counter sophisticated threats AND to tackle clickbait farms, across the internet.
11/ But it’s important to keep them distinct so we don’t do the bidding of the IO operators who are trying to seem more impactful than they are, and to use the most effective tools to counter each.
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