Almost All of Facebook’s Top Christian Pages in 2019 Run by Foreign Troll Farms

Re:Almost All of Facebook’s Top Christian Pages in 2019 Run ... by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @07:56AM (#28692524)

> 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.

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Re:Almost All of Facebook’s Top Christian Pages in 2019 Run ... by paulgb on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @08:14AM (#28692641)

> 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.

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Re:Almost All of Facebook’s Top Christian Pages in 2019 Run ... by snowwrestler on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @08:07AM (#28692590)

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.

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