Enlarge (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images )
In the wake of the 2016 election, Fb knew it had a problem. Pages and fake accounts created by the particular Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had spread through the social network and drawn massive engagement from real users. Facebook knew it had to get things under control.
But years later, Facebook’s own internal research teams revealed that troll farms were still reaching massive audiences, even if they didn’t have large direct followings. The company’s own algorithms pushed the troll content onto users who had not expressed interest in the pages, expanding the trolls’ reach exponentially. A report detailing the research was leaked to MIT Technology Review by a former employee.
When the report was published in 2019, troll farms were reaching 100 million Americans and 360 million people worldwide every week. In any given month, Facebook was showing troll farm posts to 140 mil Americans. Most of the users never followed any of typically the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content upon over 100 million Americans weekly. “A big majority of their ability to reach our users comes from the structure of our platform and our ranking methods rather than user choice, ” this report said.
Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
