Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it.

Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual messages. The payload so to say.

In particular, when Russian trolls promote both sides in some divisive foreign domestic issue, it's not to "spread chaos", but to gain a foot in the door to promote their actual messages, which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.

I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms...

However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."

I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.

I'd wish the EU would pay for California separatism as much as the US is supporting breaking up the EU (Orban, AfD in Germany, Farage, ..)

-One screenshot of Nieta Aqila's Meta monetization dashboard, which she posted, showed she made roughly $14 US in a month when she was active in Alberta Facebook groups.

So brave CBC making this woman doing this to eke out a few bucks the star of this exposé while the fb executives enabling this get to remain nameless

Canada may not have laws against this, but some countries might classify this as "subversive activity harmful to the nation". That is normally punished by imprisonment, losing the right to conduct business and hold public office.

Well done to the journalist that uncovered this. Makes a change from copying and pasting press releases that many 'journalists' seem to do these days (partly because journalist organizations have been so hollowed out by Facebook et al).

If Facebook propaganda is so effective (and cheap) Western democracies should promote democratic values in Belarus/Kazakhstan.

Canada should use this channel to promote tariff cancellation in the USA.

I doubt that Facebook is efficient on important matter. If I'm wrong then Canadian government is doing very bad job in promoting democratic values in and outside Canada.

These incentives are IMO a significant part of the political problems we are having around the world and even the general decline in mental health.

Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.

What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.

I live here, rural and in areas you'd expect this to have more traction. Nobody is even talking about it. It just doesn't come up in conversation. It might get fifteen percent of the vote and only then because only people that care will bother to show up.

Same for Datacenters, MAGA and a ton of other things. Algorithms are being abused to manipulate reality for people and people know it. But they still get swept up because it feels so real when you're reading hundreds of comments, seeing countless articles and posts and videos.

The headline is rather misleading, it indicates a specific intent. But all the article reports is that there are overseas accounts that post about Alberta separatism because it creates clicks and hence money.

Nothing to do specifically with albertan separatism, it has (and will) happened with plenty of other topics as well.

There's a problem here that people don't necessarily consider. Ignore motives for a bit. Lets say that large groups of people really, really wanted to spread positive, constructive messages on social media. Perhaps about how important it is to read and exercise and not to consume passive content. Or how kind it is to put group differences aside and focus on the things we have in common. Etc.

I'd argue that it just wouldn't work. Outrage is what's "engaging" and it is engagement which actually forces these things to go viral and spread. You are therefor limited in what sort of information you can spread on social media, at least in the virality sense. You could not, for instance, use social media to "trick" millions of people into practicing calculus every day. And you could not use social media to coerce people into spending hours meditating.

It's of course not that you could never house this content on social media, but instead that this content could never be viral, never make a strong, immediate emotional impression in the eyes of the viewer. Practicing calculus or meditation is much, much more than a strong, quick, (and I'd argue) innate emotional reaction to bare stimulus. It requires focus and participation.

So it's not just that there are these little evil troll farms sowing discord around the world. Rather, outrage, and particularly outage about social or tribal topics will always float to the top in any sort of system (algorithmic or not) that preferences engagement. There will always be at least outrage in the general population of posters (whether "natural" or else astroturfed) who are putting out outrage content, and this content will always be treated preferentially in any system that filters for outrage content. It's quite hard to avoid. You actually see this on the "boring" 4Chan boards. There is no algorithm in the modern sense of the word (although of course there is something like an algorithm in the literal sense of the word) and on these boring boards you just cannot get much much traction when starting a thread that is not a "troll" thread. A normal, informative thread gets fewer replies, and so it falls off the front page, and then no one sees, and so it gets even fewer replies.

In other words, these systems will always privilege outrage bait, even if they had real incentives to attempt to avoid it. There are only certain topics that get people fired up in a quick, immediate, emotional sort of way -- and the communication systems we've built and have become addicted to will only preference that sort of communication. Identifying these troll farms matters, but why would a crappy little troll farm from far away be able to to write content that captivates you. If they wrote a book, you wouldn't read it. If you directed a TV series, you wouldn't watch it. But one dumb little caption on an image about how a person from the wrong group has trespassed against you and it sticks in your mind forever. People need to think about why that is.

Imperial boomerang strikes again

The title is a bit misleading. The title suggests that Facebook is intentionally paying for a political interference campaign targeting Alberta. It sounds more like it is the monetary incentive structure that indirectly encourages this type of behavior.

It has been years since I signed into Facebook. The content on Facebook is just vile and disgusting, IMO. I remember signing in 3 years ago, and signing out less than a minute later because I couldn't look at it. It wasn't content from people I knew. It was all the thirst traps, rage bait, weird ads, and other garbage. I don't think normal humans still use Facebook, do they? I can't imagine regularly frequenting a sewer like that.

The same thing happened with the BLM groups during Covid. It was mostly people from overseas that created the groups and were promoting them.

Ironically comment section is essentially a more meta version of why peddling this content is so lucrative. For every Canadian who might click there's 10x that number of people in the US and Europe who'd either be rage baited or confirmation bias'd into clicking because of how what's going on in Alberta squares with their own ideology politics.

This feels illegal.

Almost like a digital Cobra Effect[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

The root issue is the monetization. If engagements weren’t monetized, no one will be incentivized to post in rage bait or hot topics for the most part, and of course, if you live in a country where $100 a month is a quality of life, you will have thousands of these posters. Look at twitter, if you browse it now you will think ww4 is imminent (as if ww3 started already), everyone is hating and attacking everything and everyone else, ragebait, clickbait, and all sort of baits just so the account owner get paid at the end of the month, a grift.

Check this grifter, indian in canada, running a bot to support MAGA to grift and milk engagements, will this bot exist if monetization wasn’t a thing?

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga

Albrexit?

Alberxit?

Albexit?

Facebook is also paying far right israelis, whose content incites violence against Palestinians.

> a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

https://7amleh.org/post/meta-monetizes-settlements-and-viole...

tl;dr:

> [The person they're investigating] even posted about income she generates from Meta's monetization program, which rewards creators for engagement and solicits subscribers on her personal page.

Facebook pays people to post content that people "engage" with, outrage is engagement, and tiny amounts of money incentive money are significant to poor people in the 3rd world.

It's the same cluster of facts that lead to "Shrimp Jesus" slop: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/04/28/facebo....

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Western governments are so concerned when this happens to them (at arguably a tiny scale) compared to the “interventions” they’ve supported around the world for almost one hundred years.

Rules for thee and not for me. Sure, Canada isn’t the CIA, but they’ve been right there with the US from Iran to Ukraine.

NATO (of which Canada is a founding member or) actively supports Kosovar separatism, it has even started an unprovoked and illegal war on account of it, at the end of of it all what would be wrong with one of Canada's federal states deciding to split off? If anything, the international community could send some Blue Helmets force there in order to support the local Albertans in the face of Ottawa-led occupation.

”Facebook is paying out to creators of monetized content because that content is popular”

Would also work as a headline. But wouldn’t attract as many clicks I guess. The implication that Facebook is actively promoting a certain view point is disgusting, and old media loves to do that (even though they were historically the ones doing so). I’m all for local filtering (on some level) and preventing foreign interference on local political matters, and social media companies ought to do better. But I twist my nose at old media shamelessly trying to manipulate the views of people on tech. And this is Facebook we’re talking about here…