What Social Media Companies Don’t Want Us To Know About Misinformation
November 2023
Most Propagators of Misinformation Make Their Money Directly From Social Media Companies, Via Ad Revenue Share Programs
The majority of misinformation content is being spread by financially motivated actors.
Most are individuals working for themselves, rather than “troll farms” or “for hire” outlets. They get paid monthly, a share of the ad revenue they help platforms generate.
More often than not, they are content agnostic, relying on stolen or synthetic content. A few take the influencer route, producing their own sensationalised content as a path to building notoriety while maximizing their earnings.
While success varies, many recurrently generate tens of thousands of dollars from platforms.
Much of the Distribution is Powered Through Widespread and Cheap Automation
Almost everything on social media can and is being automated.
Whether it’s software to automatically source and repurpose content, with just enough automated editing to trick copyrights filter, Gen AI tools to auto generate entirely new content, or software to create and manage thousands of fake accounts, posting, viewing, commenting, liking or sharing posts at scale, options are plentiful, and can be found for just a few dollars.
Most service providers offer maintenance and support as well as explicit guidance on how to evade platform restrictions.
Used savvily, and with an eye to activating platforms' own recommendation algorithms, automation regularly delivers engagement in the millions.
Political Actors Benefit From Assets, Tools and Labour Subsidized by Social Media Companies
It’s never been cheaper, easier and safer to run propaganda and adversarial disinformation campaigns on social media.
If computational propaganda used to be reserved to well-resourced state actors and bespoke consultancies, commanding million dollar contracts, this is no longer the case.
Political actors are becoming increasingly attuned to the fact that they can get cheap tools, assets and expertise on the open market.
Not only does this enable them to cut costs in ways that make such practices accessible to ever more actors, but it also enables them to outsource and build in plausible deniability.
Some savvy operators are even turning to registering their propaganda campaigns into social media ad revenue share programs, further blurring their intentions while recouping their costs.
Social Media Companies Could Do A Lot More To Tackle The Industrialization Of Misinformation But Are Financially Incentivised Not To
Social media companies are ad businesses. They make their profit from advertisers running ads on their platform.
High engagement publishers are prime assets. For every ad view on publisher content, social media companies make 45-55% of the revenue. In the aggregate, this amounts to billions of dollars annually.
This makes companies reticent to tackle the industrialisation of misinformation head on - with interventions focusing less on addressing the incentive structures and money flows, and more on minimizing reputational and business risks with advertisers.
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