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Facebook forced troll farm content on over 40% of all Americans each month

Facebook forced troll farm content on over 40% of all Americans each month

Facebook forced troll farm content on over 40% of all Americans each month
Sep 17, 2021 1 min, 24 secs

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.

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 million Americans.

Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on over 100 million Americans weekly.

The popularity and reach of the troll farms led Allen to believe that Russian Internet Research Agency operatives were likely able to exploit the same techniques or use the same pages to reach American users.

“If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there,” Allen wrote.

Users who saw troll farm content tended to fall into two groups, Allen wrote.

By way of example, Allen cited one user who discovered a troll farm page that was targeted toward American Indians.

The troll farms highlighted in the report primarily targeted four different groups: American Indians, Black Americans, Christian Americans, and American women.

At the time it was written in October 2019, the report says that for many of those groups, a majority of the top pages were run by troll farms, including all 15 top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 15 targeting American Indians.

Three targeted Black Americans, one targeted Christian Americans, and one targeted American Indians.

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