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

^{( September 17, 2021; ars Technica )}

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 million Americans. Most of the users never followed any of the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on 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 algorithms rather than user choice,” the report said.

The report by Jeff Allen, a former Facebook data scientist, was published in 2019. It alleges that the troll farms were mostly directed to Facebook users in America, and that the traffic was aided by Facebook's algorithms that tend to reward engagement. It goes on to assert that many of the troll farms are operated by foreign actors and located in the Balkan Peninsula.

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