The Secret Behind Foreign-Run Facebook Pages Capitalizing On American Patriotism

Content farmers in Macedonia are creating Facebook pages about American patriotism and making thousands of dollars thanks to American social media users who liked their posts.

In a recent report, Forbes found that numerous Facebook pages pretending to be Americans and posting about patriotism are making thousands of dollars thanks to clickbait posts, however, these pages are runed mainly in east european countries. The report found that these pages, used to amplify pro-Trump content and now found that American patriotism was a more lucrative subject and it is really easy to make money deceiving American patriots.

Forbes identified about 67 Facebook pages all run by foreigners, and combined, they had more than 9 million followers. 33 of the pages were run from Macedonia, the rest were run in other countries like Morocco, Venezuela, Kosovo, Austria and Switzerland.

The posts often delved into prayers for American soldiers, about American fathers and their families, AI-generated images of Hollywood girls, and firefighters. The pages led to AI-generated articles to heavily advertised sites, to make money with their clicks.

Macedonian pages also spread fake news during the 2016 presidential elections, siding heavily with Donald Trump content. In 2019, they used similar tactics to spread misinformation and cheap content.

Now AI makes it easier for click farmers to create fake news and cheap content to deceive people and gain their attention. Forbes cites a post by a Canadian page called American Patriots with an AI-generated image of a soldier with his child that had more than 150K likes and 45K comments. The page has more than 200K followers and has an AI-generated picture of Trump as its profile picture.

The click farmers usually do posts about trendy topics or target communities that are easily deceived, so they can engage in their content. Click farmers are a “great magnifying glass … into the more reptilian parts of our brain,” according to Jeff Allen, former Facebook data scientist.

These pages often serve their own interests and don’t care at all about American politics or society, but they can be dangerous near election times.

“I bet there are plenty of foreign influence operations that would like to buy these Pages when the time is right. So, there are times when ‘click farms’ can become much more nefarious,” Allen said.

Numerous people wanting to make easy money on social media are encouraged to make accounts pretending to be Americans because the money paid for clicks is greater than the sum paid in other parts of the world.

Allen said that, while click farmers are a real problem on Facebook, it can be solved. He said that Facebook should move away from the algorithm that incentivizes people to post sensationalist slop in the first place.

“If a click farmer tries to farm on your platform, but doesn’t get any clicks — does he do any farming?” stated Allen.