The idea of America is big business on Facebook. The social network has hosted more than a hundred pages that have adopted American patriotism as a theme, boasting names like Proud American, Proud To Be An American, American Story, and We Are America.
But a large swath of those pages — despite their names — aren’t American at all. Instead, they’re run by foreign click farmers, many of whom are based in Macedonia, who use AI to pump out a near-endless ocean of clickbaity soup. Posts sharing prayers for American soldiers, rewritten tweets, memes and pictures of old Hollywood pin-up girls link out to AI-generated articles, against which the click farmers can sell advertising. Headlines like “Dedicated Firefighters Risk Their Lives To Save Others” and “A Father’s Heroism: The Tragic Story of Phil Dellegrazie And His Son Anthony” tease short, uninformative articles on websites plastered with often sexual advertisements. The pages promoting them fake Americanness because they get paid every time someone clicks on one of their links, and in the advertising world, American clicks are some of the most valuable.
A Forbes review identified 67 Facebook pages — now taken down — that identified themselves as champions of American news, culture or identity, but were actually based overseas. As of August 20, they had more than 9 million followers combined — more than the Facebook pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Thirty-three of them were run from Macedonia, with others spread out across 23 different countries, including Canada, France, Morocco, Venezuela and Vietnam.
Click farmers, especially those from Macedonia, have a long history on Facebook. During the 2016 presidential election, teenagers in the small Eastern European country pushed fake news to millions of Americans on Facebook, making tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue. In 2019, similar Eastern European pages ran the same playbook — this time, reaching nearly half of all Americans on the platform.
Now, AI has given those same operations the capacity to produce near-infinite volumes of low-quality (or outright fake) news — and in at least some cases, this AI-produced slop is breaking through. The pages have begun using generic AI-generated imagery (bald eagles, stars and stripes, camo soldiers and the occasional Statue of Liberty) to appeal to American Facebook users — and in at least some cases, it’s working. One post made last week by the Canada-based page American Patriots featured an AI-generated photo of an American soldier and his children, and received more than 100,000 likes and 35,000 comments. The American Patriots page, like most of the others, directed people from Facebook to click farms featuring low-quality articles.
Pages like We Are America, American Patriots and USA Army........