Internal Facebook report: Eastern European troll farms reached 140M US users/month before the 2020 election; 75% of these users didn't follow any of their Pages
foreign organizations that strategically target these groups for financial and possibly political gain. https://twitter.com/... Ella Dawson / @brosandprose : “In October 2019, all 15 of the top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 Facebook pages targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 12 Facebook pages targeting Native Americans were being run by troll farms.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... David Carroll / @profcarroll : Coda: For some temporal context, last year this time, @Channel4 released #DeterringDemocracy, leaked Trump 2016 campaign voter database derived from Cambridge Analytica, exposing a deliberate deterrence campaign against Black voters in battlegrounds. https://www.channel4.com/... https://twitter.com/... @timherrera : Wait the Facebook report is so much worse than you think https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Carole Cadwalladr / @carolecadwalla : Even if you think you understand the cesspool that is Facebook, this thread about a new report is an eye popping & alarming read https://twitter.com/... Molly Jong-Fast / @mollyjongfast : Hard to imagine Facebook is actually worse than we thought it was but surprise.... https://twitter.com/... @fboversight : Facebook can't and won't fix itself. https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : This is an absolutely horrifying scoop by @_KarenHao @technolgyreview of a leaked Facebook report sandwiched in the middle a week full of an absolutely horrifying series by WSJ based on leaked Facebook Files. /1 https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... @urocklive1 : In the run up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian & Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms ... part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans. https://twitter.com/... Matthew Keys / @matthewkeyslive : OK that's...a bit extreme, though I get it. A better alternative: Start breaking up Facebook. It's too big. It's the new AT&T. It should not run one of the world's most-influential content platforms in tandem with one of the world's biggest advertisement businesses. https://twitter.com/... Chris Vickery / @vickerysec : Facebook, the company itself, is a hostile adversary to the United States of America and it is essential that we act as a nation to end the threat Facebook poses to our lives, laws, and economy. Shut Facebook down. Shut down every aspect of Facebook's operation. It must end. David Carroll / @profcarroll : Fraudsters are simply using Facebook as it was designed. Allowing anyone to target anyone else for almost any is reason is the core value proposition of Facebook. Advertisers get all the privacy and we get none. https://twitter.com/... John Scalzi / @scalzi : Wow, what a surprise, Facebook is a goddamn cesspool of disinformation created by professional trolls to influence American politics and foment social division. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Chris Vickery / @vickerysec : During the 2020 US presidential election, “Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms.” Facebook has actively chosen to become a clear and present danger to both democracy and the rule of law. https://twitter.com/... Roger McNamee / @moonalice : .@_KarenHao is doing extraordinary work covering the malfeasance of FB. Here is another mind blowing story about the impact of troll farms on FB during the 2020 elections. Spoiler: troll farms ran rampant on FB in 2020. Are you surprised? https://twitter.com/... John Battelle / @johnbattelle : Oh hai daily FB horrors. https://twitter.com/... Scott Stedman / @scottmstedman : My god. “in October 2019, all 15 of the top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 Facebook pages targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 12 Facebook pages targeting Native Americans were being run by troll farms.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Mat Honan / @mat : Big scoop from @_KarenHao: On the eve of the 2020 election Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms, part of a network that reached nearly half of all Americans: https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
MIT Technology ReviewKaren Hao
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands on a platform whose distribution machinery has been flagged before. Back in 2018, Mueller indictment reporting showed Facebook's own Groups tools were easily exploited by bad actors, and Cambridge Analytica-era work established that voter-targeting models could run on data harvested years earlier rather than fresh access — see Cambridge Analytica's claim it no longer needed Facebook data. What is new here is scale measured from inside: 140 million US users a month reached by Eastern European troll farms before the 2020 election, concentrated on pages aimed at Christian, Black, and Native American audiences.
First-order effects
Facebook now has internal documentation that its recommendation engine delivered foreign influence content to a majority of Americans who had explicitly opted out by not following any of those pages — making passive algorithmic distribution, not follower networks, the exposure channel.
Second-order effects
The finding pressures Facebook to explain why this persisted after years of takedown reports; as prior coverage noted, those reports' technocratic language obscures the human harm they describe, so each new disclosure invites scrutiny of how the company frames removals.
Third-order effects
Combined with earlier revelations that Zuckerberg and others shelved internal research on Facebook's polarizing effect, the pattern points toward regulation targeting algorithmic amplification itself — disclosure mandates for what feeds distribute, not just what pages publish — if external researchers keep surfacing what internal teams already measured.
The trend: Platform accountability is shifting from policing content publishers to auditing recommendation systems, because internal metrics show feeds deliver influence operations to audiences far larger than any following base.
On the eve of the 2020 election, troll farms were running vast page networks on FB targeting Christian, Black, & Native Americans. An internal report tracking the situation described it as “genuinely horrifying.” Some of the pages remain two year later. https://www.technologyrevi…
These pages had also achieved their reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook's own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm. 75% of the users exposed to their content had never followed any of the pages.
Troll farms are still thriving on Facebook. 140M monthly users 100M weekly users (US) 360M weekly users (global) Successfully targeting the same groups as RU IRA in 2016. Facebook is too big to not fail. https://twitter.com/...
“Instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors, it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach,” wrote the report's author, Jeff Allen, a former senior-level data scientist at Facebook. https://twitter.com/...
As pretty much everyone who works on this predicted would happen, political operatives and bad actors optimized IRA best practices from 2016 to target largely the same audiences. Facebook's negligence enabled them. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
These systems are irrevocably broken. In Fall of 2020, the top FB pages targeting Christian, Black, and Native Americans were run by troll farms — foreign organizations that strategically target these groups for financial and possibly political gain. https://twitter.com/...
“In October 2019, all 15 of the top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 Facebook pages targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 12 Facebook pages targeting Native Americans were being run by troll farms.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
Coda: For some temporal context, last year this time, @Channel4 released #DeterringDemocracy, leaked Trump 2016 campaign voter database derived from Cambridge Analytica, exposing a deliberate deterrence campaign against Black voters in battlegrounds. https://www.channel4.com/... …
Even if you think you understand the cesspool that is Facebook, this thread about a new report is an eye popping & alarming read https://twitter.com/...
This is an absolutely horrifying scoop by @_KarenHao @technolgyreview of a leaked Facebook report sandwiched in the middle a week full of an absolutely horrifying series by WSJ based on leaked Facebook Files. /1 https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
In the run up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian & Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms ... part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans. ht…
OK that's...a bit extreme, though I get it. A better alternative: Start breaking up Facebook. It's too big. It's the new AT&T. It should not run one of the world's most-influential content platforms in tandem with one of the world's biggest advertisement businesses. https://twitt…
Facebook, the company itself, is a hostile adversary to the United States of America and it is essential that we act as a nation to end the threat Facebook poses to our lives, laws, and economy. Shut Facebook down. Shut down every aspect of Facebook's operation. It must end.
Fraudsters are simply using Facebook as it was designed. Allowing anyone to target anyone else for almost any is reason is the core value proposition of Facebook. Advertisers get all the privacy and we get none. https://twitter.com/...
Wow, what a surprise, Facebook is a goddamn cesspool of disinformation created by professional trolls to influence American politics and foment social division. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
During the 2020 US presidential election, “Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms.” Facebook has actively chosen to become a clear and present danger to both democracy and the rule of law. https://twit…
.@_KarenHao is doing extraordinary work covering the malfeasance of FB. Here is another mind blowing story about the impact of troll farms on FB during the 2020 elections. Spoiler: troll farms ran rampant on FB in 2020. Are you surprised? https://twitter.com/...
My god. “in October 2019, all 15 of the top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 Facebook pages targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 12 Facebook pages targeting Native Americans were being run by troll farms.” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
Big scoop from @_KarenHao: On the eve of the 2020 election Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms, part of a network that reached nearly half of all Americans: https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...