Scammers peddling Islamophobic clickbait is business as usual at Facebook
1Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/scammers-peddling-islamophobic-clickbait-is-business-as-usual-at-facebook/
Scammers peddling Islamophobic clickbait is business as usual at Facebook
A network of scammers used a ring of established right-wing Facebook pages to stoke Islamophobia and make a quick buck in the process, a new report from the Guardian reveals. But it's less a vast international conspiracy and more simply that Facebook is unable to police its platform to prevent even the most elementary scams - with serious consequences.
The Guardian's multi-part report depicts the events like a scheme of grand proportions executed for the express purpose of harassing Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MI), Rashida Tlaib (D-MN) and other prominent Muslims. But the facts it uncovered point towards this being a run-of-the-mill money-making operation that used tawdry, hateful clickbait and evaded Facebook's apparently negligible protections against this kind of thing.
The scam basically went like this: an administrator of a popular right-wing Facebook page would get a message from a person claiming to share their values that asked if they could be made an editor. Once granted access, this person would publish clickbait stories - frequently targeting Muslims, and often Rep. Omar, since they reliably led to high engagement. The stories appeared on a handful of ad-saturated websites that were presumably owned by the scammers.
That appears to be the extent of the vast conspiracy, or at least its operations - duping credulous conservatives into clicking through to an ad farm.
Its human cost, however, whether incidental or deliberate, is something else entirely. Rep. Omar is already the target of many coordinated attacks, some from self-proclaimed patriots within this country; just last month, an Islamophobic Trump supporter pleaded guilty in federal court to ma