Who they are
We've found a network of 340 foreign-run Facebook pages that are targeting Canadian, American, UK, and European users. Most of these pages claim to be based in North America or Europe, but if you navigate to their Page Transparency information, you'll see they're all operated from a foreign country (89% of them from Vietnam).
Explore the map below to see where some of these pages are from, how many followers they have, and how many posts they've created targeting each country. In the next section, you'll be able to see some of the content they're posting.
This map is best explored on a desktop browser, but you can still pan and tap below.
What they are doing
These accounts use AI to create clickbait and fake stories to capture people's attention. They're very coordinated and often use the same text or image. Some of these accounts have even been created or modified around the same time. Ultimately, their goal doesn't seem to be politically motivated or involve any state-run foreign influence campaign. Instead, these accounts seem to want to generate engagement and redirect you to an external link so they can increase web traffic and make money from ads.
Browse some of the posts below to see just how similar they can be, the style of clickbait they use, and how much engagement they can generate (the number of reactions is at the bottom of each post).
*We don't have images from all posts since Facebook has started taking some of them down. For the same reason, clicking through to the posts may not link to the post on Facebook.
Why this matters
Making money isn't a problem, but pushing fake stories is. It can contribute to the erosion of trust, distort public opinion, and be damaging for the people or groups targeted by it. Also, most advertisers may not know that their advertising money is funding these kinds of accounts.
This plot shows where their posts are getting the most engagement and lets you explore the broader content yourself. Each circle is a set of identical posts (like in the previous section) and its size is based on the engagement it has received. The posts are coloured by topic with similar topics having similar colours. Hover over the post to see its text, what accounts are posting it, how many there are, and how much engagement they're receiving.
This interactive visualization is best explored on a desktop browser.
*These topics are automatically generated and may contain errors or not perfectly represent the underlying posts.
*On a Mac, mouse scrolling may be recommended if scrolling on a trackpad is too slow.
*Topics and visualizations were generated using Toponymy and DataMapPlot.