Puppies and Propaganda

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Puppies & Propaganda

I’ve been falling down a rabbit hole of disinformation-for-profit pages on Facebook lately.

Judd Legum over at Popular Information recently wrote about a “Police Lives Matter” Facebook page network with massive reach which was run from Kosovo with the goal of getting Americans to click and view ads. You know, less influencing elections and government policy and more squeezing a few thousand dollars from the Facebook ad ecosystem.

The pages posted old news stories as current and posted pro-cop memes that pretended to be from American police officers… all the while steering users to click on links to sites weighted down with programmatic ads.

This business model worked for the page network’s administrators in Kosovo thanks to economies of scale. Crowdtangle data indicates this pro-police meme and disinformation network had as much engagement over the past month as HuffPost Politics, Vox and Bloomberg combined.

An…