Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/facebook-overseas-alberta-separtism-9.7223966

by vrganj • 1 month ago

307 166 1 month ago

vintermann6• 1 month ago

I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it.

Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual messages. The payload so to say.

In particular, when Russian trolls promote both sides in some divisive foreign domestic issue, it's not to "spread chaos", but to gain a foot in the door to promote their actual messages, which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.

ifwinterco3• 1 month ago

There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income.

I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being Indian people pretending to be British

TZubiri2• 1 month ago

X famously implemented a feature that revelaed where the posters were from. Sure you can use a VPN, but Musk changed the rules all of a sudden and exposed a lot of accounts posting about issues from other countries.

Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.

gambiting2• 1 month ago

I mean I'm not sure it's a meme - this guy literally got rich doing it, to a point where he's selling "self guide" courses on how to do this:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...

miki123211• 1 month ago

On the other hand... on the internet, everybody is an American (or a Brit).

There are many people who don't live in a country where English is spoken natively, but who speak it well enough to lurk on the English internet. Those people are exposed to American and British politics and start to form opinions. It's not unusual for us to have our own takes on what happens in these countries.

cyanydeez2• 1 month ago

It's pretty amazing corporate america was able to find a revenue scheme based on Russian disinformation campaigns, init.

dmix3• 1 month ago

Which led Twitter to release a feature allowing you to see which country accounts were originally made which confirmed a lot of suspicions about Indian/Pakistan accounts positing politics stuff because it goes viral and pays. Other sites would benefit from that sort of feature to at least set the bar higher.

throwthrowuknow2• 1 month ago

Makes sense for the UK since if you post the same content as a citizen you could end up with the police at your door.

graemep3• 1 month ago

The same on Facebook, and its a very profitable:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...

Bluescreenbuddy• 1 month ago

South Asia and africa. There's a reason he bought twitter and let any bozo buy verification. The money they make goes a long way in low income countries.

jitix• 1 month ago

Is the solution that global wages are normalized?

I’m not an economist but it seems that a lot of things boil down to “X is cheaper in country A” or “Y is more costly in country B” creating arbitrage opportunities for players operating in grey area.

Again, I’m not an economist and am just speculating as a layman who understands math, but without wage normalization it seems the other option would be to only have per-country regulated social media. So Canadian social platforms are only accessible to users with Canadian IDs, US to US ID holders, and Indian ID holders can only access Indian social networks. And so on and so forth.. but then we become China.

Paracompact• 1 month ago

Who of credit has claimed otherwise, that dictators spread dissent as an end rather than as a means?

vintermann6• 1 month ago

Of credit, that's arguable. But a famous example is Nancy Pelosi suggesting that pro-Palestine protests in 2024 were funded by Putin.

cucumber37328423• 1 month ago

Who of credit has claimed otherwise

By my rough estimation a third to a half of these people: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

throe939494848• 1 month ago

when Russian trolls promote both sides

Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.

a2128• 1 month ago

There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

throwaway274486• 1 month ago

which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.

What would be the point of that? Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support. For instance here in the us, only around 3% of americans vote based on foreign policy. Does it really matter which narrative the masses believe? I would think it would be people in power worth persuading, and there are much more direct ways of buying politicians and career government workers.

Propagandizing their own people I get, but what you're outlining just doesn't make sense. "Spreading chaos" does because it draws resources away from their interests to domestic discord.

watwut3• 1 month ago

Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support

Up until Iran, wars in America had large general support. Americans liked wars and their support for leadership went up when those wards started. And Americans politicians who wanted those wars put a lot of work into making people support wars.

Russians supported invasion of Ukraine. And Putin made sure they will. Even Germans prior WWI and WWII supported and wanted war. Ironically, especially young wanting to prove their masculinity.

vintermann6• 1 month ago

Public opinion does sometimes change the direction of a country. For Russia it's probably most relevant in a few eastern European countries, but there's a normality effect - it is probably easier for someone like Órban to dissent from EU on Ukraine the more there is minority dissent in other EU countries.

Either way, it doesn't have to actually work, the propagandist only has to think it's worth it to try.

tokai• 1 month ago

Its not about Americans. Russians already owned them and got them to do what they want. Its about Europeans that are much closer to their representatives.

pjc504• 1 month ago

Rather like the Raytheon adverts in DC airport, the aim of all this nonsense is to alter the worldview of the small number of people who make the actual decisions. It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.

energy123• 1 month ago

That's what you think they ought to be doing as a rational actor, but there is a body of counter-evidence suggesting that their intent is to cause chaos as a dual goal.

I would point you towards the various hybrid warfare attacks on civic society especially across Europe, such as infrastructure sabotage, bomb threats to election centers, and hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.

My interpretation of this strategy is that it's an attempt to undermine social cohesion, create sectarian politics, which fragments the society, draws its attention inwards and makes it impossible to pursue any specific coherent direction.

pjc504• 1 month ago

hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.

This turns out to have been alarmingly effective. All it needs is someone willing to hand cash to bored teenagers, and their vandalism can be redirected from bus shelters to critical infrastructure.

expedition32• 1 month ago

In the 1930s there were people arguing Hitler didn't really want war.

Maybe it is time for us to stop sane-plaining Americans and just take them at their word?

mcdonje• 1 month ago

They definitely play both sides to spread chaos. That's been extremely effective for them in reducing American power and influence. Getting their messaging out there is also a goal.

vincnetas2• 1 month ago

Its been discussed for long time already how russian methods work :

The ex-KGB defector you're thinking of is Yuri Bezmenov (also known by his alias Tomas Schuman). The strategy he described is called "Ideological Subversion" (also referred to as "Active Measures" or "Psychological Warfare")

Their time scale is measured in decades.

1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)

2. Destabilization Exploiting the demoralized state to create social, political, and economic instability — polarizing the population ~2–5 years

3. Crisis Pushing the destabilized society into a full-blown crisis, creating a situation where people demand radical change ~6 weeks

4. Normalization After the crisis leads to a power shift, the new order is "normalized" — a totalitarian system is established and accepted as the new normal Ongoing

vitalyan1234• 1 month ago

1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)

took Putin less than 10 years to do that to Russia. the collapse is postponed while the regime's eunuchs and dogs are fed, of course, but God wills it, that might not be the case for much longer.

dismalaf• 1 month ago

Lol sounds like my country (Canada).

We're in a recession caused by the current government's 11 years of mismanagement but approval ratings are higher than ever because our government just blames the US.

Meanwhile the gap between our peers and us is widening and certain Canadians (mostly boomers) just refuse to see the problem.

Everyone I know has left the country and I've already got one foot out the door.

https://economics.td.com/ca-silent-brain-drain

grey-area• 1 month ago

A divided and weakened EU is the biggest priority of Putin’s Russia after reconstituting the USSR.

Brexit and other forms of dissension spread in Europe by Russian agents (from bombings in Berlin to poisoning dissidents in London) are definitely deliberate and war by other means, not some sort of sideshow. Separatist movements have and will be used to weaken enemies and figures like Farage and Orban are still doing Russia’s work.

I would not be at all surprised to find that dissent/separatism in countries opposed to Russia is funded by Putin. Dissent and chaos are an important part of the Russian playbook, not an afterthought.

seventytwo• 1 month ago

Why not both?

mrweasel2• 1 month ago

Canada may not have laws against this, but some countries might classify this as "subversive activity harmful to the nation". That is normally punished by imprisonment, losing the right to conduct business and hold public office.

fg137• 1 month ago

Usually they couldn't care less about what you say about another country. Unless, of course, if you say bad things about a certain country when you are in another certain country, you get deported. Hmm.

philistine• 1 month ago

And it should be Facebook who’s held accountable.

giarc4• 1 month ago

She lives in a different country, Canadian laws can't do anything about it. I'm not sure what the answer is to this, but it's a real problem.

mrweasel2• 1 month ago

Oh, I was thinking of going after Facebook given that they finance the operation.

pbiggar• 1 month ago

Facebook is also paying far right israelis, whose content incites violence against Palestinians.

a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

https://7amleh.org/post/meta-monetizes-settlements-and-viole...

hsuduebc2• 1 month ago

Meta is absolutely just bunch of griefers. The only thing they add to society is division, enragement and rage bait content. Fuck meta and their garbage products.

But we most keep them that they are indeed visionaries of enshitification.

andrewstuart• 1 month ago

Albrexit?

Alberxit?

Albexit?

2cynykyl• 1 month ago

Albertata!

dkdbejwi383• 1 month ago

Albertadieu

fanatic2pope• 1 month ago

Alberticide

swader9993• 1 month ago

Dumb and Dumbererer.

speed_spread• 1 month ago

Hahalberta

eunos• 1 month ago

Imperial boomerang strikes again

nextstep• 1 month ago

Western governments are so concerned when this happens to them (at arguably a tiny scale) compared to the “interventions” they’ve supported around the world for almost one hundred years.

Rules for thee and not for me. Sure, Canada isn’t the CIA, but they’ve been right there with the US from Iran to Ukraine.

hermitcrab• 1 month ago

Well done to the journalist that uncovered this. Makes a change from copying and pasting press releases that many 'journalists' seem to do these days (partly because journalist organizations have been so hollowed out by Facebook et al).

m-i-l• 1 month ago

I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms...

However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."

I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.

sunaookami• 1 month ago

This has nothing to do with free speech but giving an incentive (money) for posting which ruined every social media platform in existence (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

p-e-w2• 1 month ago

I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money

By recognizing that undesirable uses of free speech are the price society pays for having free speech, and by strongly believing that it is a price worth paying.

Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.

The idea that free speech should probably be restricted if it turns out that free speech can lead to unpleasant consequences misses the whole point of free speech – in many cases deliberately, I think.

SR2Z• 1 month ago

To some extent, people also just need to be less credulous.

Being saturated with ragebait slop is a good way to get people to associate ragebait with wasting their time.

account423• 1 month ago

Don't forget that undesirable uses of free speech can be made less effective by more speech - as long as what you desire is actually in the interest of the people you want to influence. Like for example this article.

And of course in this case the root problem is not that people have free speech but that they are financially rewarded for using it in bad ways. Financial models that reward impressions are fundamentally bad for society.

reddozen• 1 month ago

Free speech absolutists just don't defend their position because it devolves into absurdity immediately. It's just a dogwhistle of the far right or people that haven't put any thought into their beliefs.

wsng• 1 month ago

Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.

Car traffic is heavily regulated to reduce the harm being done by cars/drivers.

dtj11232• 1 month ago

Cash incentivised speech is arguably not free.

paganel3• 1 month ago

That would make most (if not all) of today's mainstream media speech (and not only) as "not free".

To add, in essence I agree with you, that's why I regard Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of the really few free thinkers out there, i.e. because he was aware that as soon as he was accepting to be paid for what he was writing then his speech would become "imprisoned".

sharperguy• 1 month ago

Free speech doesn't mean that we don't desire filters. Go check your gmail spam folder. Twitter would look identical to this with filters at all. What we really want is:

* transparency about the filters we have on our feeds

* the ability to tweak them if they're not working

* the ability to change providers without losing your entire social graph / reach

_the_inflator• 1 month ago

You are on to something but going the wrong path. It is all about personal decision making and not enforcement by goverment.

To put it:

" * Government decides and approves about the filters we have on our feeds * the government has the right and duty to tweak them if they're not working in the way a panel of experts decides * no ability to change providers since there is only one that takes care of your entire social graph / reach "

Choose the premise wisely.

trumpdong8• 1 month ago

You're not a free speech absolutist then.

trumpdong8• 1 month ago

I've talked to enough free speech absolutists to know they would defend this behavior because they believe all speech should be allowed. It's written in the name of their ideology!

jhedwards• 1 month ago

Historically, all speech was considered "intentional". And by speech here I am including two distinct things: the expression of opinion, and the publication of opinion by a magazine/newspaper owner.

I separate those two things because they are very different with respect to the scale of the dissemination of speech. Nevertheless, magazines and newspapers are free to publish opinion, though it is significant in my opinion that in those cases there is an accountable individual (the editor/publisher).

It strikes me as different when we have social media platforms that amplify speech to a massive scale without any accountability. Clearly, monetization fuels the large-scale amplification of some undesirable speech so that 1. it is not an opinion expressed in good faith and 2. there is no directly accountable individual, unless the poster can be considered accountable for FBs large-scale publication of their speech, which feels perverse to me. It's effectively "robo-published".

There are some conclusions which could be drawn here, and I'm not sure which should be drawn if any. But I think it's important to point out that the details do matter (libel laws and "malice" for example) and that the details change in significant ways as society and technology change.

dspillett2• 1 month ago

IME most people calling themselves a “free speech absolutist” absolutely believe those who agree with them should be free to speak, and anyone that might affect them negatively or just disagree should be stopped from oppressing or endangering them. The term usually means as little as the “democratic” in DPRK.

A true free speech absolutist would not be concerned with paid speech being blocked, in fact they should really be against paid speech, at least in the sense being discussed here. The point of free speech is to be able to say what you want and saying something else because you are paid to, because you can't afford to turn down the payment to say what someone else wants instead, is anti-free-speech.

throwthrowuknow2• 1 month ago

Why are you making it sound like speech needs to be qualified? The point of freedom of speech is that it doesn’t need to be approved by any authority.

Sounds more like a mealy mouthed argument against it.

KingOfCoders2• 1 month ago

I'd wish the EU would pay for California separatism as much as the US is supporting breaking up the EU (Orban, AfD in Germany, Farage, ..)

detectivestory• 1 month ago

I always find it so interesting how little the topic of Californian independence comes up online. You would think there would at least be a decent amount of organic content around that, never mind external interference.

roncesvalles3• 1 month ago

Separatism is born of a sense of ethnoracial exceptionalism:

1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country

2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country

Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.

jeroenhd• 1 month ago

The EU would be better off promoting separatism for the redneck states rather than specifically supporting California. Direct trade with California is tough, but if the southern states were to fall off, the east coast of the USA would still provide a decent area to trade with.

rafaelcosta• 1 month ago

”Facebook is paying out to creators of monetized content because that content is popular”

Would also work as a headline. But wouldn’t attract as many clicks I guess. The implication that Facebook is actively promoting a certain view point is disgusting, and old media loves to do that (even though they were historically the ones doing so). I’m all for local filtering (on some level) and preventing foreign interference on local political matters, and social media companies ought to do better. But I twist my nose at old media shamelessly trying to manipulate the views of people on tech. And this is Facebook we’re talking about here…

account423• 1 month ago

NATO is not a company that does business in Russia. Facebook is a company that does business in Canada and as a result is subject to whatever conditions Canada imposes.

pjc504• 1 month ago

Paying money for a particular viewpoint is promoting it. This is not complicated.

(yes, this is a serious problem with content monetization intermediaries; somehow as soon as the topic is sexual everyone immediately understands what the problem is and rushes to condemn the intermediary)

vrganj4• 1 month ago

Nah, that would absolutely miss the point.

The point is that Facebook's mechanisms drive poor people in the third world to promoting division in the developed world.

Doesn't need to be some sort of evil scheme in order to be dangerous. Often dangerous things come from people not thinking through the consequences of their actions instead of mustachio-twirling supervillains executing elaborate plans.

b3lvedere• 1 month ago

Almost like a digital Cobra Effect[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

cucumber37328423• 1 month ago

Ironically comment section is essentially a more meta version of why peddling this content is so lucrative. For every Canadian who might click there's 10x that number of people in the US and Europe who'd either be rage baited or confirmation bias'd into clicking because of how what's going on in Alberta squares with their own ideology politics.

traxler• 1 month ago

The headline is rather misleading, it indicates a specific intent. But all the article reports is that there are overseas accounts that post about Alberta separatism because it creates clicks and hence money.

Nothing to do specifically with albertan separatism, it has (and will) happened with plenty of other topics as well.

vrganj4• 1 month ago

It doesn't indicate intent. It indicates incentives and outcomes.

A system is what a system does, not what a system is claimed to stand for.

SpicyLemonZest4• 1 month ago

The original phrase, "the purpose of a system is what it does", was coined as a contrast to people saying "the purpose of this system is X" even though it consistently fails to achieve X. It does not make sense to look at an arbitrary problem and declare that the system is that problem or exists to produce the problem.

paganel3• 1 month ago

NATO (of which Canada is a founding member or) actively supports Kosovar separatism, it has even started an unprovoked and illegal war on account of it, at the end of of it all what would be wrong with one of Canada's federal states deciding to split off? If anything, the international community could send some Blue Helmets force there in order to support the local Albertans in the face of Ottawa-led occupation.

bryanlarsen2• 1 month ago

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that provinces essentially have the right to separate. There are a bunch of conditions, but they have the right to separate, the Federal government is required to negotiate separation in good faith.

Canada is not being hypocritical.

paganel3• 1 month ago

Then why the fuss?

tamimio• 1 month ago

The root issue is the monetization. If engagements weren’t monetized, no one will be incentivized to post in rage bait or hot topics for the most part, and of course, if you live in a country where $100 a month is a quality of life, you will have thousands of these posters. Look at twitter, if you browse it now you will think ww4 is imminent (as if ww3 started already), everyone is hating and attacking everything and everyone else, ragebait, clickbait, and all sort of baits just so the account owner get paid at the end of the month, a grift.

Check this grifter, indian in canada, running a bot to support MAGA to grift and milk engagements, will this bot exist if monetization wasn’t a thing?

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga

Fizz432• 1 month ago

Same for Datacenters, MAGA and a ton of other things. Algorithms are being abused to manipulate reality for people and people know it. But they still get swept up because it feels so real when you're reading hundreds of comments, seeing countless articles and posts and videos.

sourcegrift• 1 month ago

Reddit is 49% indian and 27% african and i doubt either groups have an incentive to spread misinformation against trump. But maybe you now something I don't?

Fizz432• 1 month ago

MAGA people are easy to ragebait and sell to

everdrive• 1 month ago

There's a problem here that people don't necessarily consider. Ignore motives for a bit. Lets say that large groups of people really, really wanted to spread positive, constructive messages on social media. Perhaps about how important it is to read and exercise and not to consume passive content. Or how kind it is to put group differences aside and focus on the things we have in common. Etc.

I'd argue that it just wouldn't work. Outrage is what's "engaging" and it is engagement which actually forces these things to go viral and spread. You are therefor limited in what sort of information you can spread on social media, at least in the virality sense. You could not, for instance, use social media to "trick" millions of people into practicing calculus every day. And you could not use social media to coerce people into spending hours meditating.

It's of course not that you could never house this content on social media, but instead that this content could never be viral, never make a strong, immediate emotional impression in the eyes of the viewer. Practicing calculus or meditation is much, much more than a strong, quick, (and I'd argue) innate emotional reaction to bare stimulus. It requires focus and participation.

So it's not just that there are these little evil troll farms sowing discord around the world. Rather, outrage, and particularly outage about social or tribal topics will always float to the top in any sort of system (algorithmic or not) that preferences engagement. There will always be at least outrage in the general population of posters (whether "natural" or else astroturfed) who are putting out outrage content, and this content will always be treated preferentially in any system that filters for outrage content. It's quite hard to avoid. You actually see this on the "boring" 4Chan boards. There is no algorithm in the modern sense of the word (although of course there is something like an algorithm in the literal sense of the word) and on these boring boards you just cannot get much much traction when starting a thread that is not a "troll" thread. A normal, informative thread gets fewer replies, and so it falls off the front page, and then no one sees, and so it gets even fewer replies.

In other words, these systems will always privilege outrage bait, even if they had real incentives to attempt to avoid it. There are only certain topics that get people fired up in a quick, immediate, emotional sort of way -- and the communication systems we've built and have become addicted to will only preference that sort of communication. Identifying these troll farms matters, but why would a crappy little troll farm from far away be able to to write content that captivates you. If they wrote a book, you wouldn't read it. If you directed a TV series, you wouldn't watch it. But one dumb little caption on an image about how a person from the wrong group has trespassed against you and it sticks in your mind forever. People need to think about why that is.

theopsimist• 1 month ago

-One screenshot of Nieta Aqila's Meta monetization dashboard, which she posted, showed she made roughly $14 US in a month when she was active in Alberta Facebook groups.

So brave CBC making this woman doing this to eke out a few bucks the star of this exposé while the fb executives enabling this get to remain nameless

swader9993• 1 month ago

I live here, rural and in areas you'd expect this to have more traction. Nobody is even talking about it. It just doesn't come up in conversation. It might get fifteen percent of the vote and only then because only people that care will bother to show up.

giarc4• 1 month ago

Fellow AB resident here.... then what do you make of their claim that 99.2% (or whatever the number was) of residents in Sylvan Lake, Drumheller etc signed the petition? Has to be completely fabricated right?

swader9993• 1 month ago

Suspect or poorly worded

jazz9k• 1 month ago

The same thing happened with the BLM groups during Covid. It was mostly people from overseas that created the groups and were promoting them.

dmix3• 1 month ago

Any political issue that is popular or viral will have stuff like this. It’s definitely not unique to this one Alberta issue since it happens all the time. It’s just a topic that has reached beyond a local issue so it gets good traction on social media.

YouTube and Tiktok have been paying creators for years. You can guarantee people will post stuff that gets traction, not just nefariously but even regular creators getting pushed in certain directions because it’s a reliable source of views. Many will do it for free just for attention or a sense of power.

josefritzishere• 1 month ago

This feels illegal.

betaby• 1 month ago

If Facebook propaganda is so effective (and cheap) Western democracies should promote democratic values in Belarus/Kazakhstan.

Canada should use this channel to promote tariff cancellation in the USA.

I doubt that Facebook is efficient on important matter. If I'm wrong then Canadian government is doing very bad job in promoting democratic values in and outside Canada.

TonyTrapp• 1 month ago

Facebook is not a universal tool that is used the same way in every country in the world. As a start, there are more Facebook users in Canada both in absolute numbers and percentage of population than in Belarus. Internet censorship also doesn't help.

The countries that would need this the most are usually also the countries where it is the hardest to reach their population from the outside.

wavemode• 1 month ago

There is an assymetry cause by the fact that way more foreigners speak English fluently, than Americans/Canadians/British who speak foreign languages fluently.

So, they're naturally able to influence the West way more than the West can influence them.

tencentshill• 1 month ago

The US used to have that program (Voice of America). Trump shut it down because promoting democracy is woke.

nerdyadventurer• 1 month ago

Democracy is just a political slogan, if so called democracy is there, why political leadership favor billionaires over public.

jamwil• 1 month ago

I doubt it’s an effective channel for promoting liberalism (or even rationality). In North America at least the folks most engaged on Facebook tend to be media illiterate and reactionary leaning. The smart people left long ago.

palmotea• 1 month ago

tl;dr:

[The person they're investigating] even posted about income she generates from Meta's monetization program, which rewards creators for engagement and solicits subscribers on her personal page.

Facebook pays people to post content that people "engage" with, outrage is engagement, and tiny amounts of money incentive money are significant to poor people in the 3rd world.

It's the same cluster of facts that lead to "Shrimp Jesus" slop: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/04/28/facebo....

cameldrv• 1 month ago

These incentives are IMO a significant part of the political problems we are having around the world and even the general decline in mental health.

Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.

What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.

mrinterweb• 1 month ago

The title is a bit misleading. The title suggests that Facebook is intentionally paying for a political interference campaign targeting Alberta. It sounds more like it is the monetary incentive structure that indirectly encourages this type of behavior.

It has been years since I signed into Facebook. The content on Facebook is just vile and disgusting, IMO. I remember signing in 3 years ago, and signing out less than a minute later because I couldn't look at it. It wasn't content from people I knew. It was all the thirst traps, rage bait, weird ads, and other garbage. I don't think normal humans still use Facebook, do they? I can't imagine regularly frequenting a sewer like that.

Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

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