Banned but still paid: How disinformation accounts keep monetising on Facebook

Disinformation actors are making money on Facebook even after violating the platform’s policies, a new study shows.

What to Fix, a tech policy non-profit, and Raskrinkavanje, a Bosnian fact-checking organisation, analysed over 290 Facebook pages in Bosnia that were flagged for distributing fake content over 10 times by one of Meta’s fact-checking partners.

Fifty-one of the accounts flagged by fact-checkers for promoting disinformation at least ten times “have a history of being enrolled in at least one Facebook monetization program,” Raskrinkavanje said in their analysis.

Of these accounts, one in three were able to register for more than one channel of monetisation before 2024, when Meta merged its various money streams into one invite-only program.

Another nine accounts were invited by Meta to join that program that pays them based on the performance of their content.

“Our findings raise important questions about Meta’s ability to fulfill its commitment to demonetise repeat disinformation offenders,” the study found.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has long faced criticism in the United States and Europe for struggling to stop disinformation from spreading on its platforms.

After information integrity concerns emerged during the 2016 US election, Meta started to work with third-party fact-checkers to verify content. It started to roll back these capabilities last year in some places, replacing them with Community Notes, where people on the platform can add notes to clarify or flag when a post is potentially misleading.

Current company policy does not allow any content that third-party fact-checkers working with Meta label as “fake” or that share clickbait from monetisation, the report said.

“Fake” content is anything “that has no basis in fact,” including content that has fake quotes, impossible claims, conspiracy theories, fabricated content or real media that is used as “proof of an unrelated event,” the company said.

However, the report notes that Meta does not specify what thresholds it uses to apply repeat restrictions.

Some of the accounts the study evaluated were eventually demonetised or suspended for violating the platform’s policies, but the study found that 84% of them were able to regain access to monetisation.

Over 50% of the restricted accounts were back online in a month, while in some cases, the suspension lasted only 2 days.

“This suggests that Meta may have allowed restricted actors to continue to monetise content on Facebook despite having accurately identified them as having violated its monetisation policies on a repeated basis,” the report found.

Euronews Next reached out to Meta for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.

What To Fix said their study is limited because Meta does not keep information on the monetisation of accounts on the platform.

Instead, the fact-checking organisations are limited to an ongoing database of disclosures to identify when accounts were monetised and an internal archive of fact-checks.

It is also possible that, due to the limited scope of their study, that Meta worked with other fact-checkers to remove other accounts and in other markets.

Still, it encouraged the European Union to research whether Meta is complying with the bloc’s rules under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and its obligations under the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, which has a commitment to “demonetise disinformation.”