I’ve been noticing ever-increasing misinformation and lies in posts on Facebook and am hoping someone can help me know how to respond to it. One form is obviously wrong information that seems designed to get outraged responses correcting the post, and another is AI images being presented as the real thing. I don’t know how Facebook posts are monetized and I’m wondering if responding to these posts in any way actually makes money for the person or computer that posts it? It’s kind of a quandary. I don’t like to leave misinformation unchallenged but I’m afraid I might be getting used by challenging it.
Facebook makes money (billions…) by selling ads. If you saw an advertisement, or even browsed on Facebook at all, then you, directly or indirectly, helped them out.
OP isn’t asking how facebook makes money, but how the person sitting behind a computer posting incorrect information*and/or AI images is making money.
I think the OPs question will have different answers depending on who’s doing the posting. I think some people are doing it purely for the LOLz. They just want to watch people argue in the comments or they get a ego boost as their engagement numbers increase. I think others are doing it to drive traffic to a specific spot. That is, they’re not making money from the post directly, but rather the post is more akin to advertising.
*Incorrect information in hopes of people responding based on their need to correct people on the internet. I’m assuming they aren’t grouping deliberate, political misinformation.
If you’re talking about politics, that’s a whole different thing.
It is even more insidious than just viewing ads next to the errant post.
Just showing ads doesn’t make money. Ads that convert to a sale or whatever else the advertising business is hawking are what keep the money raining from the sky. This is why they track you.
The missing link in the money chain is content. Who creates all those postings that attract interest? It isn’t Facebook. They rely on Facebook users to create this content. And they pay.
There is a whole business wrapped around rewarding creators for their efforts. It isn’t a lot different to other platforms - such as You Tube or X. Requirements include:
- 10,000+ followers,
- 30,000+ one-minute views of videos that are at least 3 minutes long in the past 60 days,
- and the page needs to be Facebook and advertiser friendly.
The last point is where current standards are, well, a bit lacking. Trolls, idiots, fake news, any or all may be advertiser friendly for some bottom feeding businesses and their ads. Just proving you are stupid enough may well be a good start.
Facebook will track views and comments on posts and correlate all such activities to work out what posts and what ads to serve you.
Comment on a trolling post and you can be sure they will show you more of the same. And they will show you ads they think you will be interested in based on everything you do. Including visiting other web sites that send them info every time you visit those sites. If you are logged into Facebook and you visit a huge number of other sites, they will track you. There are tactics to stop this, but the vast majority of people don’t know and don’t care. The ecosystem is one of getting you engaged and serving you targeted ads. The platforms worked out ages ago that people are far too diverse to make this content themselves.
As the adage goes, if you are not paying, you are the product.
Great post overall. Thank you. As to this edited snip …
The horrifying thing about this is the inability (unwillingness?) of the targeting systems to distinguish between positive and negative engagement.
If they serve you an e.g. anti-vax conspiracy rant, then whether you respond by agreeing or debunking that rant effectively counts as an up-vote of the rant. Both that you want more of the same, and that the world in general wants more of the same.
Which of course is somewhere between insane and active vandalism of our civilization.
“Comment on a trolling post and you can be sure they will show you more of the same.”
It is as I suspected then. Every time I post my “No AI images” on a picture of someone with 6 fingers, I am getting more of the same and fueling more AI content. Frustrating!
That is the frustrating part of all this. By calling out misinformation, you are essentially giving it an up-vote and guaranteeing you and everyone else will see more of it. I don’t know how to deal with that. It goes against my grain to see lies go unchallenged but, every time I do, I just get more.
I am the top contributor to several Facebook pages for posting “this is bullshit, and here is why… “
So are you saying that Facebook posters get this payout deal, or is this for those other sites?
I agree. I’ve noticed that people post blatantly outrageous and totally incorrect for precisely the reason mentioned, that people feel impelled to correct. I’m currently trying to train Instagram to stop feeding me crap about “here’s how to get rich bying rental properties” and “never buy a house”, plus crash videos “who’s in the wrong?” and so on. I’ve learned the hard way that responding simply results in these drowning out real, interesting content. I’ve found it’s a waste of time to comment on politics - either it’s a deliberate troll (90%) for views or the person is completely drowned in purple Koolaid (10%). (And I seem to get the benefit that I get both American and Canadian politics, which both attract the same level of moronicity).
I get how Facebook curates content based on your activity, but to the OP question, how do content creators, on FB and other platforms, make money? How does posting something result in money getting into someone’s bank account? Need answer fast!
This is the Facebook requirements. I have no idea what the other sites require. YouTube is of course well known for de-monetising for the slightest infraction. One imagines that really big time Facebook posters get well rewarded. Same as other sites. People can make a living doing this.
In the … menu, there is a “Hide Post” option that tells the system that you don’t like that particular post.
I’m a bit wary of using it on posts by my actual friends, because computers are bad at figuring out what you don’t like about things. But on junk content, I think it might be useful.
Similar for YouTube. There is a “don’t recommend this channel” or something like that in the per video menu. I hope selecting this both stops similar stuff arriving and causes at least a little damage to the channel.
Actually commenting on the video boosts both. Which is exactly what one doesn’t want.
Any sort of engagement is viewed as a positive by the various platform algorithms. Just because you are angry doesn’t mean that you won’t buy something. The platform algorithms might well serve you ads based on your being angry.
What a wicked world we live in. 
In my experience, declining one channel of garbage on Facebook doesn’t really achieve as much as it does on YouTube. FB keeps recommending junk pseudoarchaeology pages to me and I keep declining them, and more of them are offered - different ones, but differing only in name - nothing in Facebook’s algorithm appears to be registering that I just don’t want this crap - it keeps on suggesting ‘yeah, but maybe you do’.
On YouTube, there are two options ‘don’t recommend channel’ - which appears to work pretty well, and ‘not interested’, which breaks down into a couple of sub-options - ‘didn’t like it’ and ‘seen it before’ I think - which do appear to have more of an effect on tailoring the themes of stuff that appears in the recommendations feed.
Yeah, I’ve seen so many people comment ‘OK YouTube, I watched it, are you happy now?’ in apparent frustration that one of my videos appeared persistently in my feed. I used to explain to them that what they just did (watching, commenting) virtually guarantees they will be recommended more of my stuff, but I gave up on that because the conversations were rarely pleasant.
If you’re on a PC you can install the FB Purity extension and make that all go away.