There were hundreds of them and they racked up tens of thousands of engagements and hundreds of thousands of views. MIT Technology Review found many duplicate Live videos from this time frame still up. One duplicate pair with over 200,000 and 160,000 views, respectively, claimed that they were the only ones who broadcasted live from all over the country. After we brought them to the attention of Facebook, it took several of them down, as well as dozens more, and the pages that posted them. The company has reduced the distribution of fake Lives over the past year.
Rio believes that the videos were likely ripped from the crisis uploaded to the internet. The scenes are all from Vietnam and Cambodia.
Rio has tracked and identified several page clusters from Vietnam and Cambodia over the past half-year. Many used fake Live videos to quickly build their follower numbers and drive viewers to join their Facebook groups. Rio is worried that the new in-stream ads in Live videos will encourage clickbait actors to fake them. A Cambodian cluster with 18 pages began posting highly damaging political misinformation, reaching a total of 16 million engagements and an audience of 1.6 million in four months. In March, Facebook took all 18 pages down, but new clusters continue to spin up.
The actors from Vietnam and Cambodia do not speak Burmese. They probably don't understand the country's politics or culture. They don't need to. Not when they are stealing.
Rio found several Cambodians on private Facebook and Telegram groups where they trade tools and tips about money-making strategies. MIT Technology Review reviewed the documents, images, and videos she gathered, and hired a Khmer translator to interpret a video that walks viewers through a clickbait process.
The materials show how the Cambodian operators plagiarized the best content in each country for their clickbait websites. There are two dozen spreadsheets of links to the most popular Facebook groups in 20 countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, India, France, Germany, Mexico, and Brazil.
The video shows how to find the most popular videos on the internet in different languages, and how to use an automated tool to convert them into articles. We found 29 channels on YouTube that were spreading political misinformation about the current political situation in the country, which were being converted into clickbait articles and redistributed to new audiences on Facebook.
One of the channels is spreading misinformation. It was eventually taken down by Google.
After we brought the channels to its attention, YouTube terminated them for violating its community guidelines, including 7 of which it determined were part of coordinated influence operations linked to the country of Myanmar. In the past, YouTube stopped serving ads on nearly 2,000 videos. She said that they continue to monitor their platforms to prevent bad actors from abusing their network for profit.
One of the tools is that allows pre recorded videos to be used as fake Facebook Live videos. Another tool can mass-produce fake Facebook accounts using some of the profile information generated by another randomly generated one.
Many Cambodian actors operate alone. Rio calls them micro-entrepreneurs. She has seen people manage as many as 11,000 Facebook accounts on their own.
Successful micro-entrepreneurs are training others to do the same work. She says it will get worse. Any Joe in the world could be affecting your information environment.
