Tech Capture: The Audience Farmers
Harvest time, and we are the crop
This was a big slap in my face the first time I realized it. I couldn’t look at one of these pages seriously without doing my due diligence ever again.
Many political and social movement pages are highly calculated audience farms operating behind an activist front.
Some of the biggest are run by troll farms. A troll farm is a professional operation where a group of people share computers and phones to run large numbers of pages and accounts together. They pose as ordinary people who share their followers’ faith, community or politics, and they post whatever gets the strongest reaction. They don’t need to believe any of it. They only need us to react.
How big can that get? Bigger than almost anything else on Facebook. In the run-up to the 2020 election, troll-farm pages were reaching 140 million Americans every month. Walmart’s page, the next largest, reached 100 million. Seventy-five percent of those people had never followed any of the troll-farm pages. They saw the content because Facebook’s algorithm pushed it into their feeds.
Fifteen thousand of those pages, with majority-American audiences, were run out of Kosovo and Macedonia by people who, in the report’s words, "don’t necessarily understand American politics." The pages specifically targeted Christian, Black, and Native American communities. The report noted that some of the people running them had "never been to church" or "never had an interaction with an African American." They posted whatever got the most engagement, which tended to be misinformation, clickbait, and divisive content. The largest Christian page reached 75 million Americans a month, and 95% of them had never followed it.
We know this because Facebook’s own data scientist, Jeff Allen, found it. His October 2019 internal report, How Communities Are Exploited on Our Platforms, concluded that people weren’t choosing to follow these pages. In his words, "it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach." He called the situation "genuinely horrifying." The report leaked to MIT Technology Review two years later. Facebook knew its own design was handing strangers overseas the loudest voice in American communities.
The outrage farms
You don’t need a leaked report to spot these pages.
Outrage pages frequently present themselves as grassroots movements: a passionate Blue Democrat page, a staunch Red Patriot page. But checking a page’s Page Transparency information often reveals that the managers have no personal connection to the cause at all.
Their posts tend to look alike. "BREAKING" on news that isn’t new. Words in ALL CAPS. Headlines where someone "SLAMS" or "DESTROYS" an opponent. "They don’t want you to see this." "Share before it’s deleted." Each one is designed to make you react before you think, and it works: a 2024 study in Science, drawing on more than a million Facebook posts, found that misinformation draws more outrage than trustworthy news, and that outrage makes people share posts without reading them first.
The feel-good farms New · Oct 23
Outrage is only one crop. Heartwarming stories work just as well.
In May 2026, the UK fact-checking charity Full Fact found pages posting invented feel-good stories about British politicians rescuing dogs, funding shelters and saving abandoned twins. The pages had British-sounding names, but ten of the eleven had managers based in Vietnam. One researcher called it weaponizing empathy rather than hate.
Then there’s like-farming. A post shows a sick child and claims Facebook will donate money for every share, or simply asks you to type "Amen." The goal is to pile up likes and shares fast. According to the Better Business Bureau, once the page has a big audience, its owners strip it and use it to sell products, sell the page along with the data from its likes, or use it to collect credit card numbers and passwords. In 2017, scammers stole photos a British mother had shared of her son’s severe chickenpox, posted to push for a free vaccine, and turned them into a fake story that he had cancer and needed surgery. The post got more than 2.1 million shares and nearly 300,000 likes before Facebook removed it. Every one of those shares grew the audience its owners could later sell or turn on people with sales pitches and scams.
Researchers at Harvard’s Misinformation Review studied 125 Facebook pages flooding feeds with AI-generated images: cabins, babies, sculptures, uplifting scenes. The pages averaged nearly 147,000 followers each.
Fifty of those 125 pages had started out as something else entirely: a church in Georgia, a windmill seller, a horse services business, a high school band. The researchers describe them as stolen or repurposed. One belonged to a real touring band until it was hacked in December 2023. It was renamed "Life Nature," started posting AI images, and gained about 300,000 followers in a week.
The pages made money through links. They typically put a link in the first comment leading to websites packed with ads, which pay the site’s owners each time the ads are seen.
Our attention is exactly what the feeds are after. Give yours a rest if it’s tired; this page will wait.
The payout Updated · Oct 23
Whether it’s an inflammatory meme or a heartwarming story, the post has a target. It builds a large, highly reactive following. Once the page has hundreds of thousands of engaged followers, the operators turn that audience into money, in three ways.
The ads. As described above, a link, often in the first comment, leads to a website packed with ads, and those ads pay the site’s owners each time they’re seen.
The list. Some pages send followers to petitions, merchandise stores, or quizzes that ask for a name, phone number, or email address. Those details are collected and sold.
For example, in 2024, ProPublica found eight operations, each running its own group of Facebook pages, more than 340 pages in all. Together they posted over 160,000 political ads. Clicking an ad led to a sign-up form, some promising free government cash or free health insurance, that collected people’s names and phone numbers. That information was then sold to telemarketers.
Some pages go further and pose as stores. The Harvard study found pages implying they sold products, some of which didn’t exist, and asking commenters for personal details.
The platforms themselves. The platforms pay pages directly. Facebook’s Content Monetization program shows Facebook’s own ads alongside a page’s posts and shares part of that ad money with the page: the more views and engagement, the bigger the payout. Facebook paid creators nearly $3 billion this way in 2025. X pays creators too, based on how many verified users view their posts. A page doesn’t need to run a single ad. It only needs posts that spread.
Reading about manipulation can leave our bodies feeling tight. Let your shoulders drop, take a slow breath, and return when you’re ready.
How to check a page yourself New · Oct 23
Before sharing, take two minutes:
- Find Page transparency. Go to the page and tap the small icon or label under the page’s name (usually in small font, like "Digital creator"), or tap the page’s name itself. Tap Page transparency, then check the following.
- Who manages it. Is it a person or a company? A news or cause page run by a marketing or business company is likely a business asset, built to collect attention and turn it into money. Either way, check where the managers are based. Managers in another country posting about your country’s politics or people is a mismatch.
- Its history. Look for name changes. A page about home tips that’s now called something unrelated, like "True Stories" or "Amazing World," has been repurposed to post whatever builds a large following it can later turn into money.
- Its posts’ sources. If a post says it was fact-checked by the page itself, that’s a big red flag. Naming well-known, reputable sources without actual links is another tell: it borrows their credibility to make the page look like something it isn’t. Make sure sources have links, and click them. And if every source traces back to a government press release or to social media sites repeating each other, nobody independent has verified it.
- Its emotional effect. When a post gives us a rush of outrage, vindication, or sympathy and we want to share it right now, that’s the moment to pause. Those feelings are what the feeds are deliberately designed to trigger, to keep us hooked and engaged, so we can be steered later toward whatever pays.
Checking a political ad New · Oct 23
A familiar candidate’s face or voice in an ad doesn’t prove it’s them. ProPublica found ads using deepfake audio of Trump, as well as Biden. It also found hacked accounts of other public figures, such as a Fox News meteorologist, taken over to run deceptive ads under a name people trusted.
- "Paid for by." Meta says it requires political advertisers to get authorized and show a "paid for by" line, but that line isn’t reliable. ProPublica found more than 100,000 ads that carried it while the names listed didn’t accurately represent who was behind them, and some named organizations that don’t exist.
- AI labels. Meta says advertisers must disclose AI-altered political ads, but only in certain cases, and it doesn’t catch all AI content. An ad without an AI label isn’t necessarily real.
- The Ad Library. Every political ad is stored publicly in Meta’s Ad Library for seven years. Search the page’s name to see the ads it has run and who paid for them. A page posing as a campaign that has also run ads for insurance, giveaways or merchandise is a red flag. A political page run from another country can be one too.
- Go to the source. Don’t donate through an ad or link on social media, for two reasons. First, everything you do there teaches the platform more about you. When you open a link from inside the Facebook or Instagram app, it opens in the app’s own browser, and in 2022 a security researcher found those browsers add code to every website you visit that could let Meta track what you do there. Second, pages can be hacked. Open your regular web browser, find the candidate’s or organization’s official website, and give there. The same goes for checking any surprising claim or offer.
Refer back to this page whenever you’re not sure what you’re looking at in your social media feeds, especially when something resembles one of these categories. And please share this information with your friends. The more people know, the less we become victims of this kind of manipulative commodification, and the less we contribute to the spread of misinformation.
This is coaching, not therapy. I don’t diagnose or treat. This work is not a substitute for medical or psychological care.