Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta

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Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta

robtherobber

Comments (336)

mattlondon
I think this is a bit misleading.It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
rubyfan
Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me. They are bad for your soul, bad for the nation, bad for the world.
florkbork
I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found. While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm
fosron
Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.
bilekas
This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.
wpietri
> "it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness"Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
Barbing
Recent Guardian article: “Inside a meme factory: meet one of thousands of Indonesians trading political outrage clicks for Facebook cash“ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237298
superxpro12
Facebook figured out a long time ago that "ragebait" and profit are transitively connected via "engagement". They recognized that anger, hate, fear, and all negative emotions can ALSO bring in a LOT of clicks.
khernandezrt
Just to add onto this; Instagram purposely floats controversial comments to the top of a comment section for "engagement" purposes. I've seen this many times.
bwb
FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?
ravivooda
Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this was the kind of content worth generating.
wookmaster
I'm not surprised, I quit because I kept getting pushed this content for a long while and suspected as much. Same is happening on nextdoor for sure, whenever I login there's some pushed post that creates a bunch of engagement of someone stating something very political and controversial. It almost feels funny how bluesky and other platforms lack this sorta rage bait being prioritized. Facebook and friends sold us out hard and made society suffer. Stop using their services.
tomaytotomato
I would drop Facebook in a heartbeat but Facebook Marketplace is a strong pull for getting bargains in my local area.I have alternatives like eBay and Gumtree but they have their own shortcomings.Examples from Facebook:- Antique lumber planks 50p a plank- 4 sticks of DDR4 16GB SODIMMs, £60- Garden tools, £10This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
cdrnsf
Meta and its products are a cancer.
koe123
Every single time historically we have unregulated media you get a shitshow. I think you can blame our societies nonchalant lassez faire attitude to the propaganda profiteering by American big tech for lots of the issues we face today. Honestly: do cocaine laced recommender algorithms really benefit us? I really hope the EU fully bans this stuff.
graemep
Ragebait is what FB runs on. A lot of these people do not even believe what they say. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
Bleaphar
This sucks, I feel like most people are so done with rage bait content but it's what the platforms have proven makes the most money. At this point it would take a new platform with a different paradigm to get people to stop but also no one wants a new app to keep track of.
thih9
The companies clearly won’t listen to reason, not as long as this strategy works.Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.
manoDev
Social media is weaponised thought control. The new generation is being forced out of viable useful jobs to turn into so called “content creators”. Don’t participate in it, and delete it from kids and parents devices if possible.
game_the0ry
Its time to boycott all meta products. Delete whatsapp, insta, facebook.
PowerElectronix
Misleading headline, nontheless it paints a bleak picture for facebook's revenue if they need to resort to these practices.
hugodan
Click on it, read the image title, that's all you need to know and the correct title here.
throwfaraway135
There is no solution based on censorship that doesn't undermine democracy. If you want Facebook to censor people/content/ideas that you don't like it is going also to censor vital information needed for a democracy to work.The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
ChrisMarshallNY
I stopped logging into Faecebook, years ago, because it marked most of my posts as spam (I tended to post "look at my latest" stuff, there, so I understand why; but it rendered the platform worthless, for me).However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
christkv
I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymore
Growtika
Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic
raincole
Newspapers and also pay people to produce rage-bait content.
cedws
Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
iamnothere
This is a tired rehash of the same panic we had after 2016. In short: “Oh no, if we allow unrestricted communications, people may turn this into political advantage!” No shit. That’s the point of free speech.As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for everyone, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a great solution.
seydor
Can't they just do it with AI ?
fergie
The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.
falsemyrmidon
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook anymore
classified
Probably training the rage-bait edition of their AI so they can generate future "content" themselves.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
This is a really funny way to describe Facebook's (and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and...) entire business model. It's long been known that they aggressively promote ahem "engaging" content. How do they incentivize people to make it? Ad revenue!
archerx
Maybe they should pay their programmers to fix the audio bug in their iOS app. I can't listen to my podcasts and use the facebook app at the same time because it wants to mute the podcast to play nothing, even with the phone on silent and autoplay disabled the facebook app just randomly mutes my podcasts for no reason making me not want to use the app.
bakugo
Ironically, this article is rage-bait.
phendrenad2
People want to feel like they're doing something in the "culture war". Rage-bait gives them an outlet. Facebook might be saving us from total civil war here.
giwook
I hate that I've become jaded enough to say this, but what else is new?
binary132
My ragebait good. Your ragebait bad.
Razengan
Why do the richest and most powerful humans, who have seen all of the world and its wonders, and can go anywhere anytime, and get all the luxuries our civilization has to offer, and never have to struggle for anything in their lives..want to make it worse?
efilife
Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program
xhkkffbf
Just to be clear, I was not enraged by this headline when I desperately clicked on it as fast as I could. It was out of pure scholarly interest.
diogenescynic
We've become a provocateur type of society... Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Jake/Logan Paul... it's all the same thing at the end of the day. They harvest attention and in return funnel their audience towards ads, merch, OnlyFans, etc.
magic_hamster
First of all, Facebook is not even the worst offender. That'd have to go to X and TikTok. Rage bait, propaganda, and straight up bad actors with money pushing their agenda. If you got angry because of a TikTok video, you are being exploited.Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
juleiie
When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.
somelamer567
Meta have long profited from knowingly aiding and abetting the enemies of the West by undermining our societies from within.Meta are the greatest force against freedom in the world today, apart from Putin's post-fascist power vertical and the Chinese Communist Party.What I think of Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately cannot be printed, because unlike Meta platforms, HN has standards.
chris_explicare
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patchtopic
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eclips0
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eclips0
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eclips0
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elmer2
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shevy-java
Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
aBskH123
It is not only rage bait. They like the new corporate fascism and that its followers believe that the right wing will fix the economy.Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
mkbkn
Entire public Meta suite of products are cancer to the society.
pbiggar
Similarly, Meta is paying violent illegal israeli settlers, who commit attrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to steal their land. Same mechanism.https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-does...
bdangubic
If we were normal society company like Meta would be shut down and its CEO would be in Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity
throww2q79ww
Social network is a cancer. I don't even talk to people who use these networks.
ThunderSizzle
How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.Social media is just following the same strategy.