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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.
This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
> appear to be profiting from is "an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts."
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
Yes, it says in the article that they are being paid through Meta’s content monetization program. The title is a bit of bait but it’s simply true that rage sells eyeballs so Meta does create an incentive for people to create awful content of many different types.
No, Meta intentionally set up the incentive structure to reward rage bait content. You should expect they knew what they were going to get from doing that.
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
They are creating an environment where they incentivize it and profit from it. Whether or not that’s meaningfully different from directly commissioning it themselves seems like a minor quibble to me. It’s no different than a mob boss suggesting a rival should take a long walk off a short pier.
They wrote that title specifically to mislead people.
Twitter/X has actually paying some of those creators. They're changing that program in September.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...
I think building an algorithm that prioritizes controversial content, and then paying the makers of the content is equivalent to commissioning the work.
they have a system where they accept all content, but pay double(or whatever extra the algorithm prioritization creates) for controversial content
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
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“I didn’t directly tell them to make white nationalist content, I just paid them for being an engaging content creator.”
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Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt.
It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. manslaughter.
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.
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
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.
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.
> "it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness"
Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
Recent Guardian article:
“Inside a meme factory: meet one of thousands of Indonesians trading political outrage clicks for Facebook cash“
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.
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.
FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?
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
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.
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.
Meta and its products are a cancer.
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, £10
This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Its time to boycott all meta products. Delete whatsapp, insta, facebook.
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.
Misleading headline, nontheless it paints a bleak picture for facebook's revenue if they need to resort to these practices.
Probably training the rage-bait edition of their AI so they can generate future "content" themselves.
Click on it, read the image title, that's all you need to know and the correct title here.
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.
Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic
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.
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?
Newspapers and also pay people to produce rage-bait content.
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.
Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program
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.
Ironically, this article is rage-bait.
Can't they just do it with AI ?
The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook anymore
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.