Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-caught-paying-nazis-to-post-on-facebook

617 points · 42 comments · view on lemmy.world

42 Comments

kirisamemarisa@lemmy.eco.br · 123 pts · 11d (3 replies)

"Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness" what??????

Kissaki@feddit.org · 20 pts · 11d (1 reply)

What even are their policies and community guidelines for? Just publicity. Or as a tool in other cases. Corrupt liars.

anomnom@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 10d

Rich people and people in charge (see: police, their kids, even local politicians) don’t have to follow rules, especially rules they wrote. They think that their motives are always justified/pure/exceptional, and so the rules don’t need to apply to them.

methanemoose@lemmus.org · 4 pts · 10d

META's job is to get people to click and comment. It's all marketing that I walked away from years ago.

dgriffith@aussie.zone · 106 pts · 11d (1 reply)

The best kind of content for engagement is hate. You get users angrily defending both sides, stacks of comments, reposts (both in support of, and "OMG look at what they're saying), the whole shebang.

Meta has learned that promotion of hate content pays off handsomely on those sweet sweet engagement metrics that shareholders love.

So of course they're going to pay the hatemongers for content. Even when their own content policies ostensibly forbid it. Because that's what makes line go up and they'll do anything to keep that happening.

HakunaHafada@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 10d

Ragebait!

saltnotsugar@lemmy.world · 76 pts · 11d (3 replies)

Man, this really isn’t the future I was picturing when I was growing up, but here we are.

quarkquasar@lemmy.world · 56 pts · 11d (1 reply)

"The Internet of the future will be amazing! People will use it to voluntarily enrich their minds, and freedom and peace will reign!"

Actually: Nazis

Carl@anarchist.nexus · 4 pts · 10d

Hey now, it isn’t only Nazis…
^It’s^ ^also^ ^an^ ^overwhelming^ ^amount^ ^of^ ^CSAM…^

AstralPath@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 10d

This is something I struggle to accept every day of my life.

floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 45 pts · 10d

Between this, Cambridge Analytica, and the overall enshittification of society it has brought, can Meta be fucking dissolved already? Or would that be too harmful to the global dopamine hit supply?

ViatorOmnium@piefed.social · 45 pts · 11d

Underscoring how much Meta has dropped the ball on this one, even X — owned by Elon Musk, who performed two suspiciously Sieg Heil-looking salutes back in 2025 — has banned The Noticer for violating its “hateful profile policy.”

Not just Nazis but Nazis that make other Nazis squeamish.

A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip · 37 pts · 11d (3 replies)

Now That Is What I Call A Headline


These pages and individual creators posted content that appeared to be in clear violation of Facebook’s own hate speech policies. Nonetheless, they were able to earn money on their posts through the platform’s “Content Monetization” program — which is invitation-only.

Meta should’ve been under no illusions about who they were paying to drive engagement on the platform.

Yet I'm sure that's exactly what they claim. [insert South Park BP Oil Sorry meme]

BTW:

Facebook’s monetization program can be quite lucrative, though it’s unclear how much each of these pages made individually. In 2025, Facebook doled out nearly $3 billion to 16 million accounts, the reporting notes. The platform periodically discloses data on these monetized accounts, which has been collated into a searchable database by the tech accountability non-profit What to Fix.

Trex202@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 10d (1 reply)

$3b / 16m is $187.5 each account.

titanicx@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 10d

Quite

Lucrative

Abyssian@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 10d

Yes, my master.

Naich@piefed.world · 32 pts · 10d (2 replies)

"Hugo Lennon ... believed to be one of the organizers behind an “anti-immigration” march on a sacred Indigenous site in the city last year."

JAavsBNdRGtUJfB.jpg

forgetfulmeat@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 10d

MFW talking to anyone in my red state

PattyMcB@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 10d

Yeah... they're that stupidly-malicious

OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 11d (1 reply)

As if it wasn't obvious enough that nazi posters have special protected status on social media platforms. The report buttons do nothing against them.

Abyssian@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 10d

That's crazy talk. The report buttons work exactly as intended for racist accounts. Every time someone reports them they make 50 cents.

EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app · 28 pts · 11d

Oh that's the actual headline lol.

I thought it would be like they paid some people with some ties to fascist groups but some plausible deniability...

But no. Full mask off.

IAmYouButYouDontKnowYet@reddthat.com · 21 pts · 11d (6 replies)
[ removed ]
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 10d (2 replies)

I think you're on the wrong track. Reality is still immensely accessible to you if you go out in the world and critically check the information you've been given against the human reality out there.

Don't lose yourself to the despair or confusion.

In a way, it's also kind of blatant if you look back at the past 10 years and how nothing seems to socially make sense in a natural organic human way. Like orchestrated social event planning to manipulate psychology to lead to a certain path. (Look into generations of warfare, specifically 5th and 6th iirc.)

Plenty of things make social sense from the last 10 years in local communities, national contexts and international contexts. Both the good and the bad, e.g. a broad normalisation of LGBT and a backlash against it, progress in renewable energy and fights against different diseases, the rise of vaccine skeptics after COVID, the pandemic itself.

Or look at the "Ceuta crisis" in Europe. Images spread, right wing panic ensues, critical media investigates, it's clear that the real situation is completely under control, the whole story becomes about an opportunistic right wing trying to create panic about immigration and left wing Spain.

All of this has played out in a natural, organic human way. Yes, social media has been a big, ugly shift in how communities work, and yes, they definitely work on purpose to simplify things that would previously die off most likely. But if you go outside and open your eyes, the world can make plenty of sense without some inhuman conspiracy beyond regular greed.

And please don't say that anyone that disagrees with you are just victims of propaganda, that's the ideal way to detach yourself from reality.

afterthewar@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 10d (1 reply)

Your suggestion is to fact check events happening in other countries you read about in person?

SmoothOperator@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 10d

No, rather my suggestion is to start rooting yourself in the reality around you, understand the relationship between that reality and the media reporting on it, and then try to understand international events through that lense.

If certain media reports on things in your area in an unreasonable way, it might be that it's a fundamentally unreasonable media. If some group's messaging and ideology doesn't match the reality you see around you, it might be a group detached from reality. Use these learnings to build critical thinking and find media and sources you can trust, or where you at least understand their angle and blind spots.

Of course, it does really help to see the situation around your own country and in other countries with your own eyes. Not everyone has that opportunity, but if you do, seize it, and talk to real people in the community.

SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 11d

I think what's happening is everyone is operating entirely for their own self interest, and after awhile those interests start syncing up. So there's no conscious conspiracy, but people are working together towards a common goal.

It would be more comforting if it were a conscious conspiracy, at least then there would be a goal set by conscious people. But I don't think there is actually anyone at the wheel just all of the parts of a machine working together while we drive off a cliff.

Social media is definitely used to control people and yeah making people hate is the way they're controlling people. But it's a mess of foreign interests and moneyed interests. Foreign interests don't want societal cohesion in their adversaries to weaken them. Moneyed interests don't want cohesion so we can't get it together enough to tax them and regulate their businesses. So they promote radicalization and demonization of centrists and disgusting politics on both the far right and far left to keep everyone divided.

l3mming@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 11d

This was very well put. Thank you.

Sims@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 11d

Don't worry. You sound perfectly sane to those that have spent any time investigating the big movements in global society. Good work..

daychilde@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 10d

:sigh: I hate when people just tell outright lies for clicks.

Did bad people get money from Meta? Yes.

Did Meta actively pay bad people to post bad content? NO. This is like saying that Youtube had hired people to post AI videos targeting children because they pay people part of the advertising they sell on videos. It is not the same thing at all.

If a Walmart employee beats you up while they're on the clock, these twits would post "WALMART HIRED AND PAID PEOPLE TO BEAT INNOCENT PEOPLE UP".

Am I saying Meta is great? No1 Fuck you no! But is this headline bullshit? YES IT IS.

greatwhitebuffalo41@slrpnk.net · 18 pts · 11d

I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you! Ok not even a tiny bit.

gedaliyah@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 11d

Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material: anything that will get people upset and arguing is the best way to get engagement.”

That tracks.

eicker@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 11d

Facebook spent years claiming it couldn’t control what its platform amplified: Apparently it gets much easier when it’s time to write the checks.

Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 9 pts · 11d

i would be surprised if they wouldnt, because they only ever push right wing material on FB.

LemmyPlaceDN@europe.pub · 3 pts · 11d

That shortened headline phrasing is semantically ambiguous. With context it's clear, but it can also be read as "Meta has caught paying nazis in order to post on Facebook"

CosmoNova@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 11d (1 reply)

Imagine what his ancestors would think of Zuckerberg when if they could read this.

PrimeMinisterKeyes@leminal.space · 2 pts · 10d

Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew himself, wrote this after WW II on Jewish Nazi sympathizers and collaborators:

The violence of a totalitarian State is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship and adoration. How else can one explain the way certain intelligent, thinking Jews declared the slaughter of the Jews to be necessary for the happiness of mankind? That in view of this they were ready to take their own children to be executed - ready to carry out the sacrifice once demanded of Abraham?

donald_von_shitsnpants@kopitalk.net · 2 pts · 11d

Milliardäre lieben Nazis? Schock

Kolanaki@pawb.social · -1 pts · 11d (2 replies)

iamthetot@piefed.ca · 14 pts · 11d (1 reply)

From the article:

Hate, unfortunately, sells. Right-wing extremism researcher Kaz Ross told ABC that Meta’s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material: anything that will get people upset and arguing is the best way to get engagement.”

It’s another example of how quickly Meta dropped its once-stricter content moderation policies when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Shortly before his second inauguration, Meta loosened its standards around hate speech, particularly on topics like gender identity and immigration, two of the far right’s favorite issues.

Sims@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 11d

It's much bigger than just corporate 'profits' ! This is the US/western oligarch Class pushing the world to the brink of WW3, only because they are trying to hinder China and others from eclipsing them and thereby taking away the exorbitant power they have commanded for several hundred years, while colonizing and exploiting the world..

Meta and the Zuck are colluding with the US Epstein Class to manipulate the entire 'western' hemisphere of people where Meta/facebook are present.

This is psychopathy/manipulation on a civilizational scale, and the Zuck and all his Epstein buddies will need to pay the consequences of that at some point.

Sims@lemmy.ml · -8 pts · 11d (1 reply)

Nazism have gotten a deliberate revival in the western information sphere.

We had the same celebration of Nazi c*nts in Canada, where Trudeau pulled out an old Ukrainian Nazi, and let him be paraded in their parliamentarian chambers - together with Zelensky oc.

If we go further back, we see that a throng of nazi's from old Germany/Europe was saved/relocated and protected by the Western psycho Oligarchy, that was just waiting to trigger them again later.

We even see that many of the current unelected top EU elite have families that have close connections to this archaic and disgusting ideology, through parents, or grandparents.

We see techlords that have WAY to close connections, and families that openly express similar attitudes.

What is especially interesting, is that the situation in Ukraine was escalated by US through local Nazi groups that were also nurtured since 1990'ies by the US/CIA, and we see how Ukraine is controlled by Nazi groups today (they all have Bandera and Nazi signs everywhere and their nazi groups vocally confirms it despite being told to hide it now).

My bet is that Meta worked closely with US oligarchy, to manipulate the western population towards accepting nazi attitudes, as something more normal, and hopefully for them, nurture a new breed of nationalists ready to kill others for the Zuck and the Epsteins..

Sims@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 11d

For other hardcore investigators out there: This site is by Danish Sociologist and researcher Lars Jørgensen: https://homosociologicus.com/history-of-20-21-century

Very high quality in general.