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> because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship

Or because they were raking in money off the back of it.

This maybe true, but the mechanics of it escape me?

Many fake news sites were destination sites which carried ads. It seems unlikely that the margin on that traffic would have been enough to pay for significant Facebook traffic.

The version of this play which I've heard was:

- Create fake "news" site with outrageous stories.

- Cover it with ads (from Google and others)

- Seed it in Facebook groups

- Rely on organic reach to generate traffic.

I maybe wrong about the ability to to arbitrage on this traffic. If anyone has numbers I'd love to see them.

When our granparents did this, they called it satire and had to chop down a lot of trees to like and share.

I believe the parent means Facebook makes money off of this indirectly. The more salacious fake news on Facebook, the higher the user engagement rate with the news feed, and the more time spent on Facebook reading and sharing this stuff. This translates to more ad revenue for Facebook.

Yeah, maybe, if we are stretching.

But I wouldn't describe that as "raking in money" - more like a marginal increase which might have been matched by other changes in the news feed algorithm.

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