Troll farms reached 140M Americans a month on FB before 2020 elections

It's interesting that the biggest target groups (religious, African-American, Native American) are often on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

I wonder if the perps got their desired outcome?

Interesting analysis, but I'm not clear on the motives of the troll farms in this case. Just sowing discontent among different groups of people? No real analysis on what disinformation was being spread or for what purpose. Facebook trolls have previously been associated with Russian Intelligence and thus Trump...and maybe with the Christian American group I could see that happening. However I don't see a dozen or so African American groups being used to help Trump in his 2020 election.

So what specifically makes one of these Facebook pages a "troll farm" instead of just a page run by people who happen to be outside the US? Does it even matter if they are domestic or international? Much of this article seems to describe high-engagement content that happens to out-compete other pages by simply giving users what they want. The article uses vague terms at times, like "propaganda" or "provocative content" but doesn't clarify provide clear definitions. It also mentions that the content might be of "limited originality" but that hardly seems worthy of notice, given almost the entirety of social media is exactly that.

The underlying paper, embedded towards the bottom of the article, also seems similarly vague. It mentions that Facebook's mission is to "bring the world closer together" but doesn't make clear why these groups don't fall under that mission. This particular sentence from the opening "Background" section is probably their best attempt at explaining why this is a problem:

> It is profoundly strange that people who do not speak the local language, do not understand US politics, and fundamentally do not care about US politics, were able to become one of the loudest voices in the civic space on FB.

Do any of these matter? Is someone not allowed to share content or become influential unless they speak certain languages or understand certain politics? Can't the same charges also be leveled against various domestic groups?