How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

>"The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world."

I'm not sure if "misleading" is the term I'd use.

The article goes into quite a bit of detail about how Facebook and Google profit a great deal from the clickbait farms that seem to predominate in the global south, where neither company does much in the way of vetting the content that the ads are displayed with aren't plagiarized or extremely low quality (see my other post here, which may well be an example of such a clickbait farm).

So no, FB and Google don't directly pay for the clickbait content, but they do give these folks a cut of the ad revenue. And without that ad revenue, it's unlikely that these "publishers" would even bother at all.

The snippet you quoted is accurate in that sense, IMHO.

But as always, folks need to draw their own conclusions.