Facebook Ads "budget sponges"
the fake MAGA accounts burning your budget and what you can do about it
Facebook ads are brilliant for getting the right content in front of the right people. The Steve Bannons of this world realised ages ago that in the world of politics this was like having a super power. Progressives have been trying to level up in this area for a couple of years. At Valent, we have looked at how far behind Progressives are (check out this report on the UKās Conservative Partyās digital strategy in the last election). But we are now seeing evidence of something Iāve suspected for a while; itās not just that the hard/alt right are better, they have also built tools and techniques that undermine Progressivesā campaigns.
If you are an organisation or a campaign involved in social justice campaigning, this has a direct impact on how much you are spending on your social media campaigns and what you are getting for your budget.
If you think this could be useful to someone running social justice, public health or any other sort of campaign for the greater good, please consider sharing this port with them:
For the past couple of months, Valent had the privilege of developing and executing a social media campaign for US author and activist Zach Norrisā latest book Defund Fear (definitely check out his book here). The campaign included Facebook ads. Our strategy was an adapted version of one that is used extensively in the commercial world: You build a āfunnelā that purposefully targets a broad swathe of people. And, as the audience reacts to your ads, you tweak the demographic and the content of new ads to increase the percentage of people who click/buy/watch/share the ad.
Our campaign contained dozens of ads aimed at different audiences across the US. Hereās an example of one that went to Texas:
Quite a few Trump supporters turned up in the comments section. Now, keep in mind these arenāt regular posts. They are ads that were specifically directed towards particular types of people. In this case, Progressive leaning people in Texas. Our proxy characteristics for āprogressive-leaningā were an interest in either Bernie Sanders, the Southern Poverty Law Center or Elizabeth Warren.
Facebook advertising always draws in āfalse positivesā; people who have been included in the target audience, but arenāt the people you had in mind. So, some negative comments are normal. However, Ollie, our social media strategist, noticed that the negative comments were higher than he would normally expect. So we looked in detail at the comments on a few of the ads. It turns out that A LOT of the comments are from MAGA types. Hereās a breakdown for the ad above:
297 comments = 202 people
Authentic Hard Right supporters = 80 people
Authentic liberal supporters = 57 people
Inauthentic Hard Right accounts = 37 people
Authentic non-tribal accounts = 28 people
This means 39% of those commenting were Hard Right Capitol-rioter types and just under 20% were fake accounts. The way Facebook charges for ads means part of your ad budget gets eaten up every time either the wrong sort of person sees your ad or it gets delivered to a fake account. If you were running an election campaign and have a budget that you need to wring absolutely all the value out of that you can, these accounts would be reducing your ābang for buckā, by as much as 50%.
So, whatās going on? Why are real-life hard right Trump supporting MAGAists being shown ads about prison reform meant for people who like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders; and where did these fake accounts come from?
For now, I'll stick to just the fake accounts (or at least the āmore-than-likely fake accounts). Some like āMatt Smithā seem to ālikeā a wide collection of political causes, from Evangelical organisations to US Democratic Socialists and Bernie Sandersā Page. The screengrab below is from Smithās profile.
Now, Smith might be an open-minded sort of political thinker who wants to weigh up the arguments of evangelicals and American socialists. Orā¦ he might not actually be a real person. š¤·āāļø Matt Smithās account was by no means unusual. Other sorts of likely fake accounts looked like old-school Russian Disinformation. Like āTyler Bristolā, who apparently comes from Texas but likes hanging out in front of the Kremlin:
The way Facebookās algorithm decides who likes what sort of content is famously opaque. Researchers who study social media say Facebook has on average 52,000 data points on each user. So, thatās not just Pages youāve lolāed at (š), but also data Facebook has purchased about you from data brokers like Experian; algorithms that use facial recognition software to figure out from photos who else you know; and one that uses AI to predict what you might be interested in the future.
So registering a fake Facebook profile and setting it up to mimic the personality of a particular sort of person is not that hard. That profile will then be sent ads and posts that Facebookās algorithms think the fake profileās owner will want to see.
Facebook takes fake profiles pretty seriously (much more so than violations of its community guidelines on hate speech, for example) precisely because they are used to game ads, the foundation of its business model.
So, fake profiles on Facebook are not just there to āshit postā - thatās all very 2016. They also have a number of other uses. And, although more research is needed in this space, Iām pretty confident from what weāve seen that one of those uses is as ābudget spongesā designed to blunt the impact of Progressivesā social media campaigns.
The reason this gave me a real āaha! š”ā moment is that I have seen glimpses for a while now of what look like highly coordinated hard right online operations across the UK, US the Middle East and Africa. Every now and again, we see something that just doesnāt seem right, like Libyan Pages with admins in Singapore. Or reporting by the likes of DFRLab that has identified shadowy companies like New Waves in Egypt and Newave (website screen grabs below) in the UAE that were caught running networks of hundreds of Facebook profiles and Pages across the Middle East and Africa.
Although these two companies were found out and seem to have stopped operations. Thereās a very good chances there are dozens if not hundreds more such companies offering similar services all over the world. Certainly, we tend to see certain admin locations pop up in particular countries. Pakistan, Singapore and Ukraine seem to be very popular locations for Facebook admins for some reason.
So what should you do if you donāt want your ad budget sponged up by fake profiles?
The easiest types of ad campaign to set up and the most likely to get gamed. Donāt rely on āboostsā, and make sure you have installed a Facebook Pixel on your website
Facebookās Pixel allows you to capture which accounts visited your website and visited specific pages. These people can then be re-engaged with new ads. Although this will be a much smaller group of people, you know you are engaging real people interested in what you are saying and not relying on Facebook to find people (if youāre lucky) who it thinks *might* be interested
Never click the option to use āFacebook Audience Networkā. This feature pushes ads to a wider networks of Facebook affiliated websites, but the instances of āclick fraudā seem very high
We found that fake accounts are relatively more likely to comment, but not share or ālikeā. When setting up a campaign it is possible to chose different objectives, such as shares or link clicks. Choosing one of these options tells Facebook to prioritise accounts that are more likely to be real
My name is Amil Khan. I work with an amazing team of digital strategists, content creators and researchers committed to helping those working for a better world adapt to the new digital reality. If you want to know more about what we do, or get in touch, you can visit our website here: