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There were hundreds of them, garnering tens of thousands of interactions and hundreds of thousands of views. Earlier in November, MIT Technology Review found dozens of duplicate fake Live videos from this time period. “I’m the only one who’s been live-streaming from all over the country in real-time,” said a couple in Burma, who had over 200,000 and 160,000 views respectively. Facebook removed a few of them after they came to their attention, but dozens of them and the pages that posted them still remain. Osborne said the company is aware of the problem and has significantly reduced these fake Lives and their distribution over the past year.

Ironically, Rio believes the videos were most likely copied from crisis footage uploaded to YouTube as human rights evidence. In other words, the scenes were indeed shipped from Myanmar – but all from Vietnam and Cambodia.

He has tracked and identified several sets of pages that have been sold out in Rio, Vietnam and Cambodia in the past half year. Many used fake Live videos to quickly build their follower counts and get viewers to join Facebook groups disguised as pro-democracy communities. Rio now worries that Facebook’s latest in-stream ads in Live videos will encourage clickbait players to impersonate them. An 18-page Cambodian set began posting highly damaging political misinformation, garnering a total of 16 million interactions and 1.6 million viewers in four months. Facebook shut down all 18 pages in March, but new clusters keep spinning while others remain.

As Rio knows, these Vietnamese and Cambodian actors do not speak Burmese. They probably don’t understand Burmese culture or country politics. As a result, they don’t need it. Not when they steal their content.

Rio has since found several where Cambodians exchange tools and tips on their best monetization strategies from private Facebook and Telegram groups (one of which is made up of over 3,000 people). MIT Technology Review reviewed the documents, images, and videos it collected, and hired a Khmer translator to interpret a video tutorial that takes viewers step-by-step through a clickbait workflow.

The materials show how Cambodian operators research top performing content in each country and plagiarize them for clickbait websites. A Google Drive folder shared within the community contains two dozen spreadsheets with links to the most popular Facebook groups in 20 countries, including the US, UK, Australia, India, France, Germany, Mexico and Brazil.

The tutorial also shows how they found the most viral YouTube videos in different languages ​​and used an automated tool to turn each one into an article for their site. For example, we found 29 YouTube channels that spread political misinformation about the current political situation in Myanmar, converted into clickbait articles, and redistributed to new audiences on Facebook.

After bringing the channels to its attention, YouTube terminated all of them for violating its community guidelines, including 7 that it determined were part of coordinated influence operations linked to Myanmar. Choi noted that YouTube previously stopped serving ads on around 2,000 videos on these channels. “We continue to actively monitor our platforms to prevent bad actors who want to abuse our network.”

Then there are other tools, including a tool that allows pre-recorded videos to appear as fake Facebook Live videos. Generates another random Profile details for US menAnother tool could use some of this information to mass-produce fake Facebook accounts, including a , picture, name, birthday, Social Security number, phone number, and address.

It’s so easy to do now, with many Cambodian actors working alone. Rio calls them micro-entrepreneurs. In the most extreme scenario, it found individuals self-managing as many as 11,000 Facebook accounts.

Successful micro-entrepreneurs train others to do this business in their own communities. “It will get worse,” he says. “Any Joe in the world could be influencing your information environment without you knowing.”