How to rage bait Americans

- Cut their benefits and make them leave.

It's as simple as that.

- This street interview has over a million views on Facebook.

It might not seem that weird.

At first, it's a British woman at an anti-immigration protest somewhere in the UK.

Here's the weird part.

- Cut their benefit. - Cut their benefit.

- Cut their benefits. - Cut their benefits.

- The system is completely broken.

- [All] We need proper reform for the whole broken system.

- It's as simple as that. - It's as simple as that.

- Maybe you could already tell, but all of these videos are AI-generated.

What's gone viral isn't just the videos themselves, but also the prompt used to make them.

It's part of a genre dominating Facebook in the United Kingdom.

AI-generated content designed to fuel anger online, particularly with anti-Muslim or anti-immigration messages.

It's videos like these...

- Why are migrants put first?

- But also images like these and news updates like these.

Maybe that's not too surprising, these are hot button topics.

Here's where it gets weirder, and you might already suspect what I'm about to show you.

These accounts are hiding a secret.

Many of them claim to be from the United Kingdom, but if you go to their page, click on their name, and click page transparency, you can see that they aren't.

Instead, they're actually based in places like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines.

And here's where it gets even weirder.

- If we simply cut their benefits, they'll choose to leave on their own.

- These foreign run Facebook slop accounts are also targeting Australia and the United States with almost the same exact content.

- Cut their benefits and they will deport themselves.

- I wanted to understand the ecosystem that's motivating people in these countries to specifically post this type of content about these places.

- It's a semi-dystopian system online.

- Newsfeeds are full of nightmarish slop.

- There's no sense of the real impact on people.

- I've spent the last few weeks deep in this strange corner of the internet, trying to understand why a certain kind of content meant for people in one part of the world has become an obsession for people in another part of it.

And the answer I found was much stranger than I thought.

(suspense music) One of the accounts posting these AI-generated UK protest videos was called, "I Love UK."

I Love UK is managed by people in Sri Lanka.

You can see that when you look at a Facebook page's page transparency tab.

So I went looking for more information about Sri Lankan AI slop operations, and I came across this, Hate for profit, a 2025 investigation into a Sri Lankan commercial network on Facebook.

The network consisted of 128 pages and groups which posted images like this, targeting the UK, collectively reaching over 1.5 million followers.

- Why are Facebook pages in Sri Lanka creating this very particular kind of content?

- Sri Lankan is basically a small country.

It seemed likely there was some sort of coordination going on.

- Analyst Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan and Journalist Niamh McIntyre both worked on the investigation.

And I asked them if I Love UK seemed like it could be part of this network.

Do you have a record of like this particular page being part of the network?

Is there a way to check?

- Let me check here.

Yeah, that's would say most likely part of the group.

- [Christophe] All 128 pages and groups in the network linked back to an academy run by one person, Geeth Sooriyapura.

He's a creator who runs several UK politics pages and an online academy where he teaches students how they can make this kind of content too.

(Geeth speaking in foreign language) - He's been quite instrumental in, you know, Sri Lanka being like a real hub for this because he has an academy where he tutors and mentors other Sri Lankans.

- On social media, Geeth projects an image of wealth and success, proof for customers that the business model works.

And that was consistent with the little I could learn from trying to talk to the people running these accounts directly.

I made a new Facebook account to ask the people running these pages a simple question.

"Why are you doing this?"

I heard back from a few of them, none were willing to do an interview.

Just one account, I Love UK, the same one we'd confirmed was likely part of Geeth's network responded with a simple explanation.

They only needed money.

- There is a huge impact of these individuals who demonstrate you can make money doing it and you know, have lifestyles that show that, you know, they are successful.

- So that's how an account like I Love UK probably got started.

Someone in Sri Lanka started watching Geeth's tutorials, learning the right prompts, topics and strategies and started to post.

But Sri Lanka is just one of many hubs of this kind of content along with Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

And Geeth is just one of many tutorial creators teaching people how to make money by posting AI-generated content on Facebook.

If you watch those tutorials, you'll notice that a lot of them are teaching people how to reach viewers specifically in the UK and US, like this one, specifically showing how to make AI-generated videos in the US politics news niche.

(instructor speaking in foreign language) - At exactly 10:47 this morning- - At exactly 10:47 this morning- - [Both] A former president of the United of the States was one sentence away- - I wanted to understand why these specific countries were such a big focus for tutorial creators in a whole nother part of the world.

These are places with turbulent immigration debates, but so is all of Europe.

These are English-speaking countries, but hundreds of millions of people in India speak English.

Why specifically get involved with the American and British and Australian immigration debates in particular?

(Kashif speaking in foreign language) This is Kashif Majeed.

He makes tutorials about AI-generated content creation with over 2 million YouTube subscribers.

His content is mostly focused on finance and crypto, not inflammatory political topics, but I reached out to see if he'd sit down and talk with me, and he did.

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Okay, let's get back to the story.

- So we are teaching people how to create AI videos and target US content.

So like for USA people.

- I am always interested to see like USA niche is kind of its own thing.

How would you describe what that means?

What does it mean to make like USA content?

- YouTube pays too much low payment for Pakistani audience because their purchase power is low.

So, in US and UK and Europe countries or Australia, or any other countries like white people, they have a very good purchase power.

- We are all, for the most part, on the same internet and on that internet, everyone's attention is for sale, but some people's attention is worth a lot more than others.

The amount of money that advertisers pay to reach a viewer varies significantly depending on where that viewer lives.

This is a list from the YouTube Analytics site YTFACE ranking every country by how much advertisers pay to reach viewers there.

To reach a thousand YouTube viewers in New Zealand, for example, advertisers pay about $30.

To reach a thousand viewers in Thailand, they pay about 30 cents.

This is called CPM or cost per thousand impressions.

The amount a creator makes is called RPM or revenue per thousand impressions.

And it means that content creators around the world are incentivized to reach audiences in these places, especially if they live in these places.

- If we are creating content from Pakistan, but targeting USA, UK, Canada, it give us too much money.

Like you can say the RPM would be 6 to $30 per thousand views.

And if you are creating content in Pakistan for Pakistani audience, it's about $0.4, like 40 cents.

So that's why people are creating content for the US.

- If you were to say like, "Oh, this is what I've learned Americans like," what are those categories of things?

- Yeah, yeah.

I would say the top three are finance, cars, reviews, and journalism, or you can say news.

- [Christophe] People in the content creation automation world call these niches.

- In finance, you can choose different niches like crypto, like finance history, Elon Musk history, how Elon Musk started.

After finance, it's about car reviews.

It's about news, like general news, like Trump news, Obama news, and other presidents and other USA news.

- [Christophe] Kashif mostly makes videos in that first niche, finance and crypto, and he told me that accuracy is an important part of his process.

- I mentioned in all my videos that you should research before uploading.

So the most common issue is the people are not so well-educated.

So you can say they're illiterate, they don't research too much, and they just need views.

It's a big responsibility.

- Kashif is right.

Publishing content to an audience on the internet is a big responsibility that requires doing good, accurate research.

But it did not feel like the people in this corner of Facebook were doing that.

At the beginning of the story, I was tempted to call these AI news slop channels misinformation, but as I kept talking to people, that stopped feeling like the right name for what was going on.

- It's not that they're trying to mislead or lie to people, it's just that they don't care about the truth.

- Aengus Bridgman is a political scientist who studies online misinformation in Canada.

Aengus' team fact checked almost 6,000 posts from a network of spammy news pages targeting Canada and found that only about 54% contained false or unsupported claims. - So just like a total coin flip of truthfulness on this content.

Being untruthful is not the point.

They could not care less if they are truthful or not truthful.

It is simply what gets engagement.

- And while making content about a country's issues used to take a certain amount of expertise, that barrier to entry has fallen.

- We said the barrier to entry of engaging in mass propaganda used to be very high.

Before you would've had to hire a writer or a researcher, you'd sort of like look up what's going on in that country, let's investigate it.

You've got like a country expert.

Now, you can go on ChatGPT, you can go on Claude and say, "Hey, what's going on in that country?

Write me some copy to do this thing."

- [Christophe] Which means that these creators don't need to have many technical skills or be familiar with a country's politics, or even speak its language to create highly specific, polarising and engaging content.

- It's as good as a cat video or as good as someone doing those like AI cutting glass sculptures.

It's just something that performs well.

- You're just going to use AI to produce as much as possible, as cheaply as possible.

- These creators don't care about UK politics or about the immigration debate.

They've just AB tested their way to figuring out what upsets people in rich English-speaking countries the most, and this is what that happens to be.

- One of the pages one day for some reason put out like a refugees welcome image.

Either they were trying to do AB testing to see whether that would drive up some clickbaits anger, or I suspect it's the case they just, because there's so little understanding, you know, these are people just pouring stuff out, they just put that up without even recognising what they've written.

And then they went back the next day to, you know, refugees out.

It's this complete lack of concern with what's actually being produced beyond the fact that it makes money.

- One thing that's jarring about watching tutorials from the Sri Lankan tutorial creator, Geeth, is how news is just another kind of slop topic alongside cute animals, ASMR, arts and crafts, nail art, magic, and archaeological mysteries.

And as I learned more, I started to understand just how keenly aware the platforms are of this.

In 2026, it feels obvious to say that stuff that makes people upset performs well on the internet, but back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg posted a fascinating visual explanation of how that works.

He called it the natural engagement pattern.

- I call it the Zuck-curve.

- [Christophe] Jeff Allen used to work as a data scientist at Facebook and now runs the Integrity Institute, a think tank dedicated to improving the social internet.

- So the x-axis is like how bad is the content and the y-axis is like how much engagement does it get?

- [Christophe] Past a certain point on the bad scale, content is prohibited outright, things like graphic content, nudity, bullying, or fraud.

But what the Zuck-curve showed was that the closer content gets to that line, to being prohibited, the more engagement it gets on average.

- A chart is a perfect way to understand why any algorithm that is designed to maximise engagement will inevitably float harmful content to the top.

- Platforms will, in theory, take down harmful misinformation or hate speech, but content that skirts that line without crossing it, gets more engagement.

The numbers back this up.

A 2026 report found that Facebook accounts posting low credibility content get nine times more engagement than high credibility accounts with the same follower count.

The same thing plays out on other platforms too.

On X, it's 10 times more engagement and on YouTube, 11 times more.

Okay, so ad rates that incentivize trying to reach people in rich countries, AI tools that make it easy to do that, and viewership patterns that reward making inflammatory content.

Those are true of any platform on the internet, but the problem of AI-generated news inflammatory slop is particularly visible on Facebook.

And the final thing I wanted to understand was, why that platform?

I thought that maybe it was because of who's left on Facebook as many users have migrated to other platforms, but it turns out that the answer might have a lot to do with how Facebook pays creators.

Some of these slop channels link to an external site where they make money on banner ads like this, but many of them don't.

They don't have to because they're making money on the platform itself.

- You can earn money using multiple types of content once you're in the Facebook content monetization programme.

- Since 2024, Facebook has directly paid people for content via its content monetization programme, which lets users share a portion of the ad revenue on videos, photos, and even just text.

The more engagement on those posts, the more money they get.

Creators had previously been able to make money on content via a few different programmes, but this streamlined all of those into one programme.

So even though there have always been reasons to farm engagement on Facebook, the incentives really changed at this one moment.

This is a screenshot of payments that one Indonesian creator shared, and she received these for making posts to groups supporting Albertan separation from Canada.

There are now almost 18 million accounts in Facebook's content monetization programme, all shaping what kind of content and what kind of content creators Facebook is really for.

According to Facebook's policies for this programme, content that provokes debate about social issues may face restricted or reduced monetization, but given the existence of this massively popular genre of content that appears to be poorly enforced.

Pages also aren't supposed to be able to run Meta ads that attack people on the basis of protected characteristics like national origin, but- - [Crowd] No more illegal migrants!

- [Christophe] These pages seem to be doing exactly that to grow their audiences.

And as Meta has rolled back its third-party fact checking and content moderation, more of those violations may pass undetected.

In the Facebook group run by Geeth, the Sri Lankan tutorial creator, one member posted this image, personally thanking Mark Zuckerberg for how much content monetization has helped people in Sri Lanka.

You can find posts like this all over Facebook, celebrating how the programme has helped people earn a little extra income and support their families.

- This is a story in a sense of people in the global south making money and freeing themselves from manual labour and it's just in the worst possible way you can imagine it and just spreading hate.

- There's a bizarre irony to what this programme means to people around the world and what actually gets made because of it.

- These creators aren't anomalies or sort of rogue actors.

They are actually perfectly behaving in the way that the tech industry at large is sort of encouraging them to.

- When I look at all of the content being made because of this programme, I don't see bad actors.

I see hustlers who are almost certainly completely oblivious to the nuances of politics in Western countries responding to the incentives that a platform has created for them, responding to a programme that will literally pay people to post almost anything so that it can sell more eyeballs to the advertising industry and to an advertising industry that prioritises reaching certain people on the internet

more than others.

And to us, who inevitably wind up engaging the most with the content that's just barely allowed on the platform.

That confluence of factors has made something designed to make people in Western societies as angry as possible, extremely profitable in the global south.

Every viewer of content like this is viewing it with all of the messy, complicated political feelings they have about the country they live in, but all of the creators creating it are coming to the table with none of that.

They're just doing it for money.

And every time they make money, Meta does too.

And as long as that's the case, it's hard to imagine any of this slowing down.

(upbeat music) Thank you so much for watching.

This was a really fascinating episode to work on.

If you have an idea or a question or a topic that you wanna see covered on this channel, you should send me an email at our tip line, which is christopheytchannel@gmail.com.

That's gonna be the best place to send any ideas and start conversations with me.

A few weeks ago, I asked members of our creator journalism platform, New Press, for their thoughts about how misinformation has changed on social media networks.

Their feedback was really helpful for helping me frame the big picture questions behind this story.

It's a topic that I want to keep covering a lot more of on this channel, and if you want to follow along, you should head to newpress.com, sign up, join the conversation and keep an eye out for more opportunities to shape my reporting.

Okay, that's it.

See you next time.

Okay, that's it, see you next-