In the attention economy, social media platforms have become a well-known medium for profit-driven content creation, with a business model that rewards whatever captures the most attention. Users are familiar with clickbait, whether cute pet videos or outrageous rumours. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented in 2022 how conspiracy theories have been monetized, and generative AI has since made producing such stories at scale cheaper, making content farms more lucrative.

The issue has become the subject of litigation. In February 2026, Meta filed lawsuits against deceptive advertisers in Brazil and China and against a Vietnam-based advertiser who used cloaking to run a subscription-fraud scheme. In Canada, a class action was authorized against Meta on behalf of victims of cryptocurrency scams advertised on Facebook.

As a Canadian research observatory, we began by investigating AI-fabricated content reaching Canadian Facebook users. That investigation led us outward: the pages targeting Canada turned out to be one arm of a coordinated, politically salient international network. We follow that thread in full while keeping Canada in focus, both because it is our mandate and because the clearest evidence of the network’s business model — the Canadian advertising dollars funding it — is the part we can document end to end. Amid these developments, we identify a coordinated network of 340 Facebook pages (largely operated from Vietnam, among those that disclose an administrator) that use AI-fabricated news stories about high-engagement topics in Canada, Europe, and the US to generate advertising revenue. The 340 pages we document are likely a lower bound: new pages kept surfacing throughout our investigation, as others were taken down, suggesting the network was still active and expanding as we wrote. The pages repeatedly republish the same fabricated stories while substituting their subjects (i.e. interchanging the names of politicians, sports teams, public figures, and celebrities across otherwise identical stories). These content farms generate significant engagement on Facebook, driving traffic to fabricated-news websites that are monetized through advertising. This includes legitimate campaigns from Canadian public and private organizations, meaning Canadian advertising dollars inadvertently help fund the network.

We find many similarities between this network and documented cryptocurrency scams on Facebook, including the bulk creation of pages and the use of clickbait AI-fabricated stories about high-engagement topics. The main difference is the business model, which appears centered on advertising revenue rather than financial fraud targeting citizens. Unlike a typical foreign influence operation, those behind this effort appear driven primarily by commercial rather than political incentives: across much of the network, the same fabricated stories are reused interchangeably for politicians from different parties, as a content farm chasing engagement would. A commercial motive does not make the content harmless, however. To maximize engagement the operators amplify whatever provokes the strongest reaction, and some of it — most notably the large volume of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim content aimed at UK audiences — is inflammatory. Irrespective of intent, the result is a flood of misleading, often politically charged headlines circulating on social media, particularly on Facebook.