I want to tell you about a report that came out this week, and then I want to tell you the one line in it that nobody put in a headline.
A research group called Reset Tech spent eight months watching Facebook.
What they found was a network of more than two hundred pages making fake videos of Australian politicians. The prime minister. The opposition leader. Others. Real faces, real voices, saying things they never said.
The whole operation traced back to an influencer business in Sri Lanka. Somebody’s business. Not a government. A business.
Now here are the two numbers.
Of all those fake posts, one in three got a label saying it was AI.
And one in thirty-three got taken down.
Thirty-two out of thirty-three stayed up.
That is bad enough. That is the part that made the news.
About ten percent of those pages were getting paid by Facebook.
Not paid by the Sri Lankan outfit. Paid by Facebook. Through Facebook’s own program that sends money to people who make popular content.
The fakes were popular. So the checks went out.
A man makes a fake video of a sitting prime minister. He puts it on Facebook. Facebook’s rules say he cannot do that. Facebook has a policy against deepfakes, a policy against impersonation, and a policy against exactly this kind of coordinated network.
All three rules were broken.
And Facebook sent him money.
I have said something on this.
A rule with no consequence is not a rule. It is a sign on a wall.
You can hang all the signs you want. If breaking the rule pays better than following it, the sign is decoration. Everybody on that floor knows it inside a week.
Facebook has the signs. They have policies for everything. They are written well. They are written by lawyers.
And underneath those signs there is a machine that counts views and sends money. That machine does not read the signs. It cannot. It only knows that a fake video of the prime minister got a lot of clicks, and clicks are what it pays for.
So the rule says no. And the money says yes.
Guess which one the man in Sri Lanka listened to.
Now let me give you the scale of it all.
That same research covered eight months across Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. They tracked 6,601 accounts. Combined following of 101 million people. Around 962,000 posts. More than four billion views.
They counted 290 real people impersonated in fake videos across thirty countries. Two hundred and thirteen of them were politicians. Twenty were journalists.
Some of the women politicians were not just faked saying things. They were faked into sexual images and video.
And the countries hit included France, Italy, Britain, Canada, Mexico.
And us.
Right here. Same network. Same business model. Same checks going out.
There is one more thing and it is the one I cannot get past.
The woman who ran this research said they had a handful of people. A small team. And they found all of this with ease.
Then she said she does not understand how companies with billion-dollar revenues cannot do the same thing.
I understand it fine. And so do you.
It is not that they cannot. It is that nobody has ever made them.
A small group of researchers found an industrial-scale fake video operation in eight months with almost no money. A company worth more than most countries did not find it, or found it and let it run, while the payment system kept humming along in the other direction.
Meta’s answer, when the reporters called, was that they are reviewing the pages identified.
Reviewing. The ones that got identified. By somebody else. For free.
Now here is the take away.
When somebody tells you they have rules, ask one question.
What happens when the rule is broken?
Not what does the rule say. Not who wrote it. Not how many pages it runs.
What happens.
If the answer is nothing, then you do not have a rule. You have a press release.
And if the answer is that the rule-breaker gets paid, then the rule is not just empty. It is pointing the wrong direction entirely, and everybody who follows it is losing to everybody who does not.
That is where we are with these companies right now. All of them. Not one of them.
I write about AI every day.
Some of them are good.
And this week, one in thirty-three.
You do not need a degree to judge this. You have worked somewhere. You know exactly what a rule looks like when the boss does not mean it.
This is that. At the scale of the whole world.
One last thing.
Most of you are reading this because it came across your Facebook feed. I know that because I watch where my readers come from, and Facebook sends me more than anybody.
The same feed that brought you here is the one that paid those men.
That is not a reason to leave. It is a reason to look up.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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