As batteries start to pile up, carmakers, battery companies and researchers are trying to save them from ending up in landfills. From a report: Recyclers are primarily interested in extracting the valuable metals and minerals in the cells. Getting to these materials is complex and dangerous: After removing the steel casing, the battery pack needs to be unbundled into cells carefully, to avoid puncturing any hazardous materials. The electrolyte, a liquid whose job it is to move lithium ions between the cathode and anode, can catch fire or even explode if heated. Only once the pack has been dismantled, recyclers can safely extract the conductive lithium, nickel, copper, and cobalt.

Used in the cathode, cobalt is the most sought-after material used in batteries. In its raw form, the rare, bluish-grey metal is predominantly sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where miners work in perilous conditions. The world's major electric car manufacturers are already moving away from cobalt, deterred by the human rights abuses, shortages in the supply chain. That raises the question of whether recyclers will still find it worthwhile to dismantle newer battery types lacking the most valuable ingredients. "When you move to more sustainable materials, and lower cost materials, the incentive to recycle and recover them diminishes," says Jenny Baker, an energy storage expert at Swansea University. She likens this to a dilemma in consumer electronics: It is often cheaper to buy a new mobile phone than to get it fixed or recycled.

[...] In a first step, recyclers typically shred the cathode and anode materials of spent batteries into a powdery mixture, the so-called black mass. In the board game analogy, this would be the first slide down on a snake, Gavin Harper, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, explains. The black mass can then be processed in one of two ways to extract its valuable components. One method, called pyrometallurgy, involves smelting the black mass in a furnace powered with fossil fuels. It's a relatively cheap method but a lot of lithium, aluminium, graphite and manganese is lost in the process. Another method, hydrometallurgy, leaches the metals out of the black mass by dissolving it in acids and other solvents. This method, Harper says, would correspond to a shorter snake in the board game, because more material can be recovered: you fall back, but not by as many squares as when using pyrometallurgy. The process, however, consumes a lot of energy and produces toxic gases and wastewater.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has agreed for the first time to testify before Congress, as bipartisan anger mounts over harms to young people from the app. From a report: Mr. Mosseri is expected to appear before a Senate panel during the week of Dec. 6 as part of a series of hearings on protecting children online, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, who will lead the hearing. Mr. Mosseri's appearance follows hearings this year with Antigone Davis, the global head of safety for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, and with Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistle-blower. Ms. Haugen's revelations about the social networking company, particularly those about Facebook and Instagram's research into its effects on some teenagers and young girls, have spurred criticism, inquiries from politicians and investigations from regulators.

In September, Ms. Davis told Congress that the company disputed the premise that Instagram was harmful for teenagers and noted that the leaked research did not have causal data. But after Ms. Haugen's testimony last month, Mr. Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, suggesting that his company had "provided false or inaccurate testimony to me regarding attempts to internally conceal its research." Mr. Blumenthal asked that Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Mosseri testify in front of the consumer protection subcommittee of the Senate's Commerce Committee to set the record straight.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We're nearly two months out from the public release of Windows 11, and Microsoft is still slowly updating bits and pieces of the operating system that weren't quite ready in early October. Microsoft announced redesigned emoji back in July, and the next Windows update (version 22000.348, if you're tracking this sort of thing) adds those emoji to Windows 11. The new emoji remove the bold, black outlines from the Windows 10-era designs and change the colors and shapes of a few to make them match up better with Apple's, Google's, and Samsung's glyphs -- compare the new design for Spiral Shell to the old one, for an example. There are also a few cute Microsoft-specific touches, like a Clippy design for the paperclip emoji, though Ninja Cat appears to have been removed entirely.

Quit a day job to do TikTok full-time? Why not, say some Europeans. From a report: About one in 10 are considering leaving their main job in the next six months and instead earning money from social media, e-commerce or trading platforms, according to a Morgan Stanley poll of 12,500 people. "The received wisdom is that as Covid subsides, and with modest extra flexibility from employers, the majority of people will re-embrace their prior routines," a team of Morgan Stanley economists and equity analysts wrote in a note. "Our data suggest otherwise." With labor shortages already weighing on Europe's economic rebound, wage inflation will persist for longer if the Great Resignation -- the post-pandemic trend of people leaving the workforce -- carries on, the bank said. "It reveals a far greater potential risk of structurally higher wages," Morgan Stanley wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Tor anonymity network has gone through a major change as the Tor software team has released a new version of its software that updated how .onion domains look and work. More specifically, the Tor Project has done away with 16-character-long .onion domains, also known as v2 addresses, and replaced them with 56-character-long domains, known as v3. The move, driven by a need to improve the Tor network's privacy, security, and resilience to deanonymization attacks, was announced years in advance, and the entire process took more than a year to complete.

But despite the Tor team's best efforts to announce the move in advance, new numbers compiled and released by dark web monitoring company DarkOwl show that the Tor network is still made up in large part of servers running older v2 domains. "In the last six weeks, DarkOwl's Vision platform has observed an average of 104,095 active .onion services across both address schemes of which: 62% are v2 addresses and 38% are v3 addresses," the company said last week. DarkOwl says it detected a spike in new v3 domains in July 2021, which coincided with the Tor team adding a fullscreen warning before accessing v2 domains in preparation for the browser's v11 release this fall. This resulted in more than 2,900 v3 domains being registered in the last two weeks of July alone. However, as the Tor team noted in its own v2-to-v3 analysis in September, the number of v3 domains is trending up. The report adds that v2 sites are expected to go extinct in the coming year. "The reason is that as most Tor node operators will update their servers to versions that will not support v2 domains, there will be no Tor relays capable of routing the traffic to these old-gen domains," report The Record.

Mozilla announced last week via a support article that its Firefox Lockwise password manager app will reach end-of-life on December 13th. The final release versions are 1.8.1 (iOS) and 4.0.3 (Android) and will no longer be available to download or reinstall after that date. The Verge reports: What started in 2018 as a small experimental mobile app called Lockbox ended up bringing a way to access saved passwords and perform autofills on iOS, Android, and desktop devices to a small but enthusiastic following of Firefox fans. The app was also later adapted as a Firefox extension. It seemed like it was apt to stick around for the long run.

The support article recommends that users continue accessing passwords using the native Firefox browsers on desktop and mobile. In an added note on the support site, Mozilla suggests that later in December, the Firefox iOS app will gain the ability to manage Firefox passwords systemwide. The note alludes to Mozilla adopting the features of Lockwise and eventually integrating them into the Firefox browser apps natively on all platforms.

A security researcher has publicly disclosed an exploit for a new Windows zero-day local privilege elevation vulnerability that gives admin privileges in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server. BleepingComputer reports: As part of the November 2021 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft fixed a 'Windows Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability' vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-41379. This vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri, who found a bypass to the patch and a more powerful new zero-day privilege elevation vulnerability after examining Microsoft's fix. Yesterday, Naceri published a working proof-of-concept exploit for the new zero-day on GitHub, explaining that it works on all supported versions of Windows.

"This variant was discovered during the analysis of CVE-2021-41379 patch. the bug was not fixed correctly, however, instead of dropping the bypass," explains Naceri in his writeup. "I have chosen to actually drop this variant as it is more powerful than the original one." Furthermore, Naceri explained that while it is possible to configure group policies to prevent 'Standard' users from performing MSI installer operations, his zero-day bypasses this policy and will work anyway. BleepingComputer tested Naceri's 'InstallerFileTakeOver' exploit, and it only took a few seconds to gain SYSTEM privileges from a test account with 'Standard' privileges, as demonstrated in [this video]. When BleepingComputer asked Naceri why he publicly disclosed the zero-day vulnerability, we were told he did it out of frustration over Microsoft's decreasing payouts in their bug bounty program. A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement: "We are aware of the disclosure and will do what is necessary to keep our customers safe and protected. An attacker using the methods described must already have access and the ability to run code on a target victim's machine."

Naceri recommends users wait for Microsoft to release a security patch, as attempting to patch the binary will likely break the installer.

While China's sweeping new data privacy laws have left tech companies confused about how to comply, they also put the U.S. even further behind in the global race to set digital standards. From a report: China enacted its Personal Information Privacy Law earlier this month, following Europe as the second major international player to have its own sweeping data privacy regulations. The law, regarded as China's version of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, is a set of rules for how businesses can collect, use, process, share and transfer personal information. Another Chinese data regulation, the Data Security Law, went into effect Sept. 1. The laws aim to protect Chinese citizens from the private sector, while the Chinese government still has easy access to personal data.

In May, influential U.S. business groups sent comments, viewed by Axios, to the National People's Congress protesting that the draft law's vague language, monetary penalties and criminal liabilities were harsh. They also said it would hurt innovation by being overly prescriptive and burdensome. The U.S. still does not have a federal data privacy law, and China's move could allow it to set future global norms on its terms. Meanwhile, tech companies doing business in China will have to navigate the vague new rules, and that could be expensive.

Qualcomm reportedly has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on Arm licenses. From a report: The pair launched Windows on Arm laptops in 2016, and so far we haven't seen any devices launch without a Qualcomm chip. XDA-Developers reports that Qualcomm has had an exclusivity deal on Windows on Arm, but that it's set to expire soon. The report comes days after MediaTek held its executive summit with members of the media last week, where it shared its ambitions to build its own chip for Windows on Arm PCs. If Microsoft's exclusivity deal is about to end with Qualcomm, this could open the door for many more vendors supporting Windows on Arm. Samsung, MediaTek, and even Apple's M1 chips could eventually support Windows on Arm.

The lead committee in the European Parliament writing new tech rules passed measures Tuesday that could impact major U.S. and European tech companies. Lawmakers voted to approve measures in the draft Digital Markets Act that could mean: 1. A company's messaging or social media app is interoperable, to prevent users feeling forced to use one or the other because that's where their friends are
2. A ban on behavioral targeting of ads to minors
3. Fines of as much as 20% of a company's global annual sales for breaches for the law

Companies identified as "gatekeepers" and therefore set to be accountable under the DMA include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Booking.com, and could later hit online marketplaces Zalando and Alibaba.

Rolls-Royce has announced that its all-electric plane, dubbed the "Spirit of Innovation," is the fastest of its kind in the world after it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 k/h) in recent flight tests. Gizmodo reports: In a recent news release, the company, not to be mistaken for the car company owned by BMW, claimed that the Spirit of Innovation set three new world records earlier this week. On flight tests carried out on Nov. 16, Rolls-Royce said its aircraft reached a top speed of 345.4 mph (555.9 km/h) over 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), exceeding the current record by 132 mph (213 k/h). It broke another record in a subsequent 9.3-mile (15 kilometer) flight, during which it reached 330 mph (532.1 km/h), surpassing the current record by 182 mph (292.8 km/h).

The Spirit of Innovation didn't stop there, though. Rolls-Royce affirms that it smashed another record when it reached 9,842.5 feet (3,000 meters) in 202 seconds, beating the current record by 60 seconds. In the company's view, it also took the title of the world's fastest all-electric vehicle when it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during its flight tests. The company's aircraft is powered by a 400kW electric powertrain and "the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace." "Following the world's focus on the need for action at COP26, this is another milestone that will help make 'jet zero' a reality and supports our ambitions to deliver the technology breakthroughs society needs to decarbonize transport across air, land and sea," CEO Warren East said in the news release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Last week, we reported that MediaTek is planning to build a chipset for Windows on ARM. As it turns out, the Windows on ARM chipset space could be even hotter than that, because there's a reason that we've only seen Qualcomm SoCs in ARM PCs so far. Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, and speaking with people familiar with it, we've learned that the deal is set to expire soon. Other than the fact that Microsoft has publicly said that anyone who wants to can build a Windows on ARM chip, this really shouldn't come as a surprise. Qualcomm didn't just start building PC chips hoping that Microsoft would compile Windows to support it. No, these two companies worked together to make it happen. Because of that, Qualcomm gets to enjoy a bit of exclusivity.

One thing I wasn't able to learn is when the deal will expire, only that it's the thing holding back other chip vendors from competing in the space. It's possible that Samsung might want to throw its hat into the ring with its Exynos processors too, especially given its recent partnership with AMD for graphics power. This is also presumably why Apple Silicon Macs aren't officially supported for running Windows 11, so hopefully that will change as well. [...] Between MediaTek's Executive Summit and Qualcomm's Investor Day, there's been a very clear message that ARM SoC vendors absolutely believe that the 'Wintel' partnership is going to fade and that the transition to ARM isn't just happening, it's inevitable. Naturally, that means that all of these companies are going to want to be part of it when it opens up. Qualcomm has quite a head start though, given that it's been doing this for a few years and on top of that, it's going to start building its own custom silicon thanks to its Nuvia acquisition.

Gizmodo says it will be making the "Facebook Papers" public, becoming the first media outlet to do so. These documents were leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower earlier this year and "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post. Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content." Gizmodo explains how and why they're making this move: We believe there's a strong public need in making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we've partnered with a small group of independent monitors, who are joining us to establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals' privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest. The committee includes [experts from NYU, Mass Amherst, Columbia, Marquette, and the ACLU]. While our group is itself largely American, our first decision was to require local experts when reviewing any document focused on another country. One of the committee's chief responsibilities is to vet local experts to work alongside our reviewers.

[...] Beyond privacy reasons, the documents require additional review to ensure that we aren't just handing criminals and spies a roadmap for undermining what controls Facebook does have in place to defend against propaganda that spreads lies, hate, and fear. That would undermine any benefit the world stands to reap from this act of whistleblower justice. Our work is just beginning, but we're eager to release our first batch of documents as soon as possible. To get the ball rolling, the first release will likely consist mostly of documents that warrant the least amount of inspection. To learn more, check back for updates at the top of this article in the coming days.

According to data collected by Microsoft's network of honeypot servers, most brute-force attackers primarily attempt to guess short passwords, with very few attacks targeting credentials that are either long or contain complex characters. From a report: "I analysed the credentials entered from over -- million brute force attacks against SSH. This is around 30 days of data in Microsoft's sensor network," said Ross Bevington, a security researcher at Microsoft. "77% of attempts used a password between 1 and 7 characters. A password over 10 characters was only seen in 6% of cases," said Bevington, who works as Head of Deception at Microsoft, a position in which he's tasked with creating legitimate-looking honeypot systems in order to study attacker trends.

Crypto.com's deal last week to replace Staples as the title sponsor of an iconic downtown Los Angeles sports center appears to have already paid for itself. From a report: The CRO token has surged more than 55% in the past seven days as of Monday and reached a record on Sunday, according to pricing from CoinGecko, and is now the 13th-biggest by market capitalization at about $18 billion. Its gains come as many other top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether and Binance Coin, fall back. Two people familiar with the naming agreement said last week that it was worth $700 million over 20 years. The deal is a continuation of a trend by Crypto.com and others to gain name recognition and customers through pacts in sports, music and more.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users' messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as "simply not acceptable." The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the "frontline of child sexual abuse online" because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content -- a process known as end-to-end encryption. The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram's parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest.

"We're taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023," Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. "As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we're determined to protect people's private communications and keep people safe online." Meta already uses end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service and had been planning to extend that to its Messenger and Instagram apps in 2022. It has already encrypted voice and video calls on Messenger. Announcing the privacy drive in 2019, Zuckerberg, said: "People expect their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they've sent them to -- not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments or even the people operating the services they're using."

When it comes to sales of electric cars, Norway is in a league of its own. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold. That figure makes Norway a world leader by a long way -- leapfrogging over the UK, where 15 percent of new car sales were electric as of October, and the US, where that number is just 2.6 percent. From a report: Norway's electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives -- and their success -- have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.

It's quite a big problem. The previous government -- a center-right coalition that was replaced by a center-left minority government in October -- estimated that the popularity of EVs was creating a 19.2 billion Norwegian krone ($2.32 billion) hole in the country's annual revenue. While EVs might be great news for the environment, their rapid success in Norway is now forcing some serious fiscal consternation. The road to this point has been long -- and offers lessons to other countries racing to ditch gas-guzzling combustion engines. In Norway, the most progressive electric vehicle policies in the world started with a pop group, an environmentalist, and a small red Fiat Panda. It was 1988 when activist Frederic Hauge, along with fellow green campaigners from the band A-ha, traveled to the Swiss city of Bern, where they found the red Fiat. A previous owner had converted the car to run off a lead battery, and the group planned to use the vehicle to persuade the Norwegian government to encourage electric vehicle uptake.

The Fiat became the centerpiece of a nine-year campaign in which Hauge and members of A-ha drove the car on Norway's toll roads without paying. The fines racked up, and when they remained unpaid, the vehicle would be impounded and sold at auction, where Hauge would buy it back and repeat the cycle of toll dodging. A-ha's celebrity members added glitz to the crusade against toll fees for EVs and Hauge -- who has led an environmental group called Bellona since 1986 -- courted press attention to demand incentives for electric cars. "By being a positive vigilante, he made the media and also the politicians aware of the electric car," says Oyvind Solberg Thorsen, director of Norway's Road Traffic Information Council, which publishes statistics about the country's roads and vehicles.

When Americans gather around the Thanksgiving table this week, the blistering rally in technology, electric vehicles and crypto-related stocks is likely to be a part of their conversations. From a report: There's a reason it will dominate the small talk: The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is now worth almost half as much as the benchmark S&P 500 -- the highest ever -- and the megacap tech stocks alone represent a third of the S&P 500. Nvidia and Roblox's sprint stood out in a year when the rest of the big tech names jogged to new highs, defying several calls to sell the sector around last year's thanksgiving due to soaring valuations.

Chipmaker Nvidia has soared 148% as booming chip demand and a foray into the metaverse made it the best performer on the Nasdaq 100. Applied Materials and Advanced Micro Devices were other winners, each rising about 80% and outperforming many of the megacap tech stocks. Tesla soared to a $1 trillion market value as the electric-carmaker's shares doubled in value, driven by a sustained pickup in sales, even as part shortages were crippling the broader auto industry. EV fever was even more evident with Rivian Automotive, which doubled in value in less than two weeks after going public. Lucid Group was the sector's other hot name. Roblox's tripling of value from its March listing to Facebook's name change to Meta Platforms showed the metaverse was the next big thing in tech. The rush to the space was evident with the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an exchange traded fund focused on the theme, surpassing $500 million in assets under management on Nov. 17, having doubled in just two weeks. From the digital world to digital money: Bitcoin briefly reclaiming $60,000 and a rally in smaller cryptocurrencies boosted a host of related stocks such as Marathon Digital Holdings, Riot Blockchain and MicroStrategy. Marathon Digital was among the top winners, with its stock jumping ten-fold.

The Seattle Times reports: The litany of manufacturing defects on the 787 Dreamliner is expanding as Boeing engineers take apart planes and discover new or more widespread issues, a Federal Aviation Administration internal memo indicates. The FAA memo, which was circulated internally Monday and reviewed by The Seattle Times, points to new concerns about a previously unreported defect caused by contamination of the carbon fiber composite material during fabrication of the large structures that make up the 787's wing, fuselage and tail. The memo also adds detail about the small out-of-tolerance gaps that have been discovered throughout the airplane structure: at the joins of the large fuselage sections, at a forward pressure bulkhead and in the structure surrounding the passenger and cargo doors. The FAA memo, which lists safety conditions affecting airplanes currently in service worldwide, states that these tiny gap defects are thought to be present in more than 1,000 Dreamliners.

These are not considered an immediate safety concern but could cause premature aging of the airframe.
Bloomberg reports these delays may hamper Boeing's efforts to pay down its $62 billion debt: Boeing is working to find and repair tiny structural imperfections about the width of a piece of paper in the carbon-fiber aircraft while addressing quality lapses among suppliers and their subcontractors. Both issues came to light as the Chicago-based planemaker did a deep dive in its factories and production system in the wake of two fatal crashes of its 737 Max... A Boeing spokesman wouldn't confirm a Wall Street Journal report Friday that deliveries aren't likely to restart until February or March... For each manufacturing glitch that strays from its design specifications, Boeing has to file a so-called notice of escapement with the FAA that evaluates the problem, recommends a fix and provides an engineering analysis to back up its finding. The company is still working through those notices, along with a broader inspection regimen for the 787, according to people familiar with the situation.

There are about 20 locations on Dreamliners where potential quality breaches have been identified, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. At a Boeing fabrication plant in South Carolina, for example, mechanics are inspecting the area surrounding doors at the rear of the aircraft for tiny gaps, one of the people said. Dreamliners continue to roll off the line in North Charleston at a slow rate of two planes a month, the person said. Conducting the inspections can be time consuming and costly since, in some areas of the plane, workers have to tear out passenger cabins to gain access...

The planemaker had initially requested permission to inspect a handful of planes and, if they passed, use its regimen for the rest of the undelivered aircraft, the people said. The FAA rejected that plan, and company and the regulator haven't yet agreed on an appropriate level of inspections, said one of the people.

MIT's Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), " All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites.

"In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources." [T]he sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more. In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a "determining role" in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn't done enough "to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook's algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world.

But there's a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn't just amplifying misinformation.

The company is also funding it.

An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Facebook pays them for permission to open their content within Facebook's app (where Facebook controls the advertising) rather than having users clickthrough to the publisher's own web site, reports Technology Review: Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform's design also didn't sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages — in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy — one they still use today... Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of U.S. dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary — paid to them directly by Facebook. An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019... At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said...

75% of users who were exposed to clickbait content from farms run in Macedonia and Kosovo had never followed any of the pages. Facebook's content-recommendation system had instead pushed it into their news feeds.
Technology Review notes that Facebook now pays billions of dollars to the publishers in their program. It's a long and detailed article, which ultimately concludes that the problem "is now happening on a global scale." Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook's payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale...

Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it's AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation.
Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Technology Review that they'd misunderstood the issue. And the spokesperson also said "we've invested in building new expert-driven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so."

Google's spokesperson confirmed examples in the article violated their own policies and removed the content, adding "We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information."