Internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal that 19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians were run by Eastern European troll farms overseas in 2019.

The data shows that coordinated efforts among foreign professionals working together to spread provocative content in the US are driving the vast spread of Facebook misinformation.

These groups, which are primarily based in Kosovo and Macedonia, have had particular success in targeting American Christians. Despite the fact that they spread their efforts across multiple pages, they were mostly run by the same people.

Their Christian Facebook pages collectively reach 75 million monthly users, which is 20 times the size of the next largest Christian Facebook page.

The majority of people who saw and interacted with these posts didn’t actually “like” the pages from which they came. Facebook’s attention-hungry algorithm simply delivered what it “thought” they wanted to see.

Internal studies have shown that divisive posts are more likely to reach a large audience, and troll farms take advantage of this by spreading provocative misinformation that elicits a larger response in order to expand their online reach.

The Facebook study was conducted in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in the US, and it discovered that these troll farms were targeting the same audience that Russia attempted to manipulate in 2016 with its own misinformation campaign on Facebook. Despite knowing about the troll farms and their manipulation of Americans in 2016, Facebook did nothing to address the problem.

The majority of election-related propaganda was spread online by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), and Eastern European troll farms have largely targeted the same demographic: religious people, those with low incomes, and those with a low level of education.

“Our platform has given the largest voice in the Christian American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never been to church,” wrote Jeff Allen, the report’s author, who used to be a senior-level data scientist at Facebook.

It’s difficult to estimate how much influence such Facebook pages have on American Christianity, but it appears to be significant. At best, Christian pastors have congregations in their pews once a week.

Facebook is constantly in their pocket, shaping their theology for its own purposes. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how many Christian pastors are also consuming troll farm-produced bad faith Christian content.

It’s difficult to say how widespread the problem they describe is now, two years after the report, but given the lack of serious public efforts to stop it, it’s safe to assume it still exists on some level.

“This is not normal. This is not healthy,” Allen noted. “We have empowered inauthentic actors to accumulate huge followings for largely unknown purposes … The fact that actors with possible ties to the IRA have access to huge audience numbers in the same demographic groups targeted by the IRA poses an enormous risk to the US 2020 election.”

Five of the top 60 pages targeting Christians, Black people, and Native Americans were still active two years after the report was published. When MIT Technology Review published a copy of the report, one of those, with over 187 thousand followers, was still active.