Disinformation for profit: scammers cash in on conspiracy theories When Facebook removed dozens of groups dedicated to Canada's anti-government "Freedom Convoy" protests earlier this month, it didn't do so because of extremism or conspiracies rife within the protests. It was because the groups were being run by scam artists. "It can be an extremely lucrative industry for people in other parts of the world to very closely monitor US and Canadian political climates, then capitalize on moment-to-moment trends," Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, told the Guardian. "If you're out for money, and measure success not by sowing discord in a country but by maximizing ad revenue, there's still a lot of benefit to these operations." Disinformation for profit The Guardian contacted the email address that the US Military News is registered under, but did not receive a reply. The US Military News is just one of a number of sites that appear linked to the same Vietnam-based network, according to ISD. In another of ISD's reports, researcher Elise Thomas found a network of dozens of Facebook groups and pages – which also appear to be linked to a small group of people in Vietnam – that shared plagiarized pro-Trump content aimed at conservative social media users. Taking articles from far-right conspiracy sites like the Gateway Pundit, the network created Facebook groups with names like "Conservative Voices" and built up large numbers of followers – sometimes in the tens of thousands of users. The original 'fake news' These original "fake news" websites capitalized on salacious headlines and social media algorithms that promoted posts with high engagement regardless of their content, leading creators to choose contentious political issues involving race, religion and culture war flashpoints to drive the most attention to their sites and social media accounts. Although the strategies to evade content moderators have evolved, that playbook of monetizing conspiracies and misinformation appears to have stayed largely the same. faux saint laurent bag