200 pages for “inauthentic” activity and took the rare step of identifying Gabunada’s network as the culprit.
“It is so easy to be enlisted in these jobs,” Ong said. His recent study on the industry includes an interview with one paid troll who fell into the work when the chief of staff of the political campaign she was working on ordered everyone to start creating fake accounts and posting on them. “You can look like legitimate Facebook users to trick the [company’s] artificial intelligence,” said Ross Tapsell, a researcher at Australian National University who documented the surge of paid troll activity in the Philippine province of Cebu.
Ramirez, who specializes in promoting films and celebrities, at one point controlled an army of 50 social media loyalists who together had 45 million Twitter followers on accounts that didn’t use the owners’ names. With a few strokes, she said, she could make any entertainment-related topic trend on Twitter in the Philippines. The tweeters were sometimes paid in cash, sometimes in cellphones and other gifts.