There is a new study that reveals that fact-checkers who flag pages as fake (and have received over 10 times as many) continue to monetise the content on those pages, even following inactivity.

Efforts to stop the spread of disinformation on Facebook are failing to stop disinformation creators from profiting from the platform despite breaking Facebook’s guidelines, a new study reveals.

The tech policy non-profit What to Fix and Bosnian fact-checking organisation Raskrinkavanje studied more than 290 Facebook pages in Bosnia that were marked for spreading fake news more than 10 times by one of the fact-checking partners of the social media company.

Fifty-one of the accounts flagged by fact-checkers for promoting disinformation at least ten times “have a history of being enrolled in at least one Facebook monetisation program,” Raskrinkavanje said in their analysis.

Of those, one-third managed to sign up for two or more monetisation pathways prior to 2024, when Meta combined its money-making avenues into a single invite-only program.

Another nine accounts were invited by Meta to join that program that pays them based on the performance of their content. 

The study found that it has raised important questions about Meta’s ability to meet its promise of demonetising repeat offenders in disinformation.

Meta, the holding company of Facebook, has been under fire for several years in the United States and Europe for failing to effectively curb disinformation on its platforms.

Meta began collaborating with third-party fact-checkers to verify content in response to concerns regarding information integrity in the 2016 US election. It began to take steps to roll back those features last year in some areas and instead use Community Notes, in which users of the platform can make notes to explain or mark off misguided posts.

The company has no current policy that allows for anything that third-party fact-checkers with Meta mark as “fake”, or that contains clickbait content from monetisation, the report said.

“Fake” content is anything “that has no basis in fact,” including content that has fake quotes, impossible claims, conspiracy theories, fabricated content or real media that is used as “proof of an unrelated event,” the company said.

The report does not, however, state what thresholds it uses to implement repeat restrictions.

Some of these accounts were later demonetised or suspended due to violation of the platform’s policies, but the study showed that 84% of these accounts were able to access monetisation again.

More than half of the restricted accounts were restored within 1 month, and sometimes, the suspension period was 2 days or less.

In other words, the company has been willing to let “restricted actors,” as the report terms them, continue to profit from content on Facebook even when it rightly marks them as repeat offenders of its monetisation policies, the report concluded.

Meta responded to Euronews Next for comment, but declined to give a response immediately.

What To Fix noted the limitations of their study in that Meta does not retain data on the monetisation of their accounts on the platform.

Rather, the fact-checking groups can only maintain a constantly updated catalogue of disclosures to look back on for determining when an account has been monetised, and a database of factchecks, which they are responsible for keeping.

Meta may have also engaged other fact-checkers for removal of other accounts in other markets, due to the narrow scope of their research.

Still, it encouraged the European Union to research whether Meta is complying with the bloc’s rules under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and its obligations under the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, which has a commitment to “demonetise disinformation.”