If each of Facebook’s 15,000 U.S. moderators aggressively reviewed several dozen of the most active users and permanently removed those guilty of repeated violations, abuse on Facebook would drop drastically within days. But so would overall user engagement.

Facebook is notoriously secretive about its inner workings

In addition to the torrent of vile posts, dozens of top users behaved in spammy ways. We don’t see large-scale evidence of bot or nonhuman accounts in our data, and comments have traditionally been the hardest activity to fake at scale. But we do see many accounts that copy and paste identical rants across many posts on different pages. Other accounts posted repeated links to the same misinformation videos or fake news sites. Many accounts also repeated one- or two-word comments—often as simple as “yes” or “YES !!”—dozens and dozens of times, an unusual behavior for most users. Whether this behavior was coordinated or not, these throwaway comments gave a huge boost to MSI, and signaled to Facebook’s algorithm that this is what users want to see.

Of the 219 accounts with at least 25 public comments, 68 percent spread misinformation, reposted in spammy ways, published comments that were racist or sexist or anti-Semitic or anti-gay, wished violence on their perceived enemies, or, in most cases, several of the above.

the top 1 percent of accounts were responsible for 35 percent of all observed interactions; the top 3 percent were responsible for 52 percent.

52 million users active on these U.S. pages and public groups, less than a quarter of Facebook’s claimed user base in the country.

500 pages accounted for about half of the public U.S. page engagement on the platform.