Foreign-run Pro-One Nation Facebook Groups Look More Like Ad Farms Than Propaganda Cells

ByMax Dvornik
foreign meme: A person holding a smartphone showing a Facebook social feed.

Foreign-run pro-One Nation Facebook groups are best understood as an ad-arbitrage business: cheap partisan posts pull in a large, commercially responsive audience, and Meta’s creator systems can turn that attention into payouts. The key fact is that Guardian Australia found multiple large pro-One Nation Facebook groups were run by overseas “digital creators” in places including North Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Philippines, with operators explicitly discussing monetization.

That does not mean ideology plays no role; some pro-One Nation groups in the Guardian sample appeared longstanding and genuinely supporter-run. But the strongest explanatory pattern here is commercial: low-cost outrage content, audience growth through partisan identity, and platform payouts that do not care whether the page owner believes a word of it.

The One Nation groups were built as monetized engagement farms

Guardian Australia reported that at least four major pro-One Nation Facebook groups with a combined audience of more than 350,000 followers appeared to be linked to foreign operators marketing themselves as “digital creators.” The investigation traced administrators and related accounts to North Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Philippines, not to Australian grassroots activists.

The commercial tell was not subtle. The Guardian found operators advertising page-growth services, sharing screenshots of earnings, and using content patterns associated with engagement farming. One screenshot cited by the paper showed Meta would pay US$20 for two posts that reached 50,000 people. That is only an anecdotal snapshot, not a platform-wide payout rate, but it is enough to show the basic model: scale cheap posts, collect performance-based revenue.

Meta’s own system fits that model. In October 2024, the company said Facebook Content Monetization combined in-stream ads, Ads on Reels, and Performance Bonus into a single program covering reels, longer videos, photos, and text posts. In plain English, the platform widened the set of post formats that can earn money.

That matters because these pages were not making prestige documentaries. They were pushing the sort of cheap, repeatable material that can be produced at near-zero marginal cost: reposted memes, slogan graphics, stock images, inflammatory captions, and identity-confirming outrage. If a page can earn from photos and text posts as well as video under Meta’s streamlined creator system, the production hurdle drops sharply.

Meta says it is trying to reverse some of this incentive. In March 2026, the company said it was deprioritizing unoriginal content and prioritizing original creators. After questions from Guardian Australia, Meta also removed at least one impersonating “David Farley” account. The problem is that the reward signal still starts with engagement, and engagement is easy to fake with politics.

Why conservative audiences can be more commercially valuable to advertisers

A right-leaning audience can be especially valuable because conservatives appear more likely to click sponsored content. In a 2024 peer-reviewed study summarized by Alexander Davidson in The Conversation, a 10% increase in state conservatism was associated with a 6.4% increase in clicks on sponsored search results relative to organic links.

That is not a tiny effect hiding in a lab corner. Davidson wrote that political orientation predicted ad-click behavior more strongly than demographic variables such as age and income. The journal abstract adds the proposed mechanism: conservative users were more likely to click because they perceived search ads as more trustworthy.

There is an important caveat here: Davidson’s finding is about sponsored search clicks, not Facebook feed ads directly. Extending it to social and display is an inference, not a direct measurement. Still, it is a sensible one because search, social, display, and video all live inside the same digital advertising economy and are often bought together through programmatic systems.

That market is enormous. The IAB/PwC 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report put U.S. search revenue at $114.2 billion, social media at $117.7 billion, display at $81.6 billion, and programmatic revenue at $162.4 billion in 2025. Davidson’s paper notes that search alone accounts for more than 40% of U.S. digital ad spending, so a trait that raises responsiveness to paid placements is commercially meaningful well beyond Google results pages.

The implication for pages like these is straightforward. If a conservative audience is more likely to treat sponsored content as credible enough to click, that audience is not just politically useful; it is economically useful. A page operator does not need to sell a product directly. They just need to assemble a crowd that platforms and advertisers already know how to monetize. That is the same logic behind broader right-wing content and advertiser economics: outrage is not just sticky, it can also be lucrative.

A right-leaning audience can be especially valuable because conservatives appear more likely to click sponsored content.

The margin comes from near-zero content costs and automated ad payouts

The business works because the costs are close to zero while the monetization is automated. A foreign operator can lift or lightly remix existing political memes, schedule posts into multiple groups, and let Facebook’s distribution and payout systems do the rest. There is no newsroom, no reporting budget, and often no real attachment to the politics itself.

Meta’s own terms describe the machine clearly. Under Facebook Content Monetization Terms, Meta may place ads in eligible content and pay enrolled creators subject to performance and policy compliance. Its help pages also say monetizable content must be original, policy-compliant, and generate real engagement. Not every page qualifies, and not every operator gets the same product access or payout rate, but the structure is still performance-for-attention.

That makes partisan pages attractive test beds. Identity-charged content is fast to produce, easy to localize, and unusually good at provoking comments, shares, and repeat visits. A meme about immigration, “elites,” or national decline costs almost nothing to make. If it reaches tens of thousands of users and triggers enough interaction to keep the page in circulation, the economics can work even on small per-post returns.

The Guardian’s reported payout screenshot makes the arithmetic concrete. At US$20 for two posts reaching 50,000 people, a single post works out to roughly US$10 per 25,000 reach, using the figures in that screenshot. That is not huge money per post. But if the content cost is near zero, the pages are run from lower-cost labor markets, and the operation can repeat the formula across many pages and countries, “small” becomes a business.

This is also why the propaganda framing can mislead. A conviction-driven influence campaign usually has a strategic goal outside the page itself: persuasion, turnout, agitation, party support, or geopolitical disruption. Here, the strongest evidence points inward, toward monetization mechanics. The operators built pages, amassed followers, posted engagement bait, and used or sought Meta creator revenue. Politics was the fuel, not necessarily the mission.

That reading also fits the pattern described in our look at One Nation’s online machine: modern partisan reach is often the product of systems that reward volume, emotional charge, and repeatability more than authenticity. Facebook did not need to want foreign meme farms. It only needed to pay for engagement and make engagement cheap to manufacture.

The next factual hinge is Meta enforcement. The company says its monetization rules require originality and real engagement, and it has said it is stepping up action against spammy, impersonating, and unoriginal content. Whether that meaningfully changes the economics will depend on how consistently those rules are enforced at scale.

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