"Beautiful USA", operated from Romania
Many patriotic US-themed Facebook content farm pages are run by people or organizations in countries other than the United States
Over on Facebook, a page by the name of “Beautiful USA” has been making its way into people’s feeds by posting an endless stream of United States-themed posts featuring exaggerated patriotic imagery. The page’s posts primarily consist of surreal AI-generated images laden with contextually inappropriate US flags, although plagiarized photos of iconic US locations also turn up here and there. Despite the page’s self-stated claim to be based in Los Angeles, Facebook’s Page Transparency feature indicates that it is actually operated from Romania.
The “Beautiful USA” page follows several other large United States-themed content farm pages that post similar, and in some cases identical, material. Recursively mapping the accounts followed by the pages in question yields a set of 20 US-themed content farm/spam pages run from a variety of countries. (Several of the US-themed pages also follow similar pages focused on individual US cities; these pages are excluded from the present analysis.)
The 20 US-themed content farm pages have administrators in a variety of countries, including Sri Lanka, Greece, Pakistan, Finland, Australia, Bangladesh, Estonia, Ireland, Romania, Sweden, and the United States, per Facebook’s Page Transparency feature. Only four of the 20 pages (20%) have a US-based administrator, and one of these (“USA America Facts”), also has three administrators in Bangladesh. Several of the page names are reused, with “Explore USA” being particularly popular. In one case (“Amazing America”), the page administrator’s country of origin has been hidden.
Much of the material posted by these spam pages features AI-generated patriotic imagery, frequently involving gratuitous and unrealistic displays of the US flag, such as the Old Glory-encrusted locomotive belching red, white, and blue smoke seen in the leftmost post in the above collage. Trucks, trains, and other vehicles are a recurring theme of this artificially generated content. Other types of AI-generated images, including scenery and memes, turn up as well, as do plagiarized photographs of major US cities and landmarks.
As mentioned earlier, the same posts sometimes end up being posted by more than one of the spam accounts. In most cases, the duplicate posts are pilfered photographs or AI-generated images, but there are exceptions. For example, at least three of the pages have posted visually similar posts with links to a low-effort listicle with the title “Americans Are Leaving These 11 States Faster Than Ever”.
Most of the US-themed content farm pages make prolific use of hashtags, frequently cramming five or more into each post. In some cases, the spam pages have managed to flood specific hashtags with unrelated content; for example, a significant portion of the search results for #CaliforniaRealEstate at the time of this writing are posts from “Beautiful USA” that have nothing whatsoever to do with California real estate. This hashtag flooding is likely an attempt to artificially increase engagement by piggybacking on popular hashtags.
Several of the spam pages periodically post political content, and this political content is biased in a rightward direction. Posts praising deceased Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and his widow Erika turn up repeatedly, including a surreal AI-generated image of Kirk, Jesus Christ, and a US flag worn as a garment. Other political posts include anti-immigrant material, such as a racist meme insinuating that multiple elected U.S. Representatives should be ineligible for public office based on their countries of origin. The presence of this political content, and the consistency of the political stances therein, suggests that pushing conservative political views, rather than simply serving up image spam, may be the primary goal of these pages.