How a content farm in Malaysia turned fake news directed at Taiwan into a moneymaker
In Malaysia, trans-national content farms are “an industry,” says one insider. But why does Malaysian content directed at Taiwan take on so many “Chinese characteristics”?
By Jason Liu (劉致昕), Ko Hao-hsiang (柯皓翔) and Hsu Chia-yu (許家瑜)
Photography by Su Wei-ming (蘇威銘)
Design by Brittany Myburgh
Translation by Harrison Chen
This piece first appeared in The Reporter (報導者) and is published under a creative commons license.
In part one of this series, we met the some of the uncles and aunties who fall prey to health scams and Chinese propaganda on messaging app LINE, as well as the fact-checking organizations looking to hinder the flaw of fake news. In part two, we learn about one content farm operator who peddles his unwanted wares from his base in Malaysia.
On December 13, 2019, Facebook’s operations in Taiwan removed 118 fan pages, 99 groups, and put restrictions on 51 accounts, citing violations of their guidelines. Some of the removed pages and groups were fervent in their support for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) 2020 presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜).
But just two days earlier, Yee Kok Wai (余國威) from Puchong, Malaysia, was the first to cry foul, posting on his timeline that Facebook had notified him that he had violated their community standards. Yee made similar posts in September, October and November, including that his account was suspended on his birthday and was unable to reply to birthday wishes. “Facebook is censoring me to oblivion,” he wrote.
As fact-checking groups in Taiwan chafe against a never-ending stream of online misinformation, soldiers like Yee sit on the opposing side of this “endless war.” Yee is the self-appointed chairperson of the Global Chinese Alliance (全球華人聯盟) Facebook page, and runs its associated content farms, fan pages and groups.
Yee Kok Wai, a content farmer that owns a series of groups named “Global Chinese” (全球華人), apologizes to his friends that his website has been blocked by Facebook. Source: Yee Kok Wai’s Facebook page screenshot
Yee Kok Wai began this line of work on December 17, 2014, when he set up a series of Facebook pages and groups under the “Global Chinese” (全球華人) brand name, such as the Global Chinese Military Alliance (全球華人軍事聯盟) and the Heavy Duty Scooter Association (重機車社團). He claims to control Facebook pages and groups with a total of over 300,000 followers.
Yee says he is low-key, but he keeps all his Facebook posts public and shares content daily. He rides a red heavy-duty scooter, and loves to pose with vehicles. In October 2019, he posted a photograph of a new BMW523i, valued at over $2 million NTD ($65,700 USD), and wrote “I should buy a new car!”
A GOOGLE ANALYTICS ID SHOWS A CONNECTION BETWEEN CONTENT FARMS
As chairman of the Global Chinese Alliance, his heart leans toward China. During the anti-extradition bill protests, he celebrated the anniversary of the CCP and expressed support for the Hong Kong police. The entire Global Chinese Alliance media group takes the same viewpoint, mass producing content with a pro-China ideology and praising the accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party. The content he shares on his pages and groups are largely from content farms such as KanWatch, beeper.live and Qiqu News (奇趣網).
Yee has dabbled in creating his own content farms, including: the Global Chinese Weather Union (全球華人風雲聯盟) and the Global Chinese Taiwan Union (全球華人台灣聯盟). In 2017 he continued to expand his operations, creating sub-pages such as Huiqi Worldview (慧琪世界觀), Qiqi World (琪琪看世界), Qiqi News (琦琦看新聞), Qiqi Military (琦琦看軍事), and Qiqi Life (琪琪看生活); each page features the same photo of a girl wearing a red bare-shouldered cheongsam.
After consulting with TeamT5 (a reputable player in the information security industry) we were able to confirm that the “Qiqi” fan pages, which have tens of thousand of followers, are operated in the same manner as the Global Chinese fan pages, only under different names; both shared content from the websites Qiqi World and Qiqi News. TeamT5 also discovered that the HTML source codes for Qiqi and Global Chinese series of pages were essentially the same.
We also looked for the Google Analytics tracking ID buried in the sites, and found they were all the same: UA-19409266. This ID can be used to identify affiliated websites; if several websites use the same Google Analytics tracking ID, this means that the same person or organization is tracking the web traffic through those sites.
Next, we used the PublicWWW web tool to see “if UA-19409266” appeared in the source code of other websites, and found 386 websites using the same Google Analytics ID. First on the list was Jintian Toutiao (今天頭條) a content platform commonly seen in Taiwan.
It turns out, many websites, Facebook pages, and content farms that appear under different names to the average user, could be run by the same people behind the scenes.
In order to further understand the organization behind this group, journalists from The Reporter created accounts on content platforms beeper.live, which deals in text articles, and KanWatch, which deals in video content (under user IDs 10636 and 5452 respectively).
A BUSINESS MODEL BUILT ON SHARING
The platforms were very open, and it took us only a few minutes to register, after filling out some basic information and providing an account on a third-party payment system such as Paypal. The platform is like a common blog for thousands of people, providing a robust set of tools for its users to create drafts, and monitor revenue and viewing statistics. Every day, users on the platform, strangers to each other, make money by separately sharing content on their own social media pages and groups, allowing for wide dissemination.
There are two ways to make money on the platform. The first is to share existing articles. This method is tailored toward newcomers, and many platforms require users to share a certain number of articles before they can create their own. A user can receive around 10 Singapore dollars for every thousand views.
The second way is to write articles. What is unique about the platform is that there is a mechanism for authors to adjust the “profit sharing ratios” which determine how much of the advertising revenue goes toward the user that created the content versus the user who shared it. This vertically integrated direct sale model incentivizes the wide sharing of content.
Users can see the most popular articles of the day, and displayed next to each article are viewer statistics and a clone button so that users can easily rewrite articles.
Success in this industry has little to do with creating content, but rather with creating traffic flow. Having a page or group with a lot of followers who will click on your links is key. Yee Kok Wai’s expertise on this matter shows: the 20,000 users that follow his Facebook pages and click on his shared links form the basis of his business and profits.
A CHINESE UNIFICATION PROMOTION PARTY MEMBER JOINS THE GROUP
Though Yee Kok Wai’s followers are his source of web traffic, he also provides reading material for those with similar political leanings, as well as a place to vent their emotions. The energetic content farm manager saw this as an opportunity to establish a center for setting up online discussions.
Yee Kok Wai started to proactively invite various partners to join his Facebook group, including Chinese Unification Promotion Party member Chang Dong-nan. Source: Global Chinese Alliance Facebook group
In 2014, Yee Kok Wai started to proactively invite various partners to join his Facebook group. One of those members was Chang Dong-nan (張東南) of the Chinese Unification Promotion Party (CUPP) — a pro-unification political party in Taiwan started by former gangster, Chang An-lo (張安樂).
Yee publicly welcomed Chang into the Global Chinese Alliance with the message: “a special thanks to CUPP member Chang Dong-nan for becoming an administrator for this community!” In 2015, Chang was invited to attend the Communist Party of China’s Central Party School in Beijing, where he was selected to act as a Taiwanese delegate for a study group run by the Association for Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China (統促會). Since Chang and Yee share a common political ideology, they naturally shared each other’s posts.
CONTENT FARMS ARE AN INDUSTRY IN MALAYSIA
“In Malaysia, making content farms is already an industry. You can make a living just doing that” said independent data journalist Kuek Ser Kuang Keng (郭史光慶). There are three major content farms in Malaysia, and in their heyday they could make money just by writing youth-oriented or inspirational articles. Later, when the platforms started to manage content, “a lot of people sold off their fan pages on the cheap,” said Kuek Ser.
Those who didn’t sell are still panning for gold in various content farm platforms.
We found that these mutual strangers who generate content can respond quickly to changes in the environment. In November, when a journalist from The Reporter attempted to create an account on Jintian Toutiao, the registration page asked users to “move over to beeper.live.” Not long after, the Jintian Toutiao registration page vanished. Not only that, the platform rules are repeatedly updated, sometimes opaquely, without a public announcement. On Christmas Eve 2019, page administrators decided to ban political content, and also warned users not to share or create political content, which was very popular at the time.
Who makes these rules? Who creates this system of awards and penalties, and requests that members move to a different platform? We eventually found our way into the platform’s secret base.
In part three, we meet Evan, the man behind the curtain, the man people call “the boss.”