- Among his three-person staff were Tkachenko's daughter, who focused on the animal pages. "She is 13 years old, I teach her, and I believe that these skills will help her in the future," he said. According to Tkachenko, "an elderly woman with disabilities" ran the "I Love America" page. Tkachenko said he "taught her everything from scratch."
How could this team build huge Facebook pages with massive engagement? By using other people's content. "We had an internal service that collected viral content across Facebook and gave relevant hints...posts were collected in the internal database. From there, [the posts were] selected and slightly changed by the administrators of the farm," Tkachenko explained. While Facebook down-ranked content that wasn't original, Tkachenko found that you only "need to edit 15%-20% of the material" by changing "the picture slightly" or coming up with "a new description."
Tkachenko claims that he got into posting incendiary pro-Trump memes a few weeks ago because it drove engagement and growth. "We started to publish because the algorithm showed a hot niche. That's the whole story," he said.