Russian trolls, Macedonian content farms and secretive data mining firms such as Cambridge Analytica are viewed as masters of the dark arts of Facebook.
But what if, to spread misinformation on the giant social network, all you needed was a basic grasp of the internet, a credit card, and an email account?
That's the conclusion Facebook marketer Tim Doyle has reached after years of tinkering with the platform.
As the head of growth at Koala, the online mattress sales company, and as a former political consultant, Doyle spends a lot of time thinking about out how to exploit the intricacies of Facebook, these days ultimately to drive furniture sales. And he is concerned the real problem is being overlooked.
"I have watched the coverage [on fake news] develop over the last few months and have found it frustrating that so little attention has been paid to how the actual infrastructure works," he told me this week in an email. "The outcome of this has been a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened, and also a complete misread of the role of Facebook as a platform and as a company."
This week, Doyle ran a pilot test on Facebook to prove his point.
For $85.10, he was able to serve more than 10,000 people in Ohio a post suggesting Donald Trump had forced kneeling NFL players to stand for the American national anthem. A topical issue, and a plausible story, but one that is also untrue.
In September, Facebook confirmed Russian trolls spent $100,000 on its platform during last year's US elections. Based on a simple extrapolation of Doyle's experiment, it is not unreasonable to conclude the trolls could have reached millions.
The power of Facebook
There is a simple reason why the company Mark Zuckerberg founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 is now one of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen.
Users and customers (advertisers) love its product. Two billion people use it each month, 1.5 billion of them every day.
Since these users wilfully publish intimate details about themselves on the platform, Facebook can offer advertisers something few others can match: the ability to target ads based on hundreds of parameters, to get their messages in front of exactly who they want, for a relatively small sum.
But in the hands of the wrong people, these same tools can be used for more troubling purposes.
How it works
Advertising on Facebook can be a pretty simple process - one of the reasons the company has been so successful.
An advertiser can set up a Facebook page. Then it sets up an ad account (by handing over its credit card details to the company). It creates a post, then pays Facebook to boost that post (this is denoted as "sponsored" on the site). The more it pays, the bigger and more targeted the audience it can reach.
One of the quirks of the social network is that, every ad account can be tied to multiple pages, but there is no visible link between the two. Brands can set up pages for different products, or different countries they operate in. They could also, in theory, set up a review site for a product that appears to be independent, but really isn't. The more pages tied to an ad account, the more campaigns a brand can run, the more data it can extract.
Facebook also allows advertisers to send a certain type of post only to the intended audience, and no one else. Known as "dark ads", these posts don't live permanently on the advertiser's page, and are only seen by the intended audience, and no one else.
For emerging brands with relatively small budgets like Koala, these tools can be very useful. But it doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to understand how they could be manipulated for nefarious reasons, particularly in politics.
Doyle says it took 10 minutes for him to set up an ad account, and a page "Ohio for Trump" linked to it, which gave no indication it was created by someone sitting in Australia.
He created a slightly misleading post, and then, using Facebook's most basic targeting tools, he was able to get that post in front thousands of male NFL fans in Ohio, who identified as conservative.
Imagine what a political campaign, or someone trying to create mischief could achieve with a bigger budget?
Hard to solve
Facebook earlier this year outlined a series of steps to combat fake news, including pledges to hire more fact checkers. ???
Last month, in a detailed post, Zuckerberg promised, among other things, to strengthen processes and controls, and improve transparency around political advertising.
Yet the problem might be as much about fake news creators as it is about the way Facebook and its ad products are structured.
It must be said, investors remain utterly unconcerned about all of this.
Facebook shares are still within striking distance of record highs, its market value is now above $US511 billion ($649 billion).
But concerns are brewing among lawmakers. This week, US Republican Senator John McCain agreed to support a bill that would regulate Facebook political ads like those on TV.
Regulation is where the real risks for the company may lurk. If it can't find a solution itself, one might be forced upon it.
