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During a corporate party with dancing mascots and pyrotechnics in early 2026, the CEO of HTV Network stood on stage holding a sign in Vietnamese that said "Doanh Thu Đột Phá." Translation: "Record Revenue."
The CEO, Ngo Anh Tan, had reason to celebrate that night. Since launching as an "international media company" that connects the "world with authoritative journalism" almost two years earlier, HTV now had at least 100 employees, according to a Vietnamese job listing.
But what the company purports to do contrasts vastly with its true nature, an investigation by CBC’s visual investigations unit and Radio-Canada’s Décrypteurs discovered.
WATCH | Investigating an AI slop content farm in Vietnam: Exposing a Vietnamese AI fake news empire targeting Canadians
Ngo and his team secretly run an AI-slop empire out of Hanoi, Vietnam, polluting social media feeds around the world, targeting users with fake content and sensationalist stories that range from Elon Musk banning Teslas in Canada to clickbait-style posts exploiting the Tumbler Ridge shooting.
The team uncovered close to 200 Facebook pages — with more than 55 million followers — that shared links to about 50 HTV-connected websites that generate revenue by running ads, often next to inflammatory or misleading political and religious content.
"It's quite staggering, the scope of what's being done here," said Fenwick McKelvey, a professor specializing in communications at Concordia University in Montreal. "[It’s] totally deceptive."
HTV Network shares a name with a legitimate, state-owned Vietnamese broadcaster, complicating efforts to trace its activities.
'Everyone wins except for Canadians'
The model was relatively simple: The company mass-produced AI-generated content — showing, for example, how the "U.S. lost its main city" in an attack by Russian President Vladimir Putin — posted it on one of the Facebook pages they ran and included a hyperlink.
That link would take users to one of HTV's many websites, where ads for things like fungus medication, Bank of Montreal or Nova Scotia tourism would be plastered across the articles. Ads on websites viewed by CBC were served through third-party platforms, not the companies themselves.
The CBC/Radio-Canada analysis revealed that in some cases, the Facebook pages were also monetized.
HTV CEO Ngo, through text messages, told CBC/Radio-Canada he didn’t have Facebook pages or websites. When asked why his phone number matched the one on the HTV website, he said "maybe someone has taken my information." Corporate records and domain registration documentation also matched Ngo’s personal information.
Ngo repeatedly denied knowledge of HTV sites or pages. In response to a written request for comment, Ngo replied, "I don’t understand what you mean."
The following day, the HTV company website was taken down. Ngo's Facebook profile was made private and many of the digital clues CBC/Radio-Canada used to connect the company to the accounts and websites disappeared.
Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a joint McGill-University of Toronto project, said that Facebook incentivizes this kind of low-quality, clickable content.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, recently invited users to join its creator program, where money can be made from reels, photos and text posts.
"The way this gets resolved is that there is some cost to Meta for enabling this sort of scam, a real concrete cost … [a] financial penalty," said Bridgman. "They get engagement on their platform. They get money. Everyone wins except for Canadians, Canadian businesses and Canadian democracy."
Meta did not respond to CBC/Radio-Canada’s request for comment.
How we uncovered the network
Using a combination of corporate documents, on-the-ground reporting in Vietnam, and software including DomainTools, Darkside and OSINT Industries, the CBC/Radio-Canada team was able to expose how this network of Facebook pages and websites, which targeted audiences in the U.K., Europe, United States and Canada, is connected to HTV Network.
It started with a June 2026 report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory investigating "Facebook's News Slop Economy," which identified hundreds of Facebook pages and websites managed out of Vietnam.
CBC/Radio-Canada built off that report, discovering a unique email address — containing "kolax9843" — on one of the websites MEO identified.
That email was the primary contact email for dozens of low-quality, cookie-cutter sites, including one called Autulu. Ad-laden articles from that URL in particular were shared by more than 20 Facebook pages, including "Man City Daily News" or "Wonderful World News," with more than 50,000 followers combined.
One verified Facebook page, "Danny Fernandes," named after the Canadian musician, has more than a million followers and has shared posts that included phrases like "how eight million Democrat votes just vanished" or "Kamala stepdaughter suddenly posted a bold message on Trump Inauguration day."
Fernandes did not respond to CBC.
"The deeper you dig, the more depressing it gets," said Bridgman. "At this scale of followers and number of accounts, this is likely a well-performing business."
CBC/Radio-Canada discovered another website featuring the "kolax9843" email: the company site for FG Media Corp., which contained a photo showing a group of people standing in front of a sign.
The company: HTV Network
Images posted by HTV employees identified by CBC/Radio-Canada on Facebook and TikTok show a busy office, and the company frequently posted ads on Facebook for content marketing jobs paying up to more than double the average yearly salary in Vietnam.
One HTV Network employee, on their personal Facebook page, even posted a photo of them at work. On a computer in the background of the photo, a web browser shows the employee is logged in as a manager for a Facebook page called "I Love Rugby - Kelce." The hyperlinks on that Facebook page took users to the Autulu website.
The "kolax9843" email was also present on a website called Longbientruck, which was registered to Ngo Anh Tan. Domain info showed a phone number that matched the HTV Network website.
Corporate records showed HTV Network Company Limited was created in 2024, with 7 billion Vietnamese dong (or about $350,000 Cdn) in seed money. The corporate records include the same phone number.
The CEO in those records: Ngo Anh Tan.
After CBC/Radio-Canada reached out, HTV added a disclaimer that declares the articles are "fictional and intended solely for entertainment purposes."
Low-quality AI content
The advent of AI has led to an industry of creators who produce cheap, low-quality content at scale.
This, combined with changes to the monetization policies at Meta in 2025, has led to a proliferation of this type of content, said Craig Silverman, co-founder of the Indicator, a publication dedicated to exposing digital deception.
"This kind of AI-generated slop is very clearly not a priority for the company," said Silverman.
"For years, Meta was really focused on rolling out a variety of technical measures and human oversight to eradicate exactly this type of content. Now Meta, through its own action, has just decided to throw in the towel on it. To me, it’s just completely astounding."
Meta did not respond to queries about whether these pages violated their Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior policy.
In Vietnam, Facebook serves roughly 60 to 70 million people, generating $1 billion US in annual revenue for the company in 2018.
"What's interesting with Vietnam [is] you have a very sizable youth population that's highly entrepreneurial and well-educated," said Victoire Rio, executive director of What To Fix, a non-profit that focuses on policy changes and accountability for Big Tech.
"A lot of the actors … are operating very openly without any form of obvious accountability."
Do you have any tips on this story? Please contact VI@cbc.ca
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