Several accounts -- run by users in Vietnam and boasting tens of thousands of followers -- later shifted to focus solely on Australian national politics, linking to websites full of AI-generated articles and advertisements.
AFP has tracked over a dozen sports and human-interest pages promoting content that mixes actual news with fabrications, with some posts getting thousands of shares.
The websites display "almost industrial level forms of misinformation", said open-source intelligence analyst Giano Libot.
"It's designed for the algorithm in search engines to pick up," Libot said.
"It also is reflective that, especially in Southeast Asia, we don't have a lot of policy around it yet."
Meta removed 13 pages in March after AFP contacted the Facebook parent company for comment, citing site violations.
The network is the latest to emerge from Vietnam, where low labour and electricity costs have long bred a cottage industry of click farming via social media.
An AFP investigation last year uncovered more than 30 baseball-themed pages mostly operated from the country publishing false political claims ahead of the World Series, prompting removals by Meta.
AFP fact-checkers have debunked similar disinformation targeting Dutch politicians.
AFP works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, including in Asia and the European Union.
Experts say the surge of AI-generated political clickbait is a relatively new phenomenon for Australia, attributing it to the country's...
Several accounts -- run by users in Vietnam and boasting tens of thousands of followers -- later shifted to focus solely on Australian national politics, linking to websites full of AI-generated a...