To some extent it's still going on. Protests are still happening (and it's really bad) so lately I've been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about:
- anti-protests
- anti-EU and basically nationalistic bullshit
- religion and how that will solve everything
- government does nothing wrong and protesters are a bunch of thugs
- links to well-known fake news websites
- inciting violence while appearing to be pro-protest
Groups of accounts such as these are brigading some popular news postings and I don't really find them inside the anti-protester echo rooms.
the accounts look and feel similarly to the spam profiles which were prevalent a few years back having supermodel headshots as profile pictures.
I reported about 12 such profiles and the response from Facebook was that I should block these accounts as a resolution, as they aren't doing anything wrong per Facebook community guidelines and they are legit accounts.
In contrast, 'famous' people who are famously anti-government (and trolls, that's true, like this guy: https://www.facebook.com/macacaur) are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.
How do you know what goes on outside of your direct perception anyway? It used to be conventional media channels and they would print what was arguably propaganda, but there wouldn't be any Russian trolls to poke holes in it.
Imagine if the Iraq WMD story broke now. All those Russian trolls spamming Facebook running around saying it was bullshit. That would be total chaos! Why don't people trust the mainstream?
The reality is that propaganda works. You think you know what fake news is and what's reality, but we never did and most people follow the time-honored tradition of letting our chosen authority figures tell us who is conspiring with the bad guys. This frees us from the cognitive pain of considering their arguments and evidence because they are puppets of some nebulous evil forces and therefore safe to ignore.
Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers.
That's essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.
If somebody like Rush Limbaugh had a nationwide radio show where day by day he created content based on RNC talking points.
Or a network like Fox or MSNBC went all in on party loyalty and based all their content on party talking points.
Or a media conglomerate like Sinclair or Clear Channel pushed out political messaging to their affiliates in small markets that had to be aired during prime viewership.
Parks and Rec ran for seven seasons, and its protagonist was a fictionalized Hillary Clinton. The West Wing ran for seven seasons and explicitly featured a Democratic Presidential administration.
> Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers.
That wouldn't happen, because on the one hand no amount of money from the Republicans would persuade ABC/CBS/NBC to support them, and on the other hand they're quite glad to provide free support to the Democrats. The situation is reverse with Fox 'News,' of course.
This isn't for any nefarious reason: it's just that pretty much everyone associated with mass media believes that the Republicans are evil and the Democrats are good. There's no amount of money which could persuade me to claim that all murder should be legal; likewise, there's no need to pay me to say that murder should be illegal. The situation is the same for the vast majority of showrunners & news anchors: they really are doing what they believe is right.
Private web services are fundamentally different from the FCC regulated limited band of the RF broadcast spectrum. This was a major point of contention in the Net Neutrality debate, but it certainly has no application to Facebook.
I wasn't quite aware of this myself until a few years ago. Now I see it in almost every crime/spy/military-related show or movie. I've stopped watching several shows because of it and never started watching others.
I find it laughable that facebook/twitter/etc says it cant tell the difference between "kill Jews" and "kill Palestinians". But 1 groups kill messages will mostly not be censored.
Then they hire or allow groups to enforce rules who also cant tell the difference, and allow the "Kill Jew" statements to stay.
Yet, seems, most of US can see both "kill xxx" statements are equally bad and should be removed. I don't think most of us have any special skills that make us enlightened, just not so partisan heavy in attitude.
It's a pretty bad look. When I think of social tech I think of the possibility to magnify the voice/reach of individuals. When I read an article like this all I see is that magnification going solely to big spenders. How do I form an independent political ideology if I'm only being told the part of the story that heavily monied interests want me to hear? Would I ever experience an anti-monied-interest being put on a level playing field with the monied interest?
Imagine a social platform with a nice API, no moderators, no global filters, and you're looking at a thread focused on a particular political issue.
Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments".
Lets say the volume of content produced by the chatbot is so high that if a user were to randomly browse comments in this thread, there is no statistically significant bias in favor of a particular position.
Now the question is how can you enable the users to find "truth", or learn anything, or even meaningfully communicate with other users within this context?
What continues to fascinate me about stories like this is just how nakedly, obviously partisan the post-Trump reporting on the evils of social media is. Compare this with, for example, the tone of all the stories about how the Obama campaign used social media to win the previous election...
If I recall, the bulk of those stories occurred during Obama's first campaign. At that time social media was still in its infancy (Twitter, I believe, was only about a year old) and was a new phenomenon.
Social media has dramatically wider penetration, Facebook's algorithms are vastly different, and the malicious actors have figured out what works well. It shouldn't be a shock that the coverage has changed as a result.
Should also remember that media as a industry dislikes new comers like facebook which are taking away their absolute power. They had such sway before social media, that the only news coming from these oligopolies were news and the rest was propaganda.
Facebook with all its flaws is still a much more open system compared to traditional media. If you have fake news campaigns you can also make fact news campaigns, whereas with traditional media outlets, you'd have to setup expensive paper or tv channels to actually even begin to address a problem with the existing industry.
This is felt quite sharply in India, about which this article complains. The person who killed the journalist in the article is yet to be found. Her own brother gave a statement that it might have been the doing of left-wing extremists in India. Unless you know who is culpable how can you insinuate it was due to some 'nationalist right wing trolls'? This article is just another witch hunt.
If you've ever been caught up in a mob and felt yourself losing your identity in the crowd, so that you could get swept away doing things you'd never do alone, you'll know how dangerous unstructured freedom is for people.
We're tribal animals, but we're almost herd-like when we get caught up. It's important that the institutions that whip up the herd and point it around have some kind of checks and balances. We try and get by with the notion of offending public decency, of using concepts like honesty and integrity to shame people into doing the right thing, but it doesn't come naturally - it needs to be chosen, repeatedly and maintained.
I can't help but feel we're approaching a reckoning, in both senses, for platforms selling targeted access to their users.
It's just too powerful.
On one side it's propaganda, on the other it's illegal hiring practices (eg only advertising to young, able bodied men). I can't imagine a democratic world will tolerate this much longer.
Here's what I don't get. I got back onto facebook about six months ago after deleting my previous account. I was using the account to auth into news article commenting systems.
Within 24 hours I apparently had ticked someone off who had reported me, because my account was locked until I scanned a photo ID of myself and uploaded it.
If that happened to me, why isn't it happening to _everyone_?
Facebook’s Community Standards are a total joke... no later than two days ago I came across a cartoon of a guy on public transport taking an ’upskirt’ without the woman’s consent only to start puking when he saw on his phone that she was menstruate (I kid you not). I of course reported it instantly. I promptly got an anodyne notification that ”I had done the right thing” reporting it it but that it was found ”not to violate Facebook’s community standards” so would not be taken down. I reported it again (this time as ”nudity or pornography”) and within 20 minutes my account was suspended for 24 hours. They’re dirt. And they’re too powerful.
I remember back in late 1990s to early 2000s there was a fad for scaremongering articles about how computers and the Internet are the root of all evil.
Looks like it's the turn of social networks now.
> In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader.
...Seriously? How about another article on SEO companies training political campaign managers how to gain better ranking in Google?
I think the point is that this is a group within Facebook, when Facebook has claimed that its status as a platform means it's not culpable (for hate speech, Russian sock puppets, age-biased job postings, etc.).
Those articles back then probably had in mind some of the things that social media is occasioning now, they just didn't have the specific term for it so they lumped it all together under the big novel catch-all term “Internet”. I've read some eerily prescient forewarnings from that era, particularly about the undesirable side-effects of the “global village”.
Facebook is different. Their leadership has clearly aligned with the Republican party on an operational level. Remember, Zuckerberg gave King Bush the Second his first big public engagement after his retirement. People who support Democrats may use the machinery of Facebook, but when Facebook wants steer the machine, they steer it, ever so slowly and quietly, toward Lakoff's strong father, and away from his nurturant parent.
It is indeed very interesting to consider that the vast majority of internet enabled people across the world don’t read Hacker News, don’t read Bloomberg editorials - they just check their Facebook feed...
This is why I don't want Mark Zuckerberg in any public office. I really think the guy has no moral compass because all his actions point to a very sinister "money is everything" attitude and that everything has a price.
Come now, Zuckerberg doesn't even need public office. He's more powerful where he is now than he could ever be in an elected position. Just based on the information in the article, he could offer technical embeds to campaigns he likes and ignore the ones he doesn't, or provide them with a much smaller degree of assistance, with no one the wiser. I don't think there's a single person in the world with as much potential to impact elections and policy choices as Zuckerberg today.
I’m not American but I keep hoping Bill Gates’ philanthropic inclinations will eventually get the better of him and lead him to casually pour a billion or so into getting himself nominated and elected President in a ”battle of the billionaires” and end this horror.
"Dark art" is really glorifying what those desk jockeys do.
It's just a bunch of organized paid trolls with fancy ideas about themselves and what they do, because it's all secret-y and covert-y, but really, they're incompetent people who after slamming their head against the problem many times have group-devised by trial-and-error rather nifty ways of manipulating online conversations.
Any place where you can add a comment is manipulable, but their manipulations only work if people aren't aware of their existence in the comments section and of their good-cop / bad-cop group tactics, the methodological flaws of anonymous online voting and why noise-flooding works.
Nationalists are rising or at least becoming more vocal in at least Britain, India, United States, Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan.
They are direct threats to the established status quo. Censoring their political speech will cause a "Streisand Effect" and only further galvanize a backlash against the establishment.
Social Media will probably be broken up by country (Ex. The chinese model), so that national laws on speech can be enforced.
However pros and cons of the new political groups must be debated on a public stage.
[+] [-] decebalus1|8 years ago|reply
To some extent it's still going on. Protests are still happening (and it's really bad) so lately I've been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about:
- anti-protests
- anti-EU and basically nationalistic bullshit
- religion and how that will solve everything
- government does nothing wrong and protesters are a bunch of thugs
- links to well-known fake news websites
- inciting violence while appearing to be pro-protest
Groups of accounts such as these are brigading some popular news postings and I don't really find them inside the anti-protester echo rooms.
the accounts look and feel similarly to the spam profiles which were prevalent a few years back having supermodel headshots as profile pictures.
I reported about 12 such profiles and the response from Facebook was that I should block these accounts as a resolution, as they aren't doing anything wrong per Facebook community guidelines and they are legit accounts.
In contrast, 'famous' people who are famously anti-government (and trolls, that's true, like this guy: https://www.facebook.com/macacaur) are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.
[+] [-] narrator|8 years ago|reply
Imagine if the Iraq WMD story broke now. All those Russian trolls spamming Facebook running around saying it was bullshit. That would be total chaos! Why don't people trust the mainstream?
The reality is that propaganda works. You think you know what fake news is and what's reality, but we never did and most people follow the time-honored tradition of letting our chosen authority figures tell us who is conspiring with the bad guys. This frees us from the cognitive pain of considering their arguments and evidence because they are puppets of some nebulous evil forces and therefore safe to ignore.
[+] [-] r00fus|8 years ago|reply
This link is from 6 years ago. In the past 5 years, I'm sure it's been refined and weaponized.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
[+] [-] trhway|8 years ago|reply
Sounds like hi tech version if voter ID and serving basically the same purpose.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fortythirteen|8 years ago|reply
That's essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.
[+] [-] Steeeve|8 years ago|reply
If somebody like Rush Limbaugh had a nationwide radio show where day by day he created content based on RNC talking points.
Or a network like Fox or MSNBC went all in on party loyalty and based all their content on party talking points.
Or a media conglomerate like Sinclair or Clear Channel pushed out political messaging to their affiliates in small markets that had to be aired during prime viewership.
oh wait...
[+] [-] 734786710934|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeveb|8 years ago|reply
That wouldn't happen, because on the one hand no amount of money from the Republicans would persuade ABC/CBS/NBC to support them, and on the other hand they're quite glad to provide free support to the Democrats. The situation is reverse with Fox 'News,' of course.
This isn't for any nefarious reason: it's just that pretty much everyone associated with mass media believes that the Republicans are evil and the Democrats are good. There's no amount of money which could persuade me to claim that all murder should be legal; likewise, there's no need to pay me to say that murder should be illegal. The situation is the same for the vast majority of showrunners & news anchors: they really are doing what they believe is right.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlperguiy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nautilus12|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|8 years ago|reply
Al Gore - 30 Rock
Joe Biden/Michelle Obama - Parks and Rec
Newt Gengrich - Murphy Brown
Donna Brazil - Good Wife
etc....
[+] [-] JSONwebtoken|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-...
I wasn't quite aware of this myself until a few years ago. Now I see it in almost every crime/spy/military-related show or movie. I've stopped watching several shows because of it and never started watching others.
[+] [-] IronWolve|8 years ago|reply
Then they hire or allow groups to enforce rules who also cant tell the difference, and allow the "Kill Jew" statements to stay.
Yet, seems, most of US can see both "kill xxx" statements are equally bad and should be removed. I don't think most of us have any special skills that make us enlightened, just not so partisan heavy in attitude.
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dqpb|8 years ago|reply
Imagine a social platform with a nice API, no moderators, no global filters, and you're looking at a thread focused on a particular political issue.
Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments".
Lets say the volume of content produced by the chatbot is so high that if a user were to randomly browse comments in this thread, there is no statistically significant bias in favor of a particular position.
Now the question is how can you enable the users to find "truth", or learn anything, or even meaningfully communicate with other users within this context?
[+] [-] hkmurakami|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtberatwork|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oconnore|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praulv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arun_einstein|8 years ago|reply
Facebook with all its flaws is still a much more open system compared to traditional media. If you have fake news campaigns you can also make fact news campaigns, whereas with traditional media outlets, you'd have to setup expensive paper or tv channels to actually even begin to address a problem with the existing industry.
This is felt quite sharply in India, about which this article complains. The person who killed the journalist in the article is yet to be found. Her own brother gave a statement that it might have been the doing of left-wing extremists in India. Unless you know who is culpable how can you insinuate it was due to some 'nationalist right wing trolls'? This article is just another witch hunt.
[+] [-] barrkel|8 years ago|reply
We're tribal animals, but we're almost herd-like when we get caught up. It's important that the institutions that whip up the herd and point it around have some kind of checks and balances. We try and get by with the notion of offending public decency, of using concepts like honesty and integrity to shame people into doing the right thing, but it doesn't come naturally - it needs to be chosen, repeatedly and maintained.
[+] [-] oliwarner|8 years ago|reply
It's just too powerful.
On one side it's propaganda, on the other it's illegal hiring practices (eg only advertising to young, able bodied men). I can't imagine a democratic world will tolerate this much longer.
[+] [-] wavefunction|8 years ago|reply
Within 24 hours I apparently had ticked someone off who had reported me, because my account was locked until I scanned a photo ID of myself and uploaded it.
If that happened to me, why isn't it happening to _everyone_?
[+] [-] qubex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vadimberman|8 years ago|reply
Looks like it's the turn of social networks now.
> In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader.
...Seriously? How about another article on SEO companies training political campaign managers how to gain better ranking in Google?
[+] [-] bagacrap|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killjoywashere|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeisawesome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Indolat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foodislove|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rndmize|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshAg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matte_black|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christmasity|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jhiska|8 years ago|reply
It's just a bunch of organized paid trolls with fancy ideas about themselves and what they do, because it's all secret-y and covert-y, but really, they're incompetent people who after slamming their head against the problem many times have group-devised by trial-and-error rather nifty ways of manipulating online conversations.
Any place where you can add a comment is manipulable, but their manipulations only work if people aren't aware of their existence in the comments section and of their good-cop / bad-cop group tactics, the methodological flaws of anonymous online voting and why noise-flooding works.
[+] [-] LeoJiWoo|8 years ago|reply
Nationalists are rising or at least becoming more vocal in at least Britain, India, United States, Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan.
They are direct threats to the established status quo. Censoring their political speech will cause a "Streisand Effect" and only further galvanize a backlash against the establishment.
Social Media will probably be broken up by country (Ex. The chinese model), so that national laws on speech can be enforced.
However pros and cons of the new political groups must be debated on a public stage.
[+] [-] golemiprague|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 0xbear|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] idooontcare|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]