Facebook reveals Russian troll content, shuts down 135 IRA accounts | Hacker News Reader

Facebook reveals Russian troll content, shuts down 135 IRA accounts

techcrunch.com

89 pointscctt2354 comments

> Facebook has removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by the Russian government-connected troll farm and election interference squad the Internet Research Agency

This looks like a fairly small amount of accounts.

Yes, it is likely there are hundreds of thousands of accounts, not just a few dozen. Over time, we'll see. Twitter and all the rest have also come out with "it was just a few accounts, see, we've even gone and deleted them". But it's not that few.

Edit: Also, those few accounts pack a punch.

> 1.08 million users followed at least one of the Facebook Pages, and 493,000 users followed at least one of the Instagram accounts. The accounts had spent a combined $167,000 on ads since the start of 2015

That's a lot of influence and a fair bit of money spent on so few accounts. And across the whole Internet Research Agency as discussed by Facebook,

> 126 million people had seen the propaganda group’s Facebook posts and another 20 million had seen its Instagram posts.

Wow - that is a lot of people!

Is there any specific reason you said hundreds of thousands of accounts, and not tens of thousands, millions, or dozens?

Just an order of magnitude guess. It could be tens of thousands, it could be millions, I'm just an outsider looking in. But it seems clear that it is at least a couple orders of magnitude more than just the 70 they found and publicized so far.

This is not how it works. The goal of these accounts was to build a following to be able to influence more people. A page with a couple of hundreds likes or followers will have much more impact than a million accounts with no followers. Building audiences to influence people is hard and takes time. It is much more probable that there are around 70 accounts than millions. Sorry to be that blunt but do you know anything about this matter?

Do you know anything about this matter? The scope of this is still largely unknown, unless you have some information the rest of us don't.

Influence can be local. Generic-looking pages (i.e. not locale specific in the content they post) or accounts are often followed by people only from a specific small city and surrounding areas (10^4 people, say). Is it so hard to believe that accounts such as these were used by the IRA?

It seems to me intuitively obvious that an account with 10^4 followers has less influence than an account with 10^7 followers. (Sure, if you have 1000 accounts with 10^4 followers, it adds up...)

Removing the big accounts (probably) isn't going to remove the IRA's presence on Facebook. It's going to take a big chunk out of their influence, though. (Unless they have other accounts with big followings that weren't removed.)

You know the old saw, “quantity has a quality all of its own.” I’d add that these guys could have done both. They could have high follower count identities, medium, and low. They can have highly active accounts, and “sleepers” and everything in between. It would be unwise to make too many assumptions based on limited press releases from Facebook. It’s more sensible to think about what they could have done, and then move on from there.

They could have had tiers of accounts, all for different purposes. They could have used a ton of low accounts to simulate a grassroots response, to openly troll and be banned, and all kinds of things. They’d have cultivated more and less popular, and obvious accounts as well. If they were smart they’d have a whole layer of accounts designed just to be caught, and give a misleading impression of their competence and methodology.

You expressed my thoughts better than I could. I'm looking forward to more analysis being done on the actions of IRA - I just hope FB/Twitter/others don't sweep what was done beyond these big accounts under the rug, because we're only going to see more of this sort of "information warfare."

I'd expect IRA (or whomever) to use both types of accounts. They can work together.

I'd expect the 10^7 follower account to indeed have more influence, but not necessarily be able to effectively use that influence as well as the 10^4 follower account.

The big follower accounts would probably tend to be more general, with more diversity among their followers. For example they might have followers spread throughout the nation. Much of their influence will be wasted influencing people in areas where changing a few opinions is not enough to make a difference.

The smaller accounts might be able to be more focused on one particular region and one particular group of potential voters in that region. They will align with that group better than the big, national account will, and so might be more likely to change positions of their followers, and they can be focused on a region where things are close.

So what you do is use your big accounts as sources, and use your small accounts to post things from the big accounts. The link to the big accounts lends credibility to the material in the eyes of your followers on the smaller accounts.

That's all true. I especially like your last paragraph about the smaller accounts borrowing prestige from the big accounts.

But it seems to me that the amount of effort required to run an account does not scale with the number of followers. Sleeper accounts are essentially free, of course, but an account with 10^7 followers is not 1000 times harder to run than an account with 10^4 followers. Unless they have a lot more people devoted to the smaller accounts, they probably don't have 1000 times as many accounts with 10^4 followers.

They have different types of accounts for different purposes some are just used to comment or authenticate to 3d party sites and to comment there. They also serve as feeder accounts for the "core" accounts that are actually trying to build up followers.

How dare you dismiss the possibility that there are billions or trillions of Russian accounts? Clearly you underestimate the limitless power of arch-villain Putin.

Small # of accounts, but massive amounts of followers/viewers. Kylie Jenner has a "fairly small amount of accounts" (ie one) on Twitter, but a single tweet can send a company's stock into the red[0].

0. http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technology/snapchat-update-k...

Would you know of a single Russian account like that?

Don't these 'troll' accounts mostly have fake followers though? What reach could 76 accounts with mostly fake followers/likes really have on the world?

They most certainly arent anywhere near Kylie Jenner level so Im not sure what that has to do with this.

But I guess no one involved (media, FB) wants this story to be any less newsworthy so I doubt we'll ever have an answer...

IRA = Internet Research Agency for those confused by the title, i.e. the russian "troll" company.

Thanks for this.

Reusing already-prominent acronyms gets really confusing although I know often it's unintentional.

Many Americans won't know who the IRA were/are, but in the UK (and probably the rest of Europe) it's common knowledge and burnt in.

id say middle age and older people would. they were shown in various movies during the 90s but yea. younger people probably think of the IRA savings account.

We middle-aged folks also remember some big bombing incidents executed by the IRA. The IRA is still referenced in the news now and then.

I'm american and remember some high profile movies that featured them. Then again, I'm almost 30. I thought it was common knowledge among many who the IRA were, even among americans.

I think IRA is common knowledge in the US, at least it's well-known by anyone over ~40.

I find amusing the "troll" label applied to it. Trolling in my books is someone taking the piss out of someone else or a situation. We're talking about far greater reach here with devastating impacts.

We need some kind of TrollTrace program to keep tabs on this situation

There's certainly some moments that fit this label perfectly, like when Trump announced that he was going to form a joint taskforce with Russia to secure American elections from hackers.

Are we ever going to see any of the controversial posts and ads that supposedly influenced the US election? I don't see anything US politics or election related in the samples they showed.

> "We removed this latest set of Pages and accounts solely because they were controlled by the IRA — not based on the content.”

This is readily searchable, but here is an example:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/01/media/russian-facebook-ads-r...

Is Facebook notifying the affected people that they had viewed fabricated news, or just releasing press releases?

Does any of this content qualify as "fabricated news" ? Can you point out what you mean by that?

This is too little too late for Facebook. They are just trying to save as much face as possible now.

It remains to be seen whether these scandals will have any real effect in the long run. Facebook grew to be a behemoth, now it seems almost "too big to fail".

What would happen if it failed?

I disagree.....considering the political and "news" climate we live in today, "finding" and "shutting down" "Russian trolls" seems to me like an absolutely brilliant strategy to get the public and especially the media back on your side.

Excitement drives clicks, and Russia is the US's biggest boogey-man du jour (what happened to the pesky North Koreans and Muslims by the way, why don't we hear anything from them anymore?) that we need to government to protect us from, so this campaign should be a big winner I'd think.

Seems like a fairly small number for removing propaganda/state influence..

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9233-uncovering_british_spies_we...

People can exert a lot of influence with just one account, and in this case it’s about 270 so far. You’d be surprised at how effective Sybil attacks are with far fewer than a dozen accounts, never mind hundreds. When those accounts build reputation, often assisted by more accounts, it’s even more powerful. Still, the biggest advantage is that you get to probe your audience multiple ways, then just go with what gains traction. The reputation of any one account doesn’t matter, it’s a “team” effort.

So while you or I might care about what we say, try to build a reputation, and in general say things in accordance with what we believe, they don’t have to. It’s a radically different proposition, and devastating when done well. Even being discovered can be its own kind of “win” if it creates distrust and instability within the network itself. You can undermine faith in said network by exposing it as essentially corrupted, albeit by you.

From the provided sample content it appears to be rather harmless. Reminds me of buzz feed style posts.

None of that looks harmless to me. And also, buzzfeed-style posts are hardly harmless - I think you'd find a number of people who honestly believe that buzzfeed-style posts are a harbinger of the downfall of humanity. Regardless of any hyperbole, I do think "buzzfeed-style posts" are very harmful, and I while do think that these posts by Russian operatives can vaguely resemble buzzfeed-style posts, I think they are far more harmful.

Much of it seems to more be designed to sew discord between the parties than to directly influence the election.

Mission accomplished I guess.

I don’t know if you looked at the samples or not, but out of 6 samples only 2 can be considered remotely political. Sure, one uses a photo of Putin with a toast “let’s drink for politics”. At the stretch we could consider every “thanks Obama” meme a political one.

I think this is a distraction maneuver by Facebook to direct away attention from the latest events.

I suppose you're right, not necessarily between the two parties but between US citizens and each other, for which the parties are sometimes used as a proxy - you see lots of promotion of black rights groups with fringe views and far-right groups with thinly or completely unveiled racist views. Just little tricks that will hook a small number of people, but make the overall picture you see on TV look much worse than it is on average.

But there is none of that in these samples provided. It’s just memes and and garbage “viral” content a-la buzz feed.

I know there were other samples posted before that had more of what you are talking about. But I’m strictly speaking about the current batch and the article in question and screenshots from that article.

I’d imagine Facebook would cherry pick the most offending pieces to show off. And whatever evidence is currently presented seems weak at best.

“sow discord” is an overused meme thrown around by people who choose to not form their own opinion but, instead, repeat what they read in the tabloids

95% of 135 accounts operated in Russian-speaking countries? So this means little in the context of alleged US election interference?

Hmm, I guess I come from an older generation where mention of the "IRA" was a whole different genre of terrorism...

Do you mean the individual retirement accounts? /s

Good point. Similar age group I am guessing, but this is also a US-centric interpretation. The Irish Republican Army was probably more recognisable by their TLA worldwide back in the 70's and 80's.

Well into the 90s i would say.

Yeah, I always thought IRA was the main acronym for the "Irish Republican Army". Weird that they used IRA in this article to mean something else. Has the main association changed?

Currently, the association is for the "Internet Research Agency", which is the formal company name for a purported Russian based professional trolling firm.

We've always been at war with IRA.

What's a retirement plan got to do with this?

I love how we're all falling for this Russian troll BS and not attacking Facebook's business model of micro-targeting advertising

There were dozens of them! DOZENS!

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