Removing Bad Actors on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Removing Bad Actors on Facebook

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178 pointsrunesoerensen347 comments

It sure would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that these bad actors are clearly non-partisan, and are simply trying to cause civil unrest in the US by agitating both sides of the political spectrum.

I'm sure these state actors are thrilled that their plan has gone so well -- not only are their agitations seemingly driving the population apart, but the wider politicization of the issue itself, fueled by the media, where people think the bad guys are acting to tip the scales in the favor of the opposition just plays further into the hands of these actors and does more to fracture our society than any of these stupid Facebook ad campaigns they're concocting ever could.

This. It's documented that the Russian state security apparatus was not seeking (and did not believe it possible) to prevent Clinton from winning.

What they wanted, and got, is mania.

Source?

Read NYTimes. Then watch Fox. Repeat. You’ll know what he means.

Are you sure you're putting blame in the right place and not just falling into some manufactured consent?

Every day income inequality gets worse, workers are treated like garbage[1], wages are going down[2] with unemployment going down, people can't afford health insurance and even if they can they will probably still be broken as deductibles and out of pocket costs rise, 80% of all people are living paycheck[3], 50% of all people in USA are defined as poor or low income[4], 80% of the country makes under $65k/year while the value of our money becomes less[5], 1/5 of children are in poverty[6].

I really think this is a natural occurrence to the failures of this corrupt capitalist system that provides for the few instead of the many. Things are shifting left, and it's certainly not because Russia spent $50k on advertisements on Facebook. You can also argue that the UK was a far greater influence with Cambridge Analytica, but it's something people like to ignore.

These are absolutely our own policies having this effect.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/30/accidents...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

[4] https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...

[5] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2016

[6] http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html

Depends on where you are standing. The best metaphor I've seen for the world these days is Scott Adams' about us watching two different movies in parallel at the same time.

It's equally possible to look at the same world, and see that business is booming, the stock market is at record highs, employers are hiring and making investments at rates we haven't seen in years. Tension in areas of the world that have been problematic my entire life appear to be on the ebb at the moment. Maybe it's a regional thing... But things are looking pretty fricking awesome over on this side of the fence.

You can go a long way towards flipping between these parallel universes by logging in and logging out of social media.

You're looking at things from the side of the elite and I absolutely agree, that side of the fence looks fantastic.

Business is booming for the elite, the stock market is almost entirely owned by the top 10%[1] so nobody is really seeing those gains except people who already have plenty, employers are hiring but nobody has really seen a wage increase since the 90's[2] and wages are actually slightly falling[3]. Where's the bargaining power as we close in on full employment? It's nowhere to be found, and conditions are getting worse for the people who do the work.

[1] http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

> wages are actually slightly falling

According to your source wages fell, in real terms, between May 2017 and May 2018 by 0.1%. They're up from 5 years ago, up from 10 years ago and way up from 50 years ago. The principal cause of that real decline was gas prices rising unexpectedly.

Are you adjusting for inflation? Most Americans haven't seen any real wage growth when adjusted for inflation since the 70's. If they have seen real income growth, it has been extremely small. Wages have actually dropped since 1970 for the bottom 40% when adjusted for inflation.

https://www.businessinsider.com/record-median-household-inco...

> Are you adjusting for inflation?

Yes. "Without adjusting for inflation, these 'nonsupervisory' workers saw their average hourly earnings jump 2.8 percent from last year. But that was not enough to keep pace with the 2.9 percent increase in inflation, which economists attributed to rising gas prices" [1].

> Most Americans haven't seen any real wage growth when adjusted for inflation since the 70's

This is not true for people employed full time [2]. Real hourly wages for hourly nonfarm workers [3] are up. About the only people I can find who are earning less, in real terms, than they were in the 1970s are manufacturing workers, and even they are up over the last decade.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.t01.htm

I mean the question you need to be asking is if things are getting better or getting worse. A year ago, you would have included "nobody is hiring" in your list of criticisms, but now you are forced to say "employers are hiring, but...."

Clearly improvements in the things you mention can't happen overnight. But improving the availability of jobs and having the stock market going up instead of crashing are objectively better than the opposite.

The article you cite explains that the net loss of YoY wages was entirely due to inflation, and in nominal terms wages actually increased YoY, and it also cherry picks the "production and nonsupervisory" group of workers (inflation adjusted wages for all workers actually increased) -- so its somewhat dishonest to not clarify those aspects. Inflation adjustments are also a notoriously tricky business, and without delving into the details of what inflation metric was used, and if it was applied on a region-by-region basis, hair splitting over the effects of inflation on wages to drive a narrative around wage growth (when the direction is generally "upwards") seems wrong.

You seem to be looking for reasons to explain why the trajectory of the US economy is negative, but I'm afraid that the evidence is mounting that wage growth and job opportunities should be expected to improve over time going forward, absent some new financial crisis.

edit: Also worth mentioning: staring at medians around wages is, imho, missing an critical aspect to understanding the actual experience of participants in the economy: income mobility. There's evidence that upward mobility has been stable despite an increase in point-in-time income inequality [1]. The question we should be asking is if income inequality at a point-in-time is necessarily bad if participants in the economy have ample opportunity to move up to higher levels of income. I don't have the answer to this, but any arguments about wage growth or income inequality need to take into account mobility, and they almost never do.

https://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356290/study-upward-mobili...

Wage growth without accounting for inflation makes any wage growth insignificant. The lower 40% of Americans have seen NEGATIVE wage growth since the 1970's, and the 40%-60% of wage earners have seen a measly 0.5% increase since the 1970's when adjusted for inflation [1]

Stock market is entirely irrelevant for most of Americans [2]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/record-median-household-inco...

[2] http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...

If you assume that people are locked into a fixed position in the economy, then yes, those people have seen negative wage growth when adjusted for inflation.

But if you assume that new entrants to the economy develop skills and move up over time as they acquire skills and responsibility, as is likely a closer reflection of reality, then their wages have grown over time. The observation you are making shows that for new entrants to the economy at low income levels, there has not been a net increase in the starting wages those people earn since the 1970s.

I guess the question to ask is: should we expect the real earnings of low level, low skill jobs (not people) to increase over time as the economy does? As you said, these are relatively flat. I have no reason to assume someone performing low-skilled labor in 1970 should be paid more in real terms than someone today doing the same job, in pure economic terms. For that to be true, they'd need to be performing some kind of increased value in their job relative to 40 years ago -- but if they were doing that, they wouldn't be performing a low-skilled job anymore, and hence would be moving up in income level!

The underlying argument is that although the economy is improving in some aspects for some people, what good is it if the majority of the population sees no to negative benefit? If a journeyman level low skill worker makes less real wages today than 30 years ago, and the majority of the country is comprised of low skill workers, how on earth could anyone consider the recent economy a net positive for the country?

>If you assume that people are locked into a fixed position in the economy, then yes, those people have seen negative wage growth when adjusted for inflation.

80% of the country makes under $65k[1]. They're pretty locked in. This talk of "upward mobility" is not really true. Only a few will move up the chain, but not the majority. Not everyone is moving into management, not everyone is becoming a software engineer. With the costs of college education & textbooks rising exorbitantly, less people are able to afford to get the skills to move up [2].

>I guess the question to ask is: should we expect the real earnings of low level, low skill jobs (not people) to increase over time as the economy does? As you said, these are relatively flat. I have no reason to assume someone performing low-skilled labor in 1970 should be paid more in real terms than someone today doing the same job, in pure economic terms.

The cost of everything necessary is rising[2] while income's have stayed the same since the 70's when adjusted for inflation, so yes I expect "low skill" jobs to keep up. "Low skill" jobs are still a necessary part of the economy and someone hast to do them; who's going to pick up your trash at work, who's going to make your smoothies, who's going to prepare your breakfast sandwiches, who's going to pick up trash at event stadiums, who's going to cut your hair?

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2016

[2] https://www.abi.org/newsroom/chart-of-the-day/price-changes-...

> 80% of the country makes under $65k[1]. They're pretty locked in. This talk of "upward mobility" is not really true. Only a few will move up the chain, but not the majority.

Do you have a citation to support these claims? A cursory search yielded a study that showed at least from 1995-2005 these claims were completely false, and the majority of people moved up from the lowest quintiles of the economy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...

> The cost of everything necessary is rising[2]

If you look at your reference this is also false. Some necessities are flat, some have gone up. And most of the necessities like food and housing that have gone up, at least according to your reference, have tracked inflation so in real terms have not gone up and hence we should not feel like flat wage growth has reduced the availability of these necessities to the people who are economically immobile. And of course, in real terms, clothing and other necessities have gotten cheaper. You also gloss over that non-essential items that improve quality of life like tech have dropped radically, increasing the overall purchasing power of people within those spheres over time.

The remaining items like medical care and college education cited are cause for concern, but if we're being honest both of those areas are effectively in a state of crisis right now due to out of control costs, broken systems, and predatory lending practices. On the education front at least there is cause for hope due to the increasing availability of alternatives.

You paint a particularly bleak picture that is not backed up by your own sources, I'm afraid. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement in income mobility in the US or reducing the costs and waste in systems like healthcare, but like I said there are plenty of reasons for optimism and a belief that the trajectory is a positive one.

> With the costs of college education & textbooks rising exorbitantly, less people are able to afford to get the skills to move up [2].

It is cheaper in most fields to skill up than it ever has been.

It's just more expensive to get a piece of paper....

> I expect "low skill" jobs to keep up.

Then I hope you are against all low and semi-skilled immigration.

I don't understand the down voting of comments like this. Is there something controversial here?

For some, it's heresy to express such opinions, and confirmation that the speaker of such blasphemy is a no-good terrible person.

Precisely.

And regardless of the magnitude, we would surely be hypocrites to keep finger-pointing. The US has been implicitly meddling heavily with international elections for decades.

It’s quite sad that Americans are not taught the basic lessons of the 19th century French Revolutions, because learning these lessons the hard way is yet again proving catastrophic.

The “liberals” (known to Americans as the ‘Democratic Party establishment’) forego moral action for moral identity. The “proletariat” (or, working class, Democratic Socialists) must overcome the denial of their self-identity which is, in American culture and media, a battle on all sides.

The average American’s head spins when they try to interpret polical nuances of foreign nations. They are limited to 2 dimensions; every opinion is either good, bad, or moderate; every piece of information is either fact, fake, or partially fact. I cannot tell if the left-leaning American pundits are being sincere when they act surprised at the newish factions in the American left. Are they truly so ignorant of history and political theory? Serious question. It’s one thing that’s American citizens are so simple-minded, but I find it hard to believe the media is not simply playing dumb. It’s truly agregious.

Whether approached through morality, love for one’s neighbor, mathematics, or otherwise, capital precarity has every reason to be the first place to look, and must therefore be proven not the culprit before it can be discounted.

HN is not the place to wage the culture war.

No.

US security agencies have been clear that Russian intelligence interfered in our election to support Trump.

Putin admitted just two weeks ago that he wanted Trump to win.

Generalized unrest was one goal. Electing Trump, however difficult that might have seemed, was another.

>US security agencies have been clear that Russian intelligence interfered in our election to support Trump.

Why would you blindly trust intelligence agencies that have been very untrustworthy throughout US history?

Because they've provided evidence, and other intelligence agencies and governments across the world have confirmed their claims.

At a certain point you start arguing "why believe anything" and that's literally not a conversation worth having.

They provided 'evidence' for 'weapons of mass destruction' to justify the Iraq war too, and governments around the world confirmed their claims.

We now know that to be a lie.

Again, why would you trust intelligence agencies that haven't been trustworthy throughout US history?

The evidence of weapons of mass destruction was not verifiable by anyone else. Evidence of manipulation on social media is.

Is everything stated by an intelligence agency true? No. Is everything false? No. So you evaluate the claims they make. This isn't complicated.

>The evidence of weapons of mass destruction was not verifiable by anyone else.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/spy-agencies...

From article:

>The Chilcot report identifies a series of major blunders by the British intelligence services that produced “flawed” information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the basis for going to war.

So again, why trust intelligence agencies that have been untrustworthy throughout US history?

When I said "anyone else" I wasn't referring to government inquiries, which very obviously have a much higher level of access than any member of the public, including the press.

So, again, Is everything stated by an intelligence agency true? No. Is everything false? No. So you evaluate the claims they make. This isn't complicated.

>The evidence of weapons of mass destruction was not verifiable by anyone else.

You could say the same about the DNC server, which in 2016, the FBI claimed had not been provided to them for forensics.

The one firm who did have direct access was CrowdStrike, whose report had a couple inaccuracies, and whose CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, isn't impartial either. Firstly, the claim about the APT controlling Ukrainian artillery equipment was disproven. Secondly, they cited an outdated Ukranian Wordpress vulnerability as attribution evidence, which did not hold up under scrutiny. These are the forensics they gave to the FBI.

Naturally, mid-July The Daily Beast, owned by a company chaired by Chelsea Clinton, breaks a story in response to Trump's comments at Helinski, with a piece about the DNC server's virtual image being given to the FBI - something that the FBI did not comment on and also is in contradiction with the FBI's claim from 2016.

'' Providing details Tuesday to the Senate intelligence committee about the bureau’s investigation into Russian hacks targeting the election, Mr. Comey said the FBI made “multiple requests” for access, but ultimately a private company was the one to conduct the forensic review and then shared details about what it found with investigators.

“It’s not the way we would prefer to do the investigation,” Mr. Comey said. '' Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/10/james-comey...

They were directed by the Bush administration to manufacture a case for invading Iraq, and resisted it the whole time.

Also, the agenda of discrediting the US intelligence community is a long-standing goal of Russian intelligence, evidenced by their support of Wikileaks and Snowden.

>Also, the agenda of discrediting the US intelligence community is a long-standing goal of Russian intelligence, evidenced by their support of Wikileaks and Snowden.

Absolute nonsense. The Mccarthyite "Blame Everything on Russia" bots are now on Hacker News.

Skepticism over US Intel Agencies is not a 'Russian Goal'. It's common sense, and all you have to do is research their history of overthrowing governments and lying to us intentionally to lose any trust in them. You don't need a 'Russia' element to research their dark and dirty past.

Because it's been confirmed by multiple, independent private organizations:

>The U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that some of the genuine leaks that Guccifer 2.0 has said were part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC were committed by two Russian intelligence groups. This conclusion is based on analyses conducted by various private sector cybersecurity individuals and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Fireeye's Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, Trend Micro, and the security editor for Ars Technica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0

>Putin admitted just two weeks ago that he wanted Trump to win.

And we all know how trustworthy Putin is.

I'm not sure that's quite right. They wanted mania, and used tactics that would contribute towards a Clinton loss, even if the chances of it were remote. Hence, they heavily pushed Bernie Sanders and the Green Party, and once he became the Republican candidate, Trump. As far as I'm aware there hasn't been any Russian-created content found that supported Clinton, despite the fact that it would have helped contribute to the overall mania.

>As far as I'm aware there hasn't been any Russian-created content found that supported Clinton.

Well, there is the Steele dossier, which FusionGPS was paid twice for - once by a Republican PAC, then second by Clinton's Perkins & Coie - before providing it to the FBI directly. You could say that it's MI5/MI6 (once a <three letter agency> operative, always a <three letter agency> operative, amirite?) intel, but the unverified parts of it are from Russian sources.

This didn’t become public until after Trump was in office though.

It was key factor in the previous administration's ability to get a surveillance warrant on Trump's campaign.

No it was not. It was part of the evidence presented to the FISA judge by the FBI to obtain a warrant to monitor Carter Pages communications AFTER he left the campaign, and the FBI had been interested in Page before the Trump campaign even existed.[1]

The investigation into Trump's campaign and its Russian contacts was NOT started by the dossier. The FBI was not given the dossier until December of 2016. By this time there was no campaign anymore since Trump was president-elect. In fact the investigation had already started months prior when Papadopolous made suspicious comments to a diplomat about the campaign's knowledge of information related to Hillary's emails. [2]

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/why-trump-wont-stop-talking-abou... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Russia_dossier

The FISA warrant application in October 2016 identifies Steele/Fusion GPS as the source of the allegations against Page.

https://www.scribd.com/document/384413862/Carter-Page-Fisa

Ah, it seems McCain gave the dossier he received to the FBI in December but the "FBI confidential human source" had already provided the information to them.

But October 2016 is still after Page left the Trump campaign, and after the Russian investigation had started.

> They wanted mania, and used tactics that would contribute towards a Clinton loss, even if the chances of it were remote.

It's at least plausible that, at least originally, defeating Clinton wasn't a goal, weakening and dividing the US as a whole and the expected next President’s public and Congressional support might have been the whole goal. Actually causing her defeat may be a happy accident from the Russian POV (or a bit of a unhappy one that required escalating efforts to promote disunity, because in the short-term, even if the administration produced was not particularly popular, there was the risk of accidental strength from executive-legislative partisan alignment.)

Could someone ELI5 why FB is in the business of policing any non-illegal speech at all? Political, partisan, foreign-made, domestic-made, poor taste humor, memes, etc. -- why not just keep all of it? It seems like a slippery slope if they turn to active moderation, and they have everything to lose by selectively choosing one or other side of some debate.

Because facebook recognizes how powerful a tool the site is to fuel hate and they don't want to destroy society.

Facebook's motivations are profit. Nothing more and nothing less.

Not necessarily. Zuckerberg is basically accountable to no one as CEO. He can’t be fired even by the board. So Facebook’s motivations are whatever his own personal motivations are.

Facebook's brand is based on connecting real people. Fake trolls pollute their platform and tarnish their brand.

s/connecting/advertising at/

What about genuine trolls?

They call that "engagement".

I imagine that soon any co-ordinated effort at political organisation is going to require you to openly identify as a legally registered entity, e.g. a PAC or association. But what really set Facebook off in this case was the organisation of an event that could lead to physical violence. I think they're going to start clamping down hard on these, not just suspicious ones but likely in general.

There was a tipping point out of nowhere that caused everyone to be deathly afraid of comments in the internet once they realized that evil Foreigners were ALSO making comments on the internet.

Spam isn't (generally) illegal, and yet virtually everyone would argue all platforms should moderate spam because to not do so massively degrades the service quality for everyone.

I mention this because I think content moderation, as a debate, should not be framed as whether or not to do it at all -- but rather as a recognition that deciding to moderate a particular class of content carries a cost-benefit tradeoff.

It may ultimately be the case that we decide that a certain class of content is not worth moderating, because when doing so the costs outstrip the benefits, but let's keep that as a pragmatic discussion rather than a principled one about "all" speech.

Your instinct might be to respond with "of course, spam should be moderated, but besides that..." but I think the knowledge that there could be some series of enumerated exceptions suggests we should stop pretending they're exceptions at all.

> Spam isn't (generally) illegal,

Doesn't CAN-SPAM act of 2003 make spam illegal?

Only in specific circumstances, like email, and even then it's only illegal if you don't have an opt out. At least that's how it's enforced.

> Political, partisan, foreign-made, domestic-made, poor taste humor, memes, etc. -- why not just keep all of it?

Because people don't like to participate in a platform that has gone to crap. It's happened on many sites/forums in the past. If you don't weed, you won't have much of a garden.

My news feed is mostly memes by choice lol, i wouldnt say it's gone to crap

Give people the tools to opt in and out of whatever filters they please. Even turn it on by default if you want. This is one of the few things Twitter has done right - you can simply turn off their "quality filter" if you don't believe that they have your best interests at heart when deciding what shows and what doesn't. (Where Twitter does wrong is a number of other opaque filters that cannot be disabled)

Reddit has a simplistic version of this. By default, you will not see anything that has a score of -1 or below.

Because Americans are scared. They had one election with traces of foreign interference (something the US does a lot of, by the way [1]) and a candidate most people didn't vote for won-- because for some reason that's something that can happen in their democracy.

Media outlets noticed there is a lot of spam and misinformation happening on social media, and saw not only great headlines to garner clicks, but also an opportunity to make people distrust smaller sources of information in favor or big, established brands and companies. They drove subscriptions up by creating an aura of mistrust and impending doom [2][3] after historical decline due to the internet.

Did the inflammatory posts actually affect the election? It's unclear, and if so it was likely less so than the coverage of traditional media outlets [4]. That being said, there are inflammatory parties on the internet, and since Americans now seem to think the future of their country depends on removing them, Facebook needs to abide for the sake of PR. Note: this actually costs Facebook time and money (they are hiring a lot of people for this effect [5]) but they've been bashed so much on the media they need all the PR stunts they can get.

It is a slippery slope, I agree. But it's the one people in the US want to follow, again, because they are scared. Fearful people take slippery slopes and focus on apparent short-term solutions instead of long-term objectives (fixing the American political system so the population actually votes for who is president would be a good place to start). There's that quote from the Star Wars trilogy (the best line in the prequels, IMO): "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause." This comes to mind here. People will willfully act against their interests out of fear.

[1]: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-histor...

[2]: https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/17/media/nytimes-subscription-...

[3]: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/26/media/washington-post-digit...

[4]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-in...

[5]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/31/facebook-senate-testimony-do...

Bang on, and you've picked some reputable sources. America has a rich history in interfering with the elections of other countries. It (possibly) happens to them, and suddenly it's like "how dare they!".

Having recently lived in Russia, people still have not forgotten Yeltsin, and they won't. Luckily at the end of the day however, they mostly separate their frustrations with the American government and the citizens of America.

> America has a rich history in interfering with the elections of other countries. It (possibly) happens to them, and suddenly it's like "how dare they!".

I don't understand this line of argument. Isn't it clear that the people condemning election interference in the US are also against election interference perpetrated by the US? It's like saying that it's silly for Americans to be upset that they are being bombed by a country, since America bombs other countries.

The point was that there was no uproar, no real investigations, into America's interference in other countries.

>>Luckily at the end of the day however, they mostly separate their frustrations with the American government and the citizens of America.

In Russia there's the government and the people, in US, in theory, the government is the people.

It doesn't really matter if Russians are frustrated with the "government" or American people.

Russians chose more Cold War style conflict.

BTW Putin ia really not as omnipotent as some people think.

Because fb is THE psyops battlefield, and multiple state actors on many sides are tangibly involved.

Why would mark zuckerberg find himself talking to captains and colonels at the naval warfare school?

Its like an influencing campaign in civ :)

> Why would mark zuckerberg find himself talking to captains and colonels at the naval warfare school?

Why wouldn't he? I would love to talk to these people given opportunity - not because I'm involved in anything connected to military, but out of simple curiosity and interest in strategy and tactics...

I'm surprised Reddit isn't mentioned more often.

I'd argue it is also one of the primary social battlefields. The silence and inaction from admins and mods has been stunningly absent despite the blatant bot and troll activity there.

Reddit is the 4th/5th largest website in the U.S according to Alexa (keeps swapping between 4th and 5th). Source: https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US

Any agency, whether it's a nation state/government, business or political party, would be laughably bad at their job to ignore a website that size, one with the perfect format to spew their propaganda. It even has little score counters so you can keep track of what works, and what doesn't! How handy!

Reddit has been a target for manipulation for years now. I've been a moderator of some of their largest subreddits and the evidence was so overwhelming you can't help but become angry, then apathetic when told by the admins that they wouldn't do anything. "As long as they don't break the global rules, they're free to be here" I saw a moderator get told that by an admin ~3 years ago (few months before the Ellen Pao debacle). Spewing propaganda is fine on reddit, so long as you don't manipulate the votes.

I take issue with the fact that BOTH are inorganic manipulation of reddit. Both should be dealt with swiftly, without prejudiced and without mercy.

A room full of people screaming incoherently is a room that most sane people quickly leave.

It feels like we as a society have to relearn this lesson roughly every decade.

Those who do not remember IRC are doomed to repeat it

/me slaps sehugg in the face with a large trout.

Instead of banning accounts, I would rather that they put more tools into the hands of the users. Let their users flag accounts in different ways, and give them tools to use that will let them filter out accounts from their feed based on those flags.

Aren't there already filters to block the user from seeing any more posts from a certain source, see less posts from that friend, unfollow friend completely, etc? I guess they could refine it into categories like politics, but that'd hit a lot of gray areas. Their strategy recently has been to de-emphasize links altogether, but that does nothing about the crappy shared posts from spam pages.

This idea is quite popular among this crowd and is based on the erroneous assumption that 1) people are sufficiently educated on the subject to make anything more than a casual pass at filtering, 2) care enough to spend the mental energy needed to use these filtering tools rather than just checking out of the platform, and 3) such tools will not soon become the problem.

There is a long and unpleasant history to show that this idea is never going to work. If Facebook wants to survive as a platform they will need to undertake the unpleasant task of setting a baseline, enforcing it, and telling people who disagree to go find another platform. To be honest, I don't think Facebook as a company or its employees as individuals have the courage to save it -- it is too easy to keep cashing the checks while Rome burns...

There is a extremely successful version of this model, actually.

It's called Reddit. On Reddit, you give 1 person dictatorial power over a given community, and allow anyone to make their OWN community if they don't like the rules.

There are a multitude of examples of people not liking the rules, and forking off to form their own community.

It is the best way IMO, to give people freedom of choice to live with the rules that they prefer.

Except I consider Reddit to be yet another example of a failed online community. You can always create smaller sub-communities with dedicated dictators (Facebook calls them 'groups') but Reddit as a whole fails at this task as the history of the front page has clearly shown. I still remember back when there was just one Reddit and not sub-Reddits, and the events that led to the change. Fracturing into sub-communities is an answer only if you decide to avoid the question of community in the first place, or in the case of Reddit to re-define it into something much smaller.

The fact that these smaller communities with a narrow focus work while the larger ones fail is proof positive that tools are not the solution.

You have an odd definition of "fail" when these large communities have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users every day.

Having one super community is not going to be desirable.

And Im not talking about the internet. Im talking about groups of people in general.

Different people have different interests and it is perfectly fine for them to segregate themselves by choice into like-minded groups.

I would perhaps argue that this is the entire POINT of a community. To pick and choose who you want to interact with.

That would be even more vulnerable to abuse than the current state of affairs. State-sponsored attackers have access to essentially unlimited numbers of fake Facebook accounts -- why would you give them the ability to silence other accounts by flagging their posts?

Ask a Rohingya: filtering your own feed doesn't help when the unfiltered mob arrives to burn your house down.

> Could someone ELI5 why FB is in the business of policing any non-illegal speech at all?

If Facebook's brand is associated with garbage, and it has already gone quite far in that direction, Facebook won't exist for very long. The only reason to use Facebook is that others use Facebook. It's a matter of survival for them.

Facebook should definitely remove stuff from foreign actors trying to impact some political outcome (like Russia messing with Brexit or American elections) and any promotion by groups to incite violence (like gangs, ISIS propaganda, hate groups, etc.).

But political and partisan stuff is a slippery slope. For example, I wouldn't touch Alex Jones stuff. Maybe derank his content and posts promoting his content, but banning him all together is a step too far. Like it or not, were in a weird place in American politics where conspiracy theorists not only have influence in political parties, but also get elected President. Facebook banning figures, and to be more specific, conservative figures when conservatives already believe Facebook is biased against them is just a bad idea.

If Congress wants Facebook and Twitter to silence speech, they need to pass a law. That law needs to be clear about what is inbounds and what is out. If not, Facebook is opening itself up to legal challenges from the Right and is only going to erode trust from half the population.

We are in a weird place in American politics and Facebook should tread lightly. Also, Congress should do it's damn job and not rely on companies to use discretion. If Facebook bans something that the left deems is biased against them then Facebook, once again, will be in big trouble with half the country.

Delete.

Alex.

Jones.

From.

Everything.

He crossed the line from "free speech" into "actively instigating violence" a long time ago.

One has to give Alex Jones one thing...

Mr Jones is the one subject that every single field can study.

From business to political science to marketting to psychology and perhaps psychiatry and journalism.

He is a fountain, sometines a geyser, of never ending supply of data to further advance the sciences.

Because they've always been in the business of policing non-illegal speech. They want an advertiser-friendly image, because its advertisers who pay the bills.

It's not a slippery slope at all. It's Facebook. The slope is made of rough grit sandpaper.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al. should go on outright banfests. There is no free speech argument to be made. None. Zero. These aren't government enterprises and getting banned from these sites for any reason really shouldn't matter. Facebook already enforces some weird moral code where a nipple gets you instantly banned, but when it comes to politics somehow it's a "free speech" argument and they don't want to take sides. It's 100% bullshit.

These companies need to grow up. If people don't like that they have been banned then they can start an alternative site or, you know, use the decentralized Internet the way it was designed. If we were talking about ICANN policing domains that would be a legitimate "slippery slope", but we aren't.

The only thing they really stand to lose by banning blatant conspiracy theory whack jobs and divisive hate speech is some ad revenue associated with that stuff, most of which is predatory anyway. Nipples? Not acceptable, banned. Fair use of media owned by a large company? Copyright strike, banned. Divisive conspiracy theories that promote hate? Free Speech! Selling literally snake oil? Free speech!

Americans LOVE to pretend like they are morally superior, but the moral code and values built into todays companies are completely bonkers. Free speech is constantly invoked when it doesn't even apply, and it's applied so inconsistently it doesn't even make sense.

Mark Zuckerberg should travel to Nidavellir and have the Dwarf King Eitri forge him a ban hammer the likes of which the Facebook has never seen.

So if they go that way, and you get banned, would you be ok with that?

The implication in that is that the OP would be engaging in behaviour that warrants a ban, so at a guess their answer would be "my opinion wouldn't matter", which can probably be distilled down to "yes".

Yes.

༼ つ ◕ ◕ ༽つ GIVE BAN ༼ つ ◕ ◕ ༽つ

These are free websites on the internet that cater to the lowest common denominator of media we have today. Being banned is not a big deal.

>The only thing they really stand to lose by banning blatant conspiracy theory whack jobs and divisive hate speech is some ad revenue associated with that stuff

Facebook is at or near monopoly status and as such the largest risk to their business is regulation. That's why this is such a sensitive issue for them.

No they aren't. Monopoly status for what? It's just a shitty website. Take a step back and think about what Facebook is. It's no different than the forums of old. It's the same recycled technology with a new interface.

For a while you might have said that they were approaching some kind of weird monopoly status because you had to use FB to login to third party sites/services, but that didn't last long.

There are developing countries where FB is so much a monopoly that huge percentages of people don't even know that anything else exists on the Internet. To them, FB is the Internet.

But anyway, that's an argument for encouraging competition and computer literacy, not for or against free speech.

It's actually reversed. People in developing countries are actually more savvy in many ways, as they entered into the Internet during an era where there was no Facebook or Facebook wasn't the dominate player. It's really only in the US where people are so illiterate that FB is a primary destination. But that doesn't make it a monopoly.

I'm sure different countries are different. Myanmar is the one I'm familiar with and FB is definitely a monopoly there.

This site gives FB 88.11% currently. Interesting that its trending down slightly:

http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/myanmar

Without anything [obvious] to indicate what is wrapped up in "Other," that would seem to be a ranking of US-based, primarily-English language sites.

What makes you think the social media landscape of almost any country in the world isn't dominated by US-based services? They only need to provide a localized version to get into a market, which they then end up dominating through international network effects.

The only country I'm aware of where domestic services are dominant is China, and the statcounter data does reflect that. They are conspicuously missing WeChat and QQ, though (which are messaging applications and probably hard to track for a third party), so maybe there's some local service in Myanmar that similarly falls through the cracks.

OK, so, a monopoly on social media. But so what? You don't HAVE to use social media. It's not like having a monopoly on energy, banking or telecommunications, for example, where you can really put people over a barrel.

You don't HAVE to use energy, banking or telecommunications either. It's not like having a monopoly on food or water. The line you drew here is completely arbitary.

Fake news.

Not from what I've read. There are literally places in the developing world where FB fake news has caused the death of people. This example was from Asia. I don't remember the country, but it was news a few months ago.

You're probably thinking of Myanmar https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43385677

WhatsApp lynchings in India?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44897714

You didn't answer the parent's question: monopoly on what?

If they are an actual monopoly, their biggest risk is not being involved in writing those regulations. Eventually the public will force legislators to act and they're not know for taking measured responses once the public outrage reaches a certain threshold. That's why telecom companies like Comcast are so successful at forming local/regional monopolies - they have relationships with people from the city planners up to mayors and governors so whenever new regulations are written, they're very involved.

> Facebook is at or near monopoly status

Monopoly status for what?

Ads? No.

Online ads? No.

Communication amongst friends? No.

Reading news? No.

They have a monopoly on what?

Misused image macros and pyramid schemes.

> pyramid schemes.

What? Did Herbalife and Amway went out of business and nobody told me so I could celebrate?

Pyramid scheme incubator

I think they have a monopoly on social media.

Except they don’t? Twitter is pretty big too. Facebook is just the biggest player.

And that's before you even get into the issue of defining the market (a necessary step for any analysis of monopoly power): what is social media?

Twitter is an order of magnitude smaller than FB

Just because there isn't a free speech argument doesn't mean a communication company would benefit by going on a politically driven "banfest".
>Americans LOVE to pretend like they are morally superior, but the moral code and values built into todays companies are completely bonkers. Free speech is constantly invoked when it doesn't even apply, and it's applied so inconsistently it doesn't even make sense.
^^this doesn't make sense.

It does to me.
The US constitutional right to Free Speech only applies to government actions, not to private individuals or companies. To use someone else's analogy: if you come into my house and talk shit, I have every right to ask you to leave, and you don't have constitutional protection for that. Yet, "Free Speech" is constantly invoked when people are banned from privately-owned sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It doesn't even apply to these sites.
Free Speech is also applied inconsistently. Pornography is protected Free Speech under the US Constitution. Yet Facebook's Nipple Ban is usually not even mentioned when people talk about Free Speech on Facebook. Their right to remove pornographic content from their site is not questioned, but their right to remove someone's hate-filled rant is. This is clearly inconsistent.

If you advertise your house as a wau for people to meet and communicate with their friends, then kick out all your conservative guests, then yes, you've done something morally wrong. Free speech laws don't stop this, it's your property , but they also don't make it right.

Free speech in America isn't just valued as a legal right before the government, but as a general principle. Most people think that free speech in most situations (not just before the government, and with a few restrictions) benefit everyone.

All good communities practice some level of moderation, or else they just get worse and worse.

Moderation is usually applied as having people direct their free speech back at you, not by taking away your free speech.
It is far superior to have bad ideas met with good ideas, than to have bad ideas circulate unopposed within unpopular groups.

Not really.
HN will ban you if you are unreasonable.
The best subreddits (askhistorians, etc.) will instantly delete low quality posts.
Reddit as a whole banning bad subreddits (fatpeoplehate, coontown) made reddit a better place for everyone, and the trash moved to voat which is barely active now.
Most big sites will now ban you for for threatening or very hateful speech.
Etc.

Free speech is not the issue. No one is taking away free speech by banning you on Twitter.
Your free speech is taken away when something you say lands you in prison. Getting banned from a shitty private website doesn't violate your free speech rights in any way, full stop.

Freedom of association is also an important general principle. For instance, I don't think many place any value whatsoever on the freedom of other people to speak in their own home. I certainly wouldn't let someone stay in my house while saying the kinds of things I regularly see on Facebook, and that's my right. I think this is quite an important property of our system, and I think most agree.
As a private commercial enterprise, Facebook itself is, for the people who own it, much like my home; they are free to set whatever policy they like regarding what goes on there, as long as they aren't discriminating against certain specifically protected classes of people. It's shortly tricky, it's not unreasonable to argue that a platform the size of Facebook should be treated more like a public space than a private one. But I personally think the bar for overriding freedom of association should be extremely high, and I don't think Facebook is over it. Those who have been disallowed to associate with Facebook remain free to associate with other very similar platforms.

> Those who have been disallowed to associate with Facebook remain free to associate with other very similar platforms.
Facebook has been abusing it's massive size to block access to competitors using their Facebook Zero program : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
From the page :
> In 2015, researchers evaluating how Facebook Zero shapes information and communication technology use in the developing world found that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. 65% of Nigerians, 61% of Indonesians, and 58% of Indians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet".

Yeah I think that's awful that they do that. I was specifically talking about in the US, where it is easy to use a competitor. (The comment I replied to was also talking specifically about the US: "Free speech in America...")

Facebook has pulled similar tactics in the US also : https://www.wired.com/2010/11/google-facebook-data/

It's a principle most people don't understand. You have the right to say what you want, in public, and not be put in prison. You don't have the right to an audience or to accessing private infrastructure. There's a whole public Internet that you can do whatever you want on. Say whatever you want. Build your own Twitter, spout whatever nonsense you want. No one will censor you!

I think this is a more nuanced topic than you're giving it credit for. While free speech does not classically apply to corporate enterprises like Facebook, as society shifts into the digital world the nature of communication itself shifts as well.
The 1700s and 1800s version of Twitter was standing in the street square, handing out pamphlets, and screaming your message. You were protected to say what you wanted to say via free speech. The 2018 version of that is online through tools like Twitter. By refusing to acknowledge this, we're actually experiencing a dramatic practical reduction in free speech rights without ever technically violating the Constitution.
It's really the ultimate loophole to the ultimate problem. Want to limit free speech? Simply remold society so that communication patterns across the entire nation change and become controlled by private corporations. Done.
A particularly dystopian and extreme imagining of this would involve the CEO of a company like Facebook running for President and controlling speech and news to an unprecedented extent in favor of his/her candidacy.

It's really not. You aren't entitled to an audience. Such bullshit. Put whatever you want up on your own website.
I can't walk into SirusXMs office and demand that they give me a channel so my voice can be heard. I'm not entitled to my own TV station.
I really wish one of these companies would just do something like ban Trump from Twitter so we can let the courts just put an end to this discussion. Getting banned from Twitter has nothing—nothing—to do with free speech. Nothing. Zero.

I appreciate your viewpoint, but this is largely not a response to anything in my post, just a restatement of your previous post.

It is, because your talking about Twitter as if it's somehow analogous to a town square, and that's bullshit. It's not a public space and you have no rights to it or on it.

I am advancing the notion that there may be a threshold beyond which sites like Twitter are in practice precisely digital public townsquares. I am aware of what the laws are right now -- we are discussing here a hypothetical change of precedent or law in the future to better reflect how Americans communicate in 2018 and beyond.

No, you are wrong.
Using your own malformed analogy: The town square is the internet. Twitter is a private shop above subway station with a bunch of garbage that people like to buy. It's super busy. You can scream whatever you want in there, some people outside can hear you. You'll also probably get kicked out if you become obnoxious.

The “privatising public spaces” issue isn’t just limited to the internet. To understand the point better the above poster is making you might be interested in reading about how private malls became our de facto “public” spaces.
Legalese and dodgy analogies aside the above poster is focussing on the practical effects of these sites being so big and ‘default’.

On the other hand posting a dodgy opinion on facebook et al largely removes you from the social and physical consequences of saying things that are way outside of societal norms. When you're able to hide behind a screen the range of things you're willing to say increases as does your potential reach. I would argue it completely changes the context to which the ideas of free speech have been classically prescribed. Its worthy of discussion to question do the underlying ideals of free speech apply in this brave new world, or do we need to look at tweaking our ideals to fit the contexts in which we live. I don't have answers, nor would I ever suggest restricting free speech more, I'm just questioning does it make sense to apply it in this domain.

> On the other hand posting a dodgy opinion on facebook et al largely removes you from the social and physical consequences of saying things that are way outside of societal norms.
I get what you're saying here, but the sheer number of idiots "fired for saying X on facebook" makes me think it's not true. It lowers the barrier for saying something and increases your audience reach... but also lowers the mental barrier for saying the wrong thing or someone hypersensitive hearing it.
Have you ever investigated how speech is regulated in other countries? I'm Australian and we have a number of restrictions that make speech 'unfree' in the American sense. But I think they're appropriate and on the whole balanced well.

Precisely what was going through my head as I read the reply. Good luck with this one, I'm out.

So what happens when a domain registrar seizes your domain because they don't like your speech? (This has already happened.)
What happens when your host and cdn shut you down? (This has already happened.)
What happens when your isp shuts you down? (Only a matter of time.)
Private companies control the Internet. If we decide social media doesn't constitute a commons, the same argument applies to the rest of the Internet.
And so, like the gp said, your practical right are greatly curtailed.
Moreover, you're giving Mark Zuckerberg immense, uncontrolled power over American discourse. Sure, he has to use his power carefully, but as long as he and other tech ceos do so, they've essentially become the gatekeepers of allowable thoughts.

Like I said in the original post, we aren't talking about ICANN or domains. That's a different discussion—one worth having.

Why is it different? How is it different? The behavior and impact isn't, is it? Can you give us something more than "it's not the same" because this response isn't wholly convincing.

How is it similar? I mean, we aren't even talking apples and oranges here. We are talking apples and toilet paper. One is public infrastructure run by a pseudo independent non-profit, the other a page on a private website. It's like the difference being banned from a city vs being banned from shitposting on the bulletin board in a Starbucks. Which, when we talk about free speech on FB and Twitter is really what we are talking about. Is there a constitutional right to shitposting and trolling on someone else's website? Like, really? Smh.

> It's like the difference being banned from a city vs being banned from shitposting on the bulletin board in a Starbucks.
The problem is that Facebook isn't the size of a Starbucks. It isn't even the size of a city. It's the size of a hundred cities. There are more users of Facebook than citizens of the United States.
It's like saying the US Congress can't impose censorship because you can just go to the EU and speak there instead. And if the EU censors the same things then you can just start your own country on a ship in international waters.
And who is going to come to your ship, or even find out about it, if linking to it is prohibited in the places where people actually congregate?
There is no town square equivalent where people have to walk past and can see you on their way to Facebook.

> We are talking apples and toilet paper. One is public infrastructure run by a pseudo independent non-profit, the other a page on a private website.
ICANN may be the top-level administrator, but the actual domain registrars are normal private corporations like GoDaddy and Google. What makes Google's domain registration service public infrastructure but not their video sharing service?
The scale point the sibling commenter made also drives to the heart of the issue - we can agree that I should be free to ban whoever I want on my private forum, but Facebook exists at a completely different scale that makes a qualitative difference in their impact on speech and society. The practical effect of banning someone or some type of speech on my forum is negligible. The practical effect of banning someone or some type of speech on Facebook is enormous. By giving Facebook that power (which they technically have, even if they aren't using it much now), you are handing them incredible power, maybe more power than any organization has ever had in history.

as I understand it, the Domain Name Registrars operate under government licences for all the various country-specific TLD's, and under a US government licence for the rest (for historical reasons). Some governments do operate very strict laws about what can be said on websites that operate under their country TLD, and use their ability to grant/deny a domain as a method of controlling speech on the internet.
That makes it protected under US free speech laws, because the authority to grant/deny a domain ultimately derives from a government mandate.
The ability to post random shit on Facebook does not derive from a government mandate, so therefore isn't covered by free speech laws.

That isn't true. Domain registrars in the US are free to terminate service or even seize your domain for any reason they like. Domain registrars are not bound by US free speech protections.
This is, for example, what happened to the contemptible Daily Stormer. There is no practical difference between a major domain registrar like GoDaddy or Google and a social media website like Facebook in terms of speech, except that at least if Google Domains shuts you down you can hypothetically (unless they seize/freeze the domain, which they have done) move to another registrar and the process is "transparent" for your viewers relative to being banned from Facebook...at least until they all run you off, with the most notorious example being The Daily Stormer again.

Thanks for the clarification. I was mistaken. I'm not sure why free speech laws don't apply, though. The registrars are operating under a government licence, so would seem to be covered by this? Anyone know why they're not?

Hold up.
Somewhere between "handing out pamphlets in Hyde Park" and Twitter there were plenty of other shifts in communication patterns as well. There was a good 100 years or so where if you wanted to be heard you had to get your message into a newspaper, and then another 50 years where you also had the alternatives of TV and radio. All of these were controlled by corporate interests, and it's not like there was ever a right to have your Letter To The Editor published.

And this wasn’t a good thing. Presidents could literally intimidate journalists with exhibitionistic displays, confident that the matter would not be made public. (Lyndon famously flashed his Johnson at journalists demanding to know the rationale for the Vietnam War, saying, “this is why!”)

I don't think Twitter is analogous to yelling in a town square.
It's more like talking at a bar, where others can overhear you. Twitter can of course start throwing people out, but then it turns into a clique and will probably be eventually subsumed by the larger society that it ignores.

Pretty interesting point. One thing that pops out to me is scale, not just of output from these systems but also input into them.
For instance, newspaper, radio, and TV all reached unprecedented numbers of people, but they didn't bring the same scale to the number of folks contributing content. To use your Letter to the Editor example, a newspaper only has so much space, of which only a certain portion is allocated to displaying such letters. This means the vast majority of the country could never have their letter published just due to space limitations alone.
Modern social media like Twitter is notably different because it has scaled the input just as much as the output. Every consumer can now be a producer as well. The idea that anyone can be a producer is very powerful and is what makes it feel more like a public space than, say, a newspaper.

> Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al. should go on outright banfests. There is no free speech argument to be made. None. Zero
Not true. These are CA corporations.
The CA supreme court has already stated that businesses that hold themselves open to the public must allow lawful speech.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/74/

Super narrow scope. Doesn't apply here. Read your own source. Smh.

NB: That's SCOTUS, not SCOCA.

> Facebook already enforces some weird moral code where a nipple gets you instantly banned, but when it comes to politics somehow it's a "free speech" argument and they don't want to take sides. It's 100% bullshit.
That just comes down to the bottom line. People are on Facebook at work, in the grocery checkout line, in the park while their kids play on the jungle gym. People tap Facebook on their phones when they have 30 seconds to kill.
If there were the possibility of nudity popping up on their devices, they wouldn't feel comfortable using it in those settings and would see fewer FB ads.

Since ISP's are not government enterprises should they be able to ban users they don't like?
Legally, maybe you're right, but socially I don't think the argument is as clear cut as you make it sound.

I mean, that actually IS a good question. ISPs are pseudo government enterprises—that is, they become government enterprises when they need to be.
It's really on a whole different level though. ISPs are access to infrastructure. Should ISPs be able to ban people? I'm not sure. It's a valid question though. I tend to think that they shouldn't, but I'm not sure it would be a violation of free speech if they did. Good question though mate.
It's also worth nothing that they DO ban people. If you don't pay an ISP can ban you, outright, permanently.

Question about that, if it's something that takes us too far into the weeds I'll stuff it and save it for later in the interest of keeping us on topic:
When people make the argument of-wrt suppression or censorship of speech "Legally no but socially/in the court of public opinion yes", I often want to fire back "But...are not our laws a distilled and concentrated output of what we value in social publics? If we start allowing exemptions and exceptions to that value system to get an outcome that takes away liberties in social publics, are we unwittingly creating the 'case' to erode those values in (the grander) legal establishment-given enough time?"
(This might be a long winded argument of 'slipper slope', unsure. Someone call me out on this if so)
Maybe it's a question of ethics versus law, or perhaps ethics in the context of buffers between person/individual and state/government?

I think you're right. My suspicion is that if FB/TWTR go totally ban-happy, the social discussion will evolve into a legal one and move towards overt regulation a la utilities.
EDIT: IANAL, but if these platforms start favoring one political group over others, it seems potentially illegal, as it could be considered in-kind political donations.

>divisive hate speech
All of the people who are so vocally anti-free speech always fall back to "hate speech", but there is literally no such thing. There is no robust definition of what "hate speech" is, and whenever it is invoked, it invariably turns into "whatever I disagree with". The truth is that "hate speech" is entirely in the eye of the beholder, it is exactly the same as "offensive speech". The listener/reader is the person who decides whether or not they perceive something to be hateful in exactly the same way as they perceive something to be offensive. You can come up with entirely contrived examples that most people will agree is hateful, but that's not what you're trying to stop. Saying that a country should have borders is considered hateful by many, saying that there are only two genders is considered very hateful by many, promoting national sovereignty or pride is considered hateful by many, and this is what you're talking about when you refer to "hate speech".
The other premise that all free speech detractors completely fail to understand, is that free speech is not just a law, it is a foundational value of the nation. You can't dismiss free speech in any situation where the 1A doesn't provide protection, because people are often talking about values, not laws.

They should police, because they are already in the business of censorship and amplification via the newsfeed product.
This entire problem would be minimized if newsfeed didn't rank posts due to engagement. Its easier for trolls to get engagement on polarizing and harmful posts, because they generate stronger user emotions.
IMO, this criticism of "policing" is a bullshit straw man argument, which neglects how the product actually works, and why we even have this problem in the first place.

As far as I'm concerned, Facebook is not a content aggregator, it's a content publisher.
It directly profits off of the users, and by extension the comments and pictures and whatever else the users post. As such, they are responsible for this product.
I don't see it as censoring or policing so much as quality control.

A website that allows all legal content would be like 4chan. Ask moot how many advertising dollars 4chan attracted.
That's why Facebook is in the "business" of policing content.

FB is not in fact banning any speech here. You can say what you want as long as you are speaking on your own behalf, using your true identity. What is problematic here is that people have created false identities and use them to influence public opinion. That is a clear ToS violation.
Quote: "It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. "

Even if Facebook decided not to police, they cannot be neutral. They have to decide what to show to users. Now, they use algorithms to do this, but that doesn't relieve them of their responsibility.

Facebook without active moderation would rapidly become unusable under all the spam and nudity.

Because any public forum needs some form of moderation, or you end up with 4chan, where it’s just bad actors trying to fuck with everyone else. The best places for discussion in the BBS and web forum days were the ones that were heavily moderated.

Because controlling the narrative is how powerful interests have maintained control of our society for a century. For the first time (due to the internet) there is no centralized control of information. The failure of the ruling class to anoint their chosen candidate Hillary Clinton, despite the backing of every institution and media outlets (to an ignorant, boorish carnival barker, no less) was a wake up call for the ruling elite. They are desperate to regain control of the information flow, which is resulted in coordinated campaign to silence and/or marginalize voices that threaten their information monopoly. The Russiagate nonsense, the "hate speech" nonsense, the nonsense about "weaponizing the First Amendment" all comes from the same crowd of authoritarians whose goal is to stifle free speech and end the free and open exchange of information.

the russians are playing the various factions against each other, yes.
but they couldn't do it successfully if there weren't real, deep, vicious, and simmering rifts to begin with.
furthermore, the institutions responsible for generating public unity are, to put it lightly, in shreds.
people don't trust the media, and there is little in the way of genuine investigative reporting in any event. people don't trust the government's agencies -- nor are many of those agencies beneficial to the public anyways. local governments are facing unprecedented system failure; many can't provide basic necessities like clean water. territories like puerto rico can't count on federalism any more after being let down in their moments of great need.
putin didn't cause any of these problems by spamming propaganda on facebook.

These shortcomings of government are very basic to explain. It’s been well understood for plenty of time that private interests erode otherwise healthy good faith public service. To not acknowledge such systemic causality at this stage of things is a failure on your own part.

The content of this comment is very sensible. The fact that it has been downvoted speaks volumes about the defining culture here on HN.

This is only my experience, but personally I haven’t really found anyone who fits this “politically fractured and agitated” description in the real world.
People in person don’t really seem to care as much and are generally somewhat moderate/centrist and are perfectly capable of talking about these issues without reflexively hating the opposition.
The one thing everyone does seem to agree on is that they hate internet mobs and political extremism on both sides.
I don’t know. Regular people still seem pretty damn reasonable to me. I think the problem might be that we’re taking a very narrowly defined demographic (people who argue rudely with strangers on the internet) and extrapolating from that as if their sentiment represents everyone at large.
Media sources do this as a justification to report on population sentiment and create big narratives arcs out of it. Twitter and Facebook’s scale and visibility makes it very convenient for them.
But I really think the “write nasty comments on the internet” demo is too narrow and specific to extrapolate anything meaningful from it at all (unless perhaps you’re a psychiatric researcher...)

> these bad actors are clearly non-partisan
No, it's not at all clear.
The 2016 disinformation campaign clearly favored one candidate, while simultaneously attempting to radicalize his opposition.
Maybe stirring up anti-fascist counter-protests actually helps the right wing by proving that they're fighting evil scary masked guys wearing black.
Maybe the adversaries understand very well the countermeasures Facebook has taken, knew these accounts would be discovered, and the discovery itself is intentionally part of their campaign.
Or maybe they're just indiscriminately pouring gasoline into the fire.
It's not at all clear that all interests are equally compromised.

Umm, didn't the more radical right-wing Russian posts, while energising the alt-right, equally discredit Trump in the eyes of liberals? You can't have it both ways. The truth is the Russian operation appears to have been designed to shake people's faith in Western democracy as it currently stands (and it's working!) Even causing some people to want to use that interference to delegitimise their otherwise legitimately-elected officials (high five, everyone!)

as far as i can see, the effort to meddle would have been considered a failure had the democratic candidate won in 2016.

“Clear” is a weasel word propagandists use when matters at hand are anything but. Please provide evidence.
As far as I can tell, the main aim was (and still is) to sow division, and the ads targeted the liberal side more simply because their rhetoric was more aggressive. They went as far as organizing BLM and “resist” protests.
Facebook’s disclosure shows that they (whoever “they” are this time — FB was unable to pin this on anybody) are still doing the exact same thing and rallying the radical left, and racial/ethnic minorities.

How dare someone organize protests on FB.
Is the issue just that the organizers are ostensibly from another country/nation? Maybe the solution is for FB to regionize similar to the DVD industry? Posts in one region can only be seen in the same region?

Elections come and go, the interests of the state remain the same regardless of whom is sat on the throne.
However there are differences of opinion on the interests of the state, do you mean citizens or those that are controlling and manipulating the elected representatives? These latter folk are known as the 'deep state' although on HN the correct terminology is the 'military industrial complex'. Under normal circumstances the deep pockets of the 'deep state' back both sides of the house with contributions to both the liberal and conservative sides. No matter who gets in they have people in their pocket to further their interests and project their interests as the national interest.
The rest of the world determines who the outside enemy is supposed to be. A resurgent Russia is the current enemy, although first among many with China, axis of evil states Iran and North Korea also at the top of this very long list. In reality nobody wants to be an enemy, the enemy has to be imagined and incited into being the enemy.
With the last election no matter who won the interests of the deep state had put in the groundwork to be able to blame Russia for meddling in the result. The candidate and political party were immaterial, whatever the outcome there would be proof of Russian interference. Had the world situation been different then there would have been proof in this post truth age that China, Iran, North Korea, you name it had been meddling.
Domestically this works well as much squabbling goes on at a belief rather than a fact-based level as to whether or not the Russians did interfere. It all depends whom you get your news from. It is like a wedge strategy all over again.
The wedge strategy was used to get people talking about whether 'Creationism' should be taught in schools, meanwhile vast cuts to science funding were made and nobody talked about that because they had such strong opinions of freedom as applied to schools and 'Creationism'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

"Deep State" and "Military Industrial Complex" are two different but related things. The former are unelected diplomatic, intelligence, and military government employees who consider themselves the true bearers of the power of the republic and consider it their duty to manipulate elected officials and the general public to carry out their long-term plans for the world order. The latter is the cycle of military lobbying, funding, and spending of US taxpayer money, chasing military supremacy against threats real and imagined. Of course the two are related in that the deep state and military industrial complex are in communication about what kind of weapons to build. But I don't agree that it is two names for the same thing.

I’d say it’s closer to the truth that the 2016 disinformation clearly disfavored one candidate.

I don’t think that is the point.
Foreign intervention with the clear aim of causing political rift doesn’t care about party lines other than the fact that they can be used to manufacture outrage and division.
If Trump was a democratic candidate or if the Dems had a different loon in play while the republicans had someone say like McCain running then the same actors would have been working in the same manner just now in favor of a different party.
These actors will exploit any vulnerability and there is no hidden intention to benefit a single party other than to further their own goals.
During the Cold War the Soviets we’re finding both communist and neo-Nazi groups in west Germany at same time because for them the goal was always to cause as much chaos as possible.
In the US during Vietnam they were funding anti-war groups on campuses again simply because they were seeking to incite as much dissent as possible.
All interests are or at least can be easily compromised it’s just a matter of circumstance and timing.

> Foreign intervention with the clear aim of causing political rift doesn’t care about party lines other than the fact that they can be used to manufacture outrage and division.
Putin said in Helsinki that he favoured Trump and directed his officials to help Trump. This was not a non-partisan issue. They wanted Trump, and causing chaos was one of the features which likely attracted them to Trump.

Ofc they favored a less effective leader that can be used to cause chaos, the US also favors the same leaders in it's opponents.
That does not make it a partisan issue however, Putin doesn't give two fucks if Trump was republican or democrat and attempting to make it look like a clear partisan issue is actually playing into their hands.

>Putin said in Helsinki that he favoured Trump and directed his officials to help Trump.
Wait, what? Can I get a cite for that because I have heard a lot of claims about Helsinki but I have never heard that.

>> these bad actors are clearly non-partisan
>No, it's not at all clear.
> The 2016 disinformation campaign clearly favored one candidate, while simultaneously attempting to radicalize his opposition.
Per a recent article by FiveThirtyEight.com [0] they labeled 719,087 tweets as "Right Troll" and 427,811 tweets as "Left Troll." When describing the two types they say
"Right Trolls behave like “bread-and-butter MAGA Americans, only all they do is talk about politics all day long,” Linvill said. Left Trolls often adopt the personae of Black Lives Matter activists, typically expressing support for Bernie Sanders and derision for Hillary Clinton, along with “clearly trying to divide the Democratic Party and lower voter turnout.”"
So on one hand, yes they clearly favored Trump. On the other hand, favoring Trump was the most divisive and destabilizing thing they could do.
> Or maybe they're just indiscriminately pouring gasoline into the fire.
I think that is a huge part of the strategy. Was there collusion as well? Probably but Putin is happy to watch the West burn.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-were-sharing-3-mill...

==It sure would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that these bad actors are clearly non-partisan, and are simply trying to cause civil unrest in the US by agitating both sides of the political spectrum.==
Both of these can be true at the same time. Companies donate to both political parties all the time, that doesn't mean they don't have a preference. The Koch brothers have given money to Democrats, but they certainly prefer Republicans in power.
Putin said he wanted Trump to win in Helsinki [1]. We also know the RNC was hacked [2]. That those emails weren't released in the same manner as the DNC's seems like evidence the scales were being tipped.
[1] http://time.com/5339793/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-e...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-ha...

This thing has the potential to get put of control. Not a red scare, but like the red scare it has the potential to sweep up unintended victims.
What happens to foreign PACs, can they buy ads? Can the UK, Israel, Saudi, Mexico, China, etc, now be barred from trying to influence US politics in ways which were previously allowed? What about political ads in foreign language channels, will those be monitored for foreign influence?

> It sure would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that these bad actors are clearly non-partisan, and are simply trying to cause civil unrest in the US by agitating both sides of the political spectrum.
You're dead on. It would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that!
There might be a potential wrinkle in that it's not always possible to correctly infer an actor's true intentions from knowing some of their actions. It's also generally impossible to know for certain when you've learned of all of an actor's actions.
It would be really awesome is Facebook were to say that this is clearly just non-partisan shit-stirring! But it also might not be fully true.

What a morally convenient position when certain people are actively leaning into the disinformation for political gain...

> these bad actors are clearly non-partisan
There is no [citation needed] big enough for this claim, since it flies in the face of all available evidence so far.

Once again, we are seeing very skilled PR from Facebook.
Problem: Media have painted Facebook as an enabler of propaganda
Reality: There is so much activity on Facebook it is impossible to manage, even with the best AI tools available. There is likely next to nothing they can actually do to stop coordinated exploitation by highly skilled and intelligent state actors.
Solution: Make a hollow yet visible action to take steps in the right direction and use it as cover to make a public statement of values knowing that this action is fundamentally inconsequential and that the media and public will be temporarily fooled since most people don’t understand the real situation.

I'm with you on the analysis.
> There is likely next to nothing they can actually do to stop coordinated exploitation by highly skilled and intelligent state actors.
If they weren't so spineless, the solution is simple, at least in the time leading up to elections. Shut it down. Turn off ads. Disable non-profile pages. Allowing blatant manipulation of the platform deserves a blunt solution. Maybe let people think for themselves for once? Facebook is a convenience, not a necessity.

That makes zero business sense and will never happen. It isn't Facebook's responsibility to teach people how to identify advertisements or posts trying to sway their opinion.

I don't disagree, and it's not facebook's responsibility to teach people how to identify manipulative content, but that viewpoint is too narrow. People blindly trust facebook because it is positioned as a safe place on the internet. Users let their guard down and don't think about what they are seeing critically enough to not let themselves be manipulated. And that's exactly what facebook wants from an advertising revenue perspective. It is in their gross negligence of responsibility in keeping user data safe and out of the hands of bad actors that their complicity lies. If facebook wants to assume ownership over our data, then they are responsible for it, and by extension what others do with it.

That makes zero business sense and will never happen
Depends on the business model, doesn't it?

And blame it on an unidentified boogeyman / "bad actor" in the same breath as the Russian internet trolls.

They're hiring 10,000 full time moderators this year to help police this stuff. It's a serious attempt, and the cost of this on their projected earnings is why the stock crashed.

That is not why their stock crashed. You’re spreading even more Facebook PR propaganda.

I'm pretty sure that's what analysts are saying. The biggest cause was the drop in earnings and projected earnings due to increasing spend on security. It's not all the moderators but it's all part of the same push.

And on features that have lower potential for monetization, but higher user engagement like stories.

This is certainly part of why their stock crashed, they explicitly mentioned in guidance that this would hurt their profitability in a major way.

It's absolutely why their stock crashed. Fb lowered their guidance for upcoming quarters mostly in expectation of slimmer gross margins. Since the top-line revenue isn't expected to change, the decrease in margins is by definition driven by increased costs. This increase is directly connected to Fb's efforts to (manually) police more content. Zuckerberg even explicitly warns of this occuring in one of last year's earnings calls.

Serious question: When does having 10,000 full time FB employee "moderators" to content expressed via their platform cross into the literal definition of Thought Police?
How far are we from when actual laws-with-consequences are passed and enforced via the continual monitoring and moderation of said FB's army of moderators?
When will be the first time a person is (if not having happened already) killed for their postings to FB?
https://www.ranker.com/list/the-13-craziest-deaths-caused-by...

> Serious question: When does having 10,000 full time FB employee "moderators" to content expressed via their platform cross into the literal definition of Thought Police?
When FB moderators can impose penalties outside the context of Facebook, like jailing people.
Other than that, Facebook's control of content on its own site may be a good or bad decision, but it's nothing like police power of any kind, “Thought Police" or otherwise.
> When will be the first time a person is (if not having happened already) killed for their postings to FB?
It has probably happened already, but not because of Facebook exerting moderation.

I don't think you're thinking out far enough... Zuck has already shown his cards with political aspirations... so - in ~10 years... yeah - I am imagining a much more dystopian take on FB

> When FB moderators can impose penalties outside the context of Facebook, like jailing people.
...or seeding the Internet outrage machine by manufacturing a digital lynch mob to harass the person, dox them, harass their employer and friends and family, and utterly destroy their lives? I mean, this happens on Twitter and Tumblr all the time just by itself; actually controlling the platform would make it so much easier!

Legitimate question downvoted because it is counter to OP's narrative. This is the current state of HN. Sad!

FcBk's PR spin is based on a) the very real political influence it has and b) the current appetite for international cyber security theater.
It takes a sense of the magnitude of the potential threats to understand that banning 8 pages does not make for security, it makes the case for exploiting the signals detected by your antenna.

I have to say that this is essentially insignificant, they have only removed 32 pages where there are likely 100s of thousands of pages that are run by scammers. This is not something that can be solved without requiring every page that could be verified to have this be done.
Maybe a year back, I was contacted by a fraudster claiming to be affiliated with the FBI, they had a facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/FBI-of-Cambridge/161182553906...), which has still not been taken down even after my report saying what exactly this was.
Their response was "Thanks for your report - you did the right thing by letting us know about this. We looked over the Page you reported, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, we understand that the Page or something shared on it may still be offensive to you. We want to help you avoid things you don't want to see on Facebook."

Going after political subversion groups first seems like a great priority. If they are just now starting for real, they’re starting in the right place.

Absolutely, but I think with the case of political subversion, it has a much less clear practical impact on their every day users. I could easily see an older person who isn't as technically inclined seeing that this FBI location has a facebook page and just assuming they are legitimate.

If "impersonating a government agency" doesn't breach their Community Standards, their Community Standards need updating.

So, I know it's easy to slam FB, and I'm no fan of the company, BUT...this is a really hard problem. Whether they are just making an attempt for the sake of looking like they are making an attempt, or actually trying to solve the problem, the fact is, preventing an institution the size of a major nation government from manipulating the discourse on their platform, is difficult bordering on impossible. Like spam, we should try, but like spam, don't expect it to get solved any time soon.

this is a really hard problem
I tried to make this case to an investor who hates Facebook, and their response was: "They have billions of dollars, they can fix it if they want to."
Mind you this person is savvier than most about business and technology, and he didn't quite grok the concept of difficulty solving the authentication and content moderation problem at 2B+ user scale is not solved by throwing more people at it.
Worth invoking this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/

People sometimes forget that the other side can also have billions of dollars.

> Like spam, we should try, but like spam, don't expect it to get solved any time soon.
I don't understand. To me, spam was solved decades ago by Gmail with a simple Bayesian filter. I can still read the spam I receive if I look into the spam folder, so there is no censorship or moderation taking place. I can chose what is spam or not and it reduces noise in my inbox. Why not do the same on just everything else?

It's not about you. It's about messages other people are receiving about you.
For example, Alex Jones insisting that the parents of some murdered children are fakes has resulted in them receiving death threats offline: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/09/sandy-hook-c...

Coordinated attempts to influence elections? Are you sure you didn't mean to write "political campaigns"? Are you also implying that politicians aren't always authentic and honest when they go on campaign? Heavens to Betsy.

Those same people have zero issue with gerrymandering.

Is that making 10 million fake accounts that have the first name 'gerry'? I was born yesterday so a lot of these figures of speech are confusing to me.

The first hit on google is rather informative as to the terms meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

Google is your friend.
In short: gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing voting district boundaries to ensure your victory in as many districts as possible.

You might consider looking up the word "sarcasm", while you're at it.

Thanks, I've checked it! If I understand it correctly, your comment is a poor attempt at it.

If they publish every time they remove "32 Pages and accounts":
1) that will be a lot of blog posts
2) it will take a rather long time to chew through the vast quantities of fake accounts and bad actors

> In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these Pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017. The latest was created in May 2018.

So 0.1% of Americans were affected by these updates? Seems like fb needs to take broader strokes.

"inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it. propaganda, information warfare, disinformation, incitement, false flags, fake news ;)

Yeah, there exists perfectly good vocabulary words for naming this stuff.
Yet for some reason facebook has chosen to neutralize their language. I wonder why?
BTW Infowars is still up on facebook, right?

Maybe because inauthentic behaviour accurately describes all those different words in a single two work statement?

I'm pretty sure propaganda can be very authentic, as well as incitement. It really only depends on the audience...

"Inauthentic behavior" is not intrinsically offensive by itself and could mean almost anything or nothing at all.
"Disinformation campaigns to induce people to vote against their own interests", that's more precise, much better. What? Are we trying to conserve words here?

> "inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it.
It's how they can square the circle of "Russians are trying to sow division" with content that is identical to that which is created by domestic actors. E.g., pro-BLM Facebook post posted by an American = good, same pro-BLM Facebook post posted by a Russian? Bad! Sowing division! Inauthentic behavior!

"Once a KGB, always a KGB!"
So does that also apply to all the "former" intel people in the American MSM? They work for three letter agencies that are legally authoized to lie to the American public...

Ray Bans on Sale! Images haunt my facebook.

Wait they published an entire blog post and held a press call to announce they "removed 32 Pages and accounts"? Seriously? 32? It's a start (and I'm glad to see they're laying down some precedent) but who needs fancy algorithms and machine learning to find 32 bad accounts? You could find that many by hand by spending a few hours on Facebook.

My entire life, I've seen ad campaigns (TV, radio, web, etc) from American politicians; ads which are projected to a wide audience, and which are neither shy nor subtle about bashing their opponents.
I'm curious, how would others describe the line between acceptable influence (American political ads) and unacceptable influence (Russian political ads).
To be clear, I'm not saying there is no line, I'm just curious to read peoples' description of the difference.

This statement terrifies me:
> It’s an arms race and we need to constantly improve too. It’s why we’re investing heavily in more people and better technology to prevent bad actors misusing Facebook
To me this sounds like "We need to make sure who is real, so we need more information for our AI algorithm; lets gather more data."

> "coordinated inauthentic behavior"
Shouldn't they come out and say propaganda campaigns.
I still have questions about what they deem as acceptable and where they place hte line.

No because then they’ll have to answer for the “legitimate” propaganda that we are fine with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
Until 2013 it was illegal to broadcast VOA to Americans: https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-14160-us-repeals-ban...

Speaking of VOA & Russian meddling, I wonder why CrowdStrike would not recant their Russian hacking claims after Ukraine proved to VOA that they were fabricated: https://www.voanews.com/a/crowdstrike-comey-russia-hack-dnc-...

They're probably avoiding that word because propaganda is most closely associated with governments and they are not sure that this is driven by a government.

People can reasonably disagree on what constitutes propaganda, which is why I like the language that they are using here.
Coordinated inauthentic behavior -- multiple account purporting to be unrelated acting in tandem. Regardless of where you land on the magnitude of election interference vs. information warfare, and state actors vs. trolls vs. hacker collectives, this behavior, using sock puppets to create the impression that information is coming from multiple independent sources, is worth exposing.

> People can reasonably disagree on what constitutes propaganda, which is why I like the language that they are using here.
However in this case they're using alternative language to manipulate the reader that their judgement is correct.

I'm way more willing to accept this policy than I would a policy, say, of 32 accounts that have been "issuing propaganda" or "spreading lies" or "failing fact checks" or "interfering with an election" or "saying offensive things".
Each of those other heuristics sound horrifyingly Orwellian.
The judgments involved in enforcing this policy seem way easier to apply without excluding individuals with genuine opinions that they wish to voice to their friends or followers on the platform.

'Propaganda campaigns' is a bright-red handle that the same propagandists you're trying to excise from your platform can use to jerk you around in the court of public opinion. I have no trouble understanding why they would not want to use it.

> Shouldn't they come out and say propaganda campaigns.
Because the denotation of propaganda is broad and includes virtually all effort at persuasion, plus it has vague but strong negative connotation, so it's often used for “persuasion effort that I don't like”.
“Coordinated inauthentic behavior” has a much clearer and more specific meaning and less emotive loading, so the information-to-emotional-manipulation ratio is better.

Amusing that the organizing principles of our society are so waekend as to be broken by bad-intentioned memes

This is awesome. I'm glad Facebook is getting more involved in moderating astroturfed stuff.

The problem here is personalized political advertising. This is dangerous. Political advertising should be general so every citizen has the same messaging.
So rather than look for bad actors a cleaner solution is to disable personalized political ads, but that will affect revenue.
There is no way you can ban or even demonize activism and dissent without back-pedalling on nearly every democratic ideal. It's not a matter of slippery slopes, its bad actors manufacturing crisis to demonize dissent.

TBH, I don't think Facebook can prevent "coordinated inauthentic behavior," as they're calling it.
The only solution is for users to be more aware of who they're online "friends" are, and to be aware that they can't trust everything they read online.
In a way it's funny this problem snuck up on them like this. They make money by social engineering people to buy stuff. It should be a no-brainer that the exact same techniques can be used for other purposes.

I wonder if Facebook will move towards even more 'real world ID' - not only to prevent these types of attacks from fake people - but because it might provide additional revenue lift. Or maybe wouldn't add much revenue value, their real human targeting is pretty great already.

Any evidence of bad actors on HN comment threads? Why would attacks be limited to FB?

Return on investment I'd guess. HN is hardly a pipeline into the hearts and minds of the average US citizen. Facebook is practically the collective unconscious of our country, as disgusting as that sounds.

What is the recall of these efforts, that is, what % of the "true bad actors" are they actually catching? My gut is that it's a whack-a-mole problem and it's not getting better.

the federal government should send real intelligence officials to police this effort at this point. isn't this literally what the national security letters were for?
and don't get started on that slippery slope stuff, we are deeeeep in the mariana's trench with regard to NSL and what the intelligence community does to private companies.

The Federal Government should not be in the business of censorship.

if thats the line for you, then they don't need to do that, they need to be there in real time helping Facebook investigate where these users are coming from, instead of getting reports later after the Facebook security team says they're behind 7 proxies.

All flagged comments here should be unflagged.

If you're skimming this, as I was, and seem confused -- IRA in this article is not the Irish Replubican Army...
> Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)

"But security is not something that’s ever done." I initially read this as "Security is something that nobody ever does."
Not to be pedantic, but "finished" would have been less ambiguous.

It's a pretty common acronym - there's a fund people invest in also called an IRA, and Boston excepted, they're investing in funds for their retirement, not the Irish Republican Army.

Facebook themselves are a bad actor.

This is something that's been in the noggin for a while, kind of like a bottle of some spice that sits in the back of your kitchen cabinet; you know it's there, but never really use it or even touch it-but you always remind yourself to seek out recipes where it may have some flavor value but otherwise you never use it.
"Facebook themselves are a bad actor" is the comment that jiggled the mind-cabinet enough for that spice bottle to fall off the rack and into full view.
That's the head space I'm in when I ask this question. So with that Caveat Lector out of the way:
Am I out of line in thinking Facebook kind of opened the doors for this by aggressively "graphing" social connections and going full speed at turning relationships into algorithms and then giving everyone and their mama the tools to sculpt all of this data however they please? And that they're probably getting off way too easy?
Last night I said to a friend with much sincerity: I miss the days of MySpace and LiveJournal where I could collect all of my friends into one online space, my own little corner of the internet and interact with them on my terms. No nudges to participate in a post, no prompts to go look at what someone else is doing, no suggestions I go buy what my friend just bought and shared simply because "it's my friend". It existed, we were there, and we didn't need MySpace's help to interact with each other. Of course, that was a different Internet where everyone wasn't trying to analyze and monetize your every click and keystroke.
Just kind of thinking out loud. But curious what others think.

I've had this conversation with friends, too, about missing LiveJournal. The interactions were much more organic and fully fleshed-out. It was about sharing our internal life in a more intentional way that wasn't corporatized (unless you wanted to pay a few bucks to be able to have custom emojis), wasn't related to ad content or data or profiling.
In these conversations it seems fairly unanimous that people miss it, but changing patterns is easier said than done, plus LJ itself has that whole "now hosted in Russia" thing that concerns people.

They absolutely did. They normalized negligent, opaque and irresponsible recording/manipulation of data under the hand-wavy intent of "oh, we're just making it easier for you to interact with your friends and family." Little regard for any peripheral consequences. There have yet been any real consequences for that. At the scale this whole situation has grown to, they absolutely are getting too easy. On the surface this action by FB is pointed at the right direction, it is not enough.

The book "Trust me, I'm Lying" was eye opening to me - it described intrinsic human behaviors that has made FB into such a devastating agent (genocides in Burma, attacks on democracy, etc.) Helped me kill my FB account quickly.

Thanks for the recommendation, I will look it up.

"On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.
Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events."
Facebook is a convenient collateral damage victim the Traditional Media is willing to make to further their narrative. It continues to fuel the cognitive dissonance for 50% of the country.

We detached this generic political tangent from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654791.

Cornfielding good discussion looks terrible on you HN. Please stop.

Lets get over this bad app called facebook, its actually not that relevant

Relevant enough for you to type 10 words....

hmmm...I guess so, 13 words?

If they control content, they are publishers, not platforms, and that changes how they are taxed and how they are regulated.
If they want to be treated like platforms with the power of publishers, that's not going to fly.

I wonder what FB would do if they had bought more than $11000 measly dollars in ads?
All of these examples are identical in form to content that is otherwise plastered all over Facebook and Instagram. Especially Instagram; that's basically all shitposting and memes still over there, like Facebook was in its youth.

They would have gladly accepted the money and turned the other way. 11k is rookie numbers. I'm sure they'll spend more tomorrow on the new page they spin up.

Why is Zuck's account still active then?

So the Russian bots are posting left-wing content? How does that work?
EDIT: Looking for clarification, here. Not sure why I'm being downvoted.

If they’re simply trying to create unrest of any kind, you play each side off of each other.
They don’t need to support one side to weaken us. Making our political systems grind to a halt through a lack of agreement is something we’re already good at. Perhaps they’re just trying to push our buttons to get us into that gridlock again.

The Russians also ran the #NotMyPresident campaign after Trump was elected. The Russians trolls do not care who is in office they just want to cause mayham.

I'm nitpicking here, but I dislike that commenters and media alike so liberally use "The Russians" for this. It's the Russian government and their benefactors. There are 150 million Russians and, like anywhere, they're by and large good people with good intentions. Let's not blame an entire people for their government's decisions.
Eg if I would blame "the Americans" for the CIA torture program, I'f rightfully get backlash here.

I apologise. I completely agree with you.

BTW I didn't mean to single you out. You weren't doing anything out of the ordinary :-)

Also, "The Russians" narrative contributes to the idea that there is singular state actor doing this. I'd wager that they're not even the most sophisticated one.

It's always safest to assume that every state actor is doing whatever it can (get away with) to advance their interests.

> There are 150 million Russians and, like anywhere, they're by and large good people with good intentions
I'm not sure I'd let them off the hook so easily. They elected Putin and, if independent polling is to be believed, seem to still support him. This doesn't make them complicit in his ever crime. But it does remove their total independence.

> They elected Putin and, if independent polling is to be believed, seem to still support him.
Independent polling showing strong support for the existing leadership in a country that has a long history with (perhaps) brief interruptions of being a heavily monitored authoritarian state with both overt and covert reprisals, not infrequently including fatal ones, against dissidents cannot be trusted for reasons which ought to be obvious.
Which is not to say Putin doesn't have strong support, just that polling can't be relied on to assess that.

> Which is not to say Putin doesn't have strong support, just that polling can't be relied on to assess that
Reputable firms try to correct for the biases you mention [1]. We have more evidence for the claim that Putin is domestically supported than otherwise. Which makes sense, given he's stabilized and relatively-competently managed their economy [2]. (Cf: Oil prices are up.)
[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/20/president-putin-russian-...
[2] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/what-is-the-...

> Reputable firms try to correct for the biases you mention
The problem with that is you hve to measure how those biases change; even if you somehow of a good baseline adjustments, when you get new better numbers is it the regime being more popular or people being more afraid that criticism of the regime will be detected and punished?
Also, the survey you link doesn't actually describe any method of correcting for biases; implicitly, I suppose you could say that the art of options (some vs. a lot of confidence) and how they are treated (only “a lot” really treated as a positive signal) is a weak effort to mitigate the of bias at issue.

> when you get new better numbers is it the regime being more popular or people being more afraid that criticism of the regime will be detected and punished?
I agree that the data are imprecise. It is impossible to confidently answer "is Putin more popular today than a year ago?" But they are good enough to answer "does at least half the population support him?" Contrast that to oppressive regimes in Egypt or Venezuela, where the regimes do not appear to have popular support.

> They [..] seem to still support him.
With Putin controlling the media and, well, much of public life, what else did you expect? It's not like you can just go do an anti-Putin demonstration without fear for your future.
Don't forget that in all of Russia's history, they've never been a functioning democracy, never had proper free speech for a decent stretch of time. Putin is just the next one in a long line of, well, czars. If, for millennia, an entire country's ethos includes "well, the boss is the boss, innit? what are we gonna do about it?" then reelection is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That does not make the Russians bad people. It just makes them stoic pessimists :-)

At the end: nobody held a gun to your head. Both in US and Russia.
Americans elected Trump.
Russians "elected" Putin.
IMHO each people is responsible for their leader.
WRT polling, Putin had a 80%+ approval since at least Crimea (2014). Full stop.

Russian elections are a massive fraud fest at this point, so their results are meaningless for any purposes.
Now, it's true that the majority still supports the government. But it's nowhere near as overwhelming as the elections would let you believe (think 50% rather than 80%). And, of course, this still means that there are literally millions of people who 1) are Russian, and 2) don't support it.
I've already started seeing some rhetoric on the left that is explicitly invoking McCarthy in a positive way. That's not a good sign. Please dial it down.

If the sources I read were itself not fake, the idea is that they simply try to increase the gap between left and right. Decrease mutual understanding, prevent dialog between sides, increase mistrust.
I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though. But hey, I have no idea what their end game is. I'm sure someone here has ideas.

> I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though.
Decreases the will of the US to effectively achieve its aims, which run counter in many ways to the Putin regime. If congress is spending its days shouting at each other, then they can't do awkward things like, e.g., provide substantial support in rhetoric and materials to the Ukraine to address Russia's invasion.

Foundations of Geopolitics by Durgin lays out the groundwork for Russia's current western strategy. Putin's been implementing it word for word.

Interesting to note that Amazon seems to have removed this book https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-...

There's quite a few old and freshly minted Kremlinologists who have been studying Russia their whole life that you can read. (As opposed to random strangers on this forum!)
E.g.: Mark Galleotti

It's looks like HN is infected too, so they downvoted you. They are not only posting content, they also trying to ban or dismiss their opponents too (or just kill most annoying ones, as in my case).

Yeah, Russia was also pumping up the Bernie Bros and the Jill Stein campaign.
Not that there weren't plenty of people who legitimately wanted to see Bernie win but the goal of the Russians was to do whatever made Hillary lose - hurting her campaign directly with hacking, as well as pumping up both her Republican and Democratic competitors. In the US system, spoiler candidates hurt their competitor more than their opponent, so pumping up Bernie is another way to hurt Clinton.
The whole "they just want to cause chaos" trope is true in a sense, but they were very obviously going about it by sandbagging Clinton and pumping up her competition wherever they could. Clinton was very obviously the major-party candidate that would have produced the strongest, most stable US out of that election, and that's really what Russia was trying to avoid, that's the whole "chaos" trope. It's not truly random in the sense of uncontrollable monkeys, it's whatever they think will cause the most damage, and keeping Clinton out of the White House was a specific and key objective. It was quite obvious that Trump was a moron (and very possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer's) and that he'd be the candidate that caused the most chaos.
(Sorry Bernie Bros, but if Bernie had won the primary, he would have been an easy target for Trump and the Russians as well, and even if he won the general the country would have been highly polarized, even if his actions would have been a lot better than Trump's. People in that timeline wouldn't have gotten to see the mess Trump caused in this one. His continued campaign sandbagged Clinton into the general and was a major contributor to Trump winning. The primary was obviously over and Bernie dragging it out was doing nothing but weakening Clinton. And I say this as someone whose personal politics most closely align with Bernie's, out of the three, and who voted for him in the primary.)

> Bernie Bros
I think this (blatantly sexist) term is just as divisive as anything the Russians did.

SMH. No.
A girl can be a "bro" or a "dude" just as much as a guy.
A group of girls can be "guys".
English language is peculiar!
I am just amazed nobody Godwin'd this thing so far.

Context matters and in context the term is decidedly male. The article Wikipedia credits with coining the term has this to say:
> The Berniebro is not every Bernie Sanders supporter. Sanders’s support skews young, but not particularly male. The Berniebro is male, though. Very male.
> The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him: white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, “upper middle-class”); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/here-co...

Just for perspective:
When I hear "Berniebro".. .
I think of gym bros, frat bros, New Jersey residents, surfer "brahs", and not sexism.

Do you think of women when you think of those terms or only men? If those terms were used in a dismissive, derogatory way, would you not agree that the term is sexist?

I think of the "bro"/"brah" stereotype.
Yes, almost all of the bros who fit the stereotype are male, but I've seen a few skateboard and surfer ladies who are just as "bro" as the men.
If there was a term for girl Bernie supporters, would that make this better?
Berniechick?
One can't win this. Man is gonna be argue about genders until the Second Cumming.

I like how nobody replies to this thread with anything except "Bernie Bros is sexist! Just as bad as a foreign power throwing an election!".
A+ discussion, guys. Say, isn't that a copy of Pravda over there? What, did you read a script?

Pointlessness of banning a mere 32 pages aside, their stock is up 1% today so they'll box it up as a win internally.

This is interesting, but it's not clear from the article what the groups in question were actually doing - they don't seem to be directly connected to the republican party or Russia.

Obviously Facebook wasn't making enough revenue from these accounts / page(s) to turn a blind eye.
Give Facebook $100k and they'll allow you to upend a democracy.

The thing is, the ad spend of the bad actors during the election was basically inconsequential. But the organic reach was huge since inflammatory fake stuff spreads easily, especially if you pay 100s of people controlling individual accounts to boost it.

$100k versus 5 billion dollars spent by the presidential campaigns. Why are these people working for the IRA? Wouldn't they make billions in marketing anything other than political division?
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/03/07/the-2016...

Like I just said, it's specifically not about the ads. It's about the farm of fake content creators. They don't work for anyone else because it's state supported and also not particularly skilled, just no real companies would do that kind of astroturfing.

Give a politician $100K and they'll allow you to upend a democracy

The combined amount spent in the 2016 presidental campaign was over 5 billion dollars. Maybe Russian money is worth more?
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/03/07/the-2016...

A quick thought: There is one actor on Facebook that Facebook can never -- indeed, will never -- consider removing... regardless of how bad or horrendous the community considers the behavior of that actor. That actor is of course Facebook itself.

If I removed bad actors on Facebook I would lose half of the friends I met doing improv comedy.

Are you here until Friday?

No, but I have a show every Tuesday. For the love of God, please come out. Admission is $2.

One annoying thing about the people who run and use this site: they don't like comedy and especially, good puns.
Try SlashDot.

My services are very highly valued on reddit and I have the comment karma to prove it.

We are witnessing very dangerous times. Groupthink is real now. If you disagree with a new story you can simply claim it’s “fake news”. Getting doxxed is a real possibility. The 4th estate is no longer to be trusted. “May you live in interesting times” is no longer just a fortune in a cookie...

If you disagree with a new story you can simply claim it’s “fake news”.
Wonder if this is an entirely new phenomenon, or if with Trump we just got some new, and easy to prescribe nomenclature for this phenomenon you describe.
Edit: is there something objectionable about what either myself or the person I replied to said, if so I welcome a discussion on it. There's a LOT of downvote activity happening in this thread over completely reasonable arguments that are worth discussing here.

It’s funny, the downvote wars going on, I’ve lost karma for a comment that’s innocuous. Just comes to show the world we live in where solipsism is pandemic.

All this sounds great until legitimate political orgs get blacklisted because someone at FB thinks they're astroturfing
Regardless of who actually created the event, I can imagine that posting a removal notice of a political event is going to trigger the conspiracy nuts and aggravate distrust against FB

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