Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior from Russia
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
How is this anything but a drop in the ocean? If this is the extent of 'Coordinated inauthentic behavior' I'm rather unimpressed with the capabilities of Russia.
> How is this anything but a drop in the ocean?
It's the tip of the iceberg. You're ignoring second order effects. The people those accounts influence will influence others. Russian agents might have written the first few disinformation articles claiming the US Government created AIDS to attack blacks and gays [1], but once they got the ball rolling on that meme, others did the rest of the work to spread it for them.
I do doubt the effect reducing Russian inventory of fake accounts by 75 could have.
The things the Russian propaganda machine is spreading are just intense. Misinformation on repeat, with real life consequences. That big US corps manipulate too is another story, but what Russia is doing is clearly at another scale and state sponsored with clear foreign policy aims, most importantly to undermine trust in institutions and the actual news media and secondly to try different alternate narratives and see which ones stick. The key aim of these many sites is to disseminate and diffuse the disinformation to come from 'many sources' at once, to make it more convincing (what we hear often enough we believe).
This series of bans is a very good initiative, although I'd say far too little too late. Sputnik and co are not media, they are propaganda machines that happen to intersperse some true stories and occasional facts in their package of lies. If you don't believe me- look at the site. Solid news mixed with outlandish conspiracy theories, and all that 100% state sponsored.
For context I very much recommend anyone interested to take a look at Oxford's excellent computational propaganda research:
This official EU initiative is similar, taking apart individual pieces of disinformation:
FWIW, the commenting guidelines ask you not to impute astroturfing or shillage in HN comments. Although I do wonder to what extent such a suggestion might apply to this thread - "Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" being as good a definition of astroturfing as any - it makes sense to err on the side of caution, if only for the sake of having a productive discussion!
Their writeup says the pages claimed to be independent, but were actually linked to employees of Sputnik News.
OK, but all the screenshots they showed (in the first batch) had the word "sputnik news" in the URL. That doesn't look very surreptitious to me, let alone inauthentic. If Sputnik employees are linking to stories they worked on or their employer published, how is that different to journalists tweeting stories from their news outlets on their personal Twitter accounts? Is there some formal rule now that all employees of news agencies have to loudly identify themselves as such before re-sharing content from their employer? If so, where did Facebook announce that?
The odd way Facebook are describing this action also makes me wonder about their claim the accounts were "linked to" employees of Sputnik. What does that mean exactly? Not owned, if they were owned presumably Facebook would have said so. Rather they are "linked to". This could mean many things.
Right, as long as you don't count American political content and advertising!
Edit: I'm not alleging the US is doing such a thing in an organized manner, as the Russian "internet research agency" does, what I'm asking is whether the knee jerk response from Russian Facebook competitors (or state media like RT, Sputnik) will be to make the same allegations but in reverse. And if so, what form that will take.
(I'm OK with overt influence operations that are clearly labelled, like the BBC World Service)
BBG is the parent entity of Voice of America, etc.
The US runs a lot of foreign language media which people might not know exists, if they aren't a native speaker of the target language/culture.
For example Radio Azadi, which is the VOA/RFE for Dari speakers in Afghanistan. It also produces Pashto content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Azadi
And Farda for Iranian Farsi.
People who have vested interests in organizations such as Saudi Aramco maintaining the status quo.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-20...
[1]https://www.rt.com/usa/propaganda-us-smith-amendment-903/
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
Edit: made comment more clear
Even more ironically the only reason people follow RT is that they're often covering things that the western media status quo has a blind spot to.
The take you're promoting seems to have originated with Buzzfeed, then got picked up by BusinessInsider and amplified by Russia Today. Given that it's pretty unbelievable that there's a coordinated Western-media conspiracy to suppress it, my bet is that take has some major flaws and/or there's less to it the take makes it seems.
Based on some quick Googling, the law that was modified was the one that authorizes The Voice of America and related organizations, and (according to Wikipedia) the prohibitions on its US dissemination were originally put in place because some Congressmen in the 40s thought the State Department was full of commies (really).
This NY Times from 2018 gives some perspective (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/technology/facebook-ads-p...). VOA is still not permitted to advertise to Americans, and it characterized the law RT was writing about as:
> As with all affiliates of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is governed by the Smith-Mundt Act, a 1948 law that banned government-funded media outlets from disseminating their content inside the United States. The law was amended in 2014 to allow state-funded media organizations to distribute their content “upon request” to American viewers.
It seems that it amounted to giving organizations like the VOA permission to send their content to individual Americans who ask for it. It seems like prior to that it was available "for examination only."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act#Provis...
I would only be skeptical of something based on an RT story if you actually do the digging yourself to see if there's really a there there. In this case, I don't think there is.
That leads me to one of three conclusions:
1: Someone working for VOA felt that it was not illegal for them to do this making Business Insiders interpretation of the law at least plausible if not correct.
2: VOA knowingly used Facebook to target Americans with illegal propaganda.
3: Workers implementing VOA advertising were unable to understand that if you select "United States" as a target in Facebook's geo-targeting tool[0], that advertising indeed will be shown in the US.
Three seems the least likely to me personally given the historical context and since being skeptical of news releases is likely good practice anyway I'm not convinced that you shouldn't be.
To quote the same article:
Weston R. Sager, a lawyer with firm Gallagher, Callahan & Gartrell who has written about anti-propaganda laws, said that it was disturbing to see government-funded news agencies targeting Facebook ads at Americans, no matter their content.
“I’m concerned that we’re seeing the beginning of government efforts to try to influence public opinion in the United States through the B.B.G. and its affiliate entities,” Mr. Sager said. “It’s one thing to read a tweet by Donald Trump. It’s another to receive a very polished news story from an organization that holds itself out as objective and fact-based.”
There's a fourth speculative possibility:
4. The VOA ad-buyer isn't a robot and bent the rules to target ads at the US for testing purposes (e.g. to see with his own account).
You could call such an act "propaganda illegally targeted at American citizens by the US government," and while technically true, it'd also be a hyperventilating overreaction. Especially since:
> The ads included several human-interest stories about Russia and a graphic about NATO’s popularity.
It's also worth noting a fact about the VOA's history. It was meant as an antidote to Soviet propaganda efforts, which featured heavy censorship and deliberately concocted lies [1] [2], by reporting truthfully according to Western journalistic standards. While that might still arguably be classified as propaganda (in its broadest form, an effort to convince someone of something), I'd find it difficult to honestly condemn it. I've read memoirs of dissidents that spoke very highly of it and its reporting, and they wouldn't have done so if it had been merely censoring and lying with a different bias. In my view, the modern desire to keep it out of the US is mainly born out of tradition and an abundance of caution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation#Defections_reve...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion
> Three seems the least likely to me personally given the historical context and since being skeptical of news releases is likely good practice anyway I'm not convinced that you shouldn't be.
I'm appropriately skeptical of news releases, but it's possible to be over-skeptical as well. That over-skeptical state is actually the goal of some forms of propaganda.
With the state the American political system, I'm not convinced that's a distinction worth mentioning.
Huh?