Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections | Hacker News Reader

Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections

apnews.com

23 pointsyasp8 comments

> Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the tech giant had purged 65 Israeli accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts.

> The activity appeared focused on Sub-Saharan African countries but was also scattered in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America, what Brookie called a “staggering diversity of regions” that pointed to the group’s sophistication.

> The fake pages, pushing a steady stream of political news, racked up 2.8 million followers. Thousands of people expressed interest in attending at least one of the nine events organized by those behind the pages. Facebook could not confirm whether any of the events actually occurred. Some 5,000 accounts joined one or more of the fake groups.

> Gleicher said the misleading accounts primarily aimed to influence people in Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia.

> The most significant audience engagement was generated in Malaysia, which has a vast media market and held a general election last year, according to Brookie and his team at the Atlantic Council.

> Facebook investigations revealed that Archimedes had spent some $800,000 on fake ads, paid for in Brazilian reals, Israeli shekels and U.S. dollars. Gleicher said the deceptive ads dated back to 2012, with the most recent activity occurring last month.

We're getting very close to the point where elections in democracies can really be bought. As imperfect as print newspapers were for the purpose of informing the citizenry (see: manufacturing consent) it was the devil that we knew, the new devil has a level of venom that is much more powerful.

I've yet to see any data on how effective these social media ops actually are.

It's a tough effect to analyze effectively, given how indirect and disconnected the effect they're aiming for is from their ops. But the thing is, they're really, really cheap in relative terms. With the ones run by nation states, even a minor return is going to be an infinitesimal part of their budget with very little risk to them. Even minor successes would be more than sufficient.

I mean, the Army funded the Stargate Project[0] for nearly two decades. Social media ops have at least an advantage or two over staring at goats.

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

semi-serious comment: that's just the kind of comment a social media op would generate.

I don't see anything more than what a PR agency would be doing. Hunderds of interest groups run camaigns in all kinds of elections to help support favorable candidates.

We will end up with boundaries for the "Internet". Each country will have its own "Internet" beacuse they are distrusting each other now.

The accessibility of these tactics, barring significant changes to Facebook’s model, is inevitably going to lead to private entities copycatting the strategies proven out recently by nation states. Expect to see more of this occurring as regional powers exert influence over neighbors and domestic players do so for internal gain (as documented in the OP). Political subversion at scale and for hire.

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