Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-...
It's interesting how Guy Rosen, a co-founder of the spyware company Onavo, is now Facebook's "vice-president of integrity":
> Facebook had “moved slower than we’d like because of prioritization” on the Honduras case, Rosen wrote. “It’s a bummer that it’s back and I’m excited to learn from this and better understand what we need to do systematically,” he added. But he also chastised her for making a public complaint, saying: “My concern is that threads like this can undermine the people that get up in the morning and do their absolute best to try to figure out how to spend the finite time and energy we all have and put their heart and soul into it.”
> Rosen had joined Facebook in 2013, when the company acquired his startup, Onavo, a mobile web analytics company that Facebook would go on to use to track usage of rival apps.
Details on Onavo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
Sounds like a bad joke.
Edit: fellas I asked a question downvotes aren’t necessary
Wow you are right[1][2]. Very similar tone progressions.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duPNQCp-w4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk
Hacker News has by far the weirdest downvote patterns of any forum I've used. I wouldn't pay much mind.
Isn't that just the perfect match, based on how Facebook defines "integrity"?
Corporate speak for, "Meh, whatevs".
I think there will be more to this story as it unfolds. And this doesnt even cover twitter , which afaik does not even try to weed out trolls.
> "But it quickly became clear that no one was interested in taking responsibility for policing the abuses of the president of a poor nation with just 4.5m Facebook users. The message she received from all corners – including from threat intelligence, the small and elite team of investigators responsible for uncovering CIB campaigns – was that the abuses were bad, but resources were tight, and, absent any external pressure, Honduras was simply not a priority."
We can assume that hostile nations have known this for awhile, and they have also been exploiting this. This is tragic but true.
Sophie Zhang is a hero.
Alternatively, Facebook itself is more interested in manipulating political outcomes in the US, Taiwan, South Korea, and Poland, and less so or not at all in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.
It's even worse than that, and more craven. They are only interested in maximizing shareholder revenue, and have absolutely no loyalty or political agenda beyond that. They lack any moral compass and are only held in check by the potential for consequences, be that in the marketplace or the threat of government investigations.
They absolutely do not give a shit about anything but that sweet cash money and gobble gobble growth. Anything they seem to care about at any given moment, anything they mouth in the press, anything they add to their koolaid or internal reality distortion field, is a means to that end.
The article gives examples of these pages making hundreds of pro-government comments on various political posts.
Facebook is the de facto social network and lets people connect and spread information on an unprecedented scale, for good or bad.
Just show the stories in chronological order - let the users think before subscribing to 1000 pages and having 800 friends.
Last week wife got an email that her Facebook was logged into. Told her to open app and change password immediately.
Too late. Account email and phone number already changed. No way to use old ones to get control back.
15 year old account with a huge amount of memories gone.
Best possible was to indicate a problem, so account is disabled. But no way to use it anymore.
Apparently this has happened to around half of her cohorts. It’s now part of life to just make new accounts periodically.
Utterly shocking that account email and phone can be changed in 20 minutes and no way to change them back.
Allowing all the security info to be changed moments after logging on with no way to put them back is absurd.
Also the other commenter is right about victim blaming. The notification about a suspicious login should give appropriate options to safeguard one's account from a takeover.
That's like claiming that abusing slaves was a 'loophole'
Facebook exists because most people can accept those crimes committed against them. They really don't even understand them all. Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore
Why would that surprise anyone? He had Moxie implement the Signal protocol in WhatsApp.
Was this ever confirmed?
Is it possible Zuckerberg just installed it to check out the competition? Is it possible he has it installed as a WhatsApp backup, if FB/WhatsApp is down (exactly the sort of thing the CEO of FB/WhatsApp needs to be prepared for)?
And we've concluded "Zuckerberg uses Signal"?
The three foundational planks that we've since lost are (1) strong newsroom editorial control of content, independent of revenue, (2) long form & investigative journalism as a stable, viable profession, & (3) journalists and journalism outlets with reputation (able to counter-balance the weight of those they report on).
The greatest tragedy of Google and Facebook has been that they appropriated advertising money that used to support actual journalism, and in return offered us free social and utility apps, but definitely not journalism.
IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.
Though I would be for it, half of the US will vehemently oppose funding "fake news" with tax dollars.
That leaves "ditching the horse altogether" as the only option.
What does that look like?
The greatest tragedy of modern journalism has been its inability to adapt business models to a changing world. The old old assumption was that newspapers and TV had a near monopoly on user attention, with a tragic unwillingness to consider that maybe this wouldn't always be the case. Outlets more focused on subscriptions and less on advertising seem to have come through better.
Perhaps the alignment between advertising and journalism was coincidental, rather than some iron law?
> IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.
Don't we already have outlets like that? How do you feel about Voice of America or People's Daily? IMHO, a lot of people distrust them as rather less than independent.
What about the independent journalists and outlets that rely on said advertising revenue? Or the more mainstream ones that do likewise?
Seems like this may make it worse for those, unless you've got a way this can only affect ad network providers rather than those utilising their services.
This goes against anyone who currently runs 'a journalism'. We need to stop giving them our attention. We won't
Why anyone is still on Facebook amazes me. You all know the corporations is one of the more evil presences in our society. Smoke up boys!
Facebook content should drop in value to where it belongs: personal updates from friends and funny videos;
People need to start voting on actual policies each politician/party proposes, not based on Facebook information from unknown accounts.
Will that be enough?
Mark Zuckerberg will never give up that level of power because either he wields that power or someone else will.
Weak countries don’t matter in matters of power and this is an example of it.
Also, Facebook has no issues at all when it comes to manipulation when it is to its benefit. It has done so before.
If you believe that Facebook doesn’t have that power then you must also believe that people aren’t easily manipulated. Advertising is proof against that belief.
I'm leaning towards this is the most misunderstood aspect of Zuckerberg. The Google founders also lamented how difficult it was to steer morally straight when so many internal company issues arose when the stock price was flat: their most talented employees leaving and morale dropping. Zuckerberg is a smart cookie and is probably quite aware what's been created with Facebook. But it's absolutely worse under a bean-counter "money at all cost" corporation. Long term, federating and allowing people to retain their social graph across any client platform, breaking up the network effect, seems to be the only way forward.
And i would not be surprised if bribes inside facebook are involved , as some of those countries are known to run extensive bribery operations e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_laundromat
People who want Facebook, or "someone" to be the arbiter of the One True Truth are doomed to fail, because nothing is true.
Also the Guardian, just like most MSM holds a grudge against FB: how dare they eat their pie, all of it, and they let people escape from their 'single-eyed war-enabling worldview'?
Lay the FB 'hate' aside, will ya? For all its dehumanizing power (as much as the rest of 'social media' and technology in general) FB has not committed the 1/10000th of the harm these champions of virtue in the MSM have done for the last couple centuries (steamrolling their power on most wars, worldwide or not).
I'm guessing this one. Although facebook didn't invite this violence directly, they were the primary tool of propaganda. Now I'm not saying it's easy to solve this problem but facebook seems to be actively overlooking these things as it has happened repeatedly.
Have you seen the rampant propaganda and manipulation of facts from social-media-driven left wing and right wing groups? It is far more inaccurate and vile.
Laying off the hate is likely just good advice all the time.
Facebook has been around at scale for a short period of time so the total amount of harm it has done so far won’t compare to propaganda done by others but this should not detract from worry/blame/concern about Facebook. I won’t lay the FB hate aside as you put it because I see the great harm it can and does do. Humans are easily manipulated and Facebook can do this at an unprecedented scale.
Then you have a very limited understanding of the extreme issues with viral social media misinformation filter bubbles.
I agree with you "western" (let's say democratic instead) medias are very biased. I live in Hong Kong and I couldn't believe what I was reading in british media about our "oppression" while kids were breaking the pavement down my road and doing V for vendetta graffiti under the cries of "Fuck the Popo".
But all in all, it's fine, to be honest. We don't ask media to be without bias, but to be clear about them. We know somewhat the editorial position of the Guardian, they're one opinion amongst many.
What turn countries into rubbles, is when people can't understand who's telling them what. Facebook is too blurry, you don't know if it's your sister, a CIA agent or a FSB one talking to you about a solution to a problem. People get angry in closed networks, that echo and echo until they feel the entire population think the same way. And you can't really calm them down with deep and complex analysis because while anger is easy to spread with a quick BS meme, calming down people requires focus, dual way communication and effort on every side.
That's what happened to HK at a small scale, a sort of irrational mass anger, but that's not what happened in Lybia. Simply because in Lybia, people weren't the richest most powerful people on the planet. They tried the last resort solution, they won somewhat, now after the destruction they have to rebuild and they're learning it's way harder. We've all been through these phases, no need to argue the Guardian caused it :) I'd be partial to Facebook though :D
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12659
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfa... (p10#20)
You know why it's mainstream? Because it's nuanced, and well-researched and run by actual real-life journalists.
You know what you're left with when the media is no longer mainstream? The extremes.
Which "Mainstream media" outlets do you consider to be nuanced and well-researched?
I would put the opposite question, which non-mainstream media outlets would you consider to be nuanced and well-researched?
American news consumers should be critical, and pay attention to times when major competing news outlets are running the same headline about a complicated story.
Ahem.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton
1. It assumes that inexperience in reporting correlates well across disciplines (i.e. if you read one badly researched physics article, it means the sports pages are similarly bullshit)
2. It assumes the existence of better-informed alternative media
In the particular case Crichton cites, it's entirely reasonable to assume a news outfit might have better reporting on Palestine then on physics, if only because politicians have an incentive to talk to news outfits where scientists might not. In fact, much of journalistic ethics and process revolves around trying to determine political "truth", as much as something like that can exist. Conversely, there are plenty of scientists who can explain the details of the Standard Model or Quantum Field Theory; but don't have a single clue as to how trade negotiations work or why we sided with Saudi Arabia despite them not sharing our values one bit.
Michael Crichton assumes knowledge is an RPG stat and that if a newspaper fails a knowledge roll once we should discard the paper because it's writers didn't put enough points into INT.
Second, most alternative media I've encountered does no better on the "wet streets cause rain" problem. Actually, my experience is that they're more prone to shoddy reporting, because their goal isn't to try and find out something approaching the truth. It's to sell me a series of plausible lies that lead up to their particular political bias.
For example, let's talk about climate science. It's a demonstrable fact that the Earth is warming due to human activity, but there's multiple ways one can be wrong about that. The kind of inaccurate reporting I'd expect to see out of a mainstream outfit would be something like "CO2 causes ozone depletion". A right-wing alternative rag would instead try to deny the science altogether, either by casting FUD on the scientific process or worse. The former is something that might be technically incorrect, but the latter is deliberately trying to convince me that black is white, up is down, and short is long.
All the problems you list with legacy media are true but also have a clear expiration date as these outlets are usually money losers. Meanwhile Facebook looks like it's here to stay.
Compared to the UK, USA, France, Italy, Germany, China, Russia and on and on: Azerbaijan is poor and small.
It ranks 112th in the world for size, 99th for population, 86th for GDP.
When comparing things, especially when it's relevant to the subject (facebook doesn't care about comparatively small and poor countries) then it is not offensive.
Unless you want to take offence.
Yes. I think everyone calls Sweden small. Probably even Swedes themselves. Sweden is small and rich.
DAE miss AOL?
All 3 are insanely difficult.
Here's the truth - if you own a social media platform and you allow for microtargeting and psychological profiling, you have responsibility for what's mass shared throughout.
Facebook, Google et al. are trying to run a billion-sized community with extremely tight budgets, because they do not want to sacrifice their profits or make their services paid instead of free.
Of course it does not work.
I disagree with the framing of this as "complexity" when it's really "Facebook's profits would be reduced/Facebook's business model would be compromised".
The complexity comes from Facebook's goal of maximising profits within the permitted algorithmic and legal space.
Imagine I’m out in a park firing guns into the air and you come up to me and say, “don’t you know those bullets might come down somewhere and hurt someone?” And I say, “do you know how hard it would be for me to calculate exactly where each bullet would land and where I can aim it safely?” Would you just walk away and say, “oh yeah, that’s too hard of a problem to solve, carry on”?
It has examples of the campaigns of national political parties of different nations (hence world leaders) using a loophole that facebook pages can do certain things facebook accounts can't to boost their engagement and/or avoid the scrutiny an account would get.
It also has a really good non-techy breakdown explaining how it works. I think it's HTML5? Having read it, I would say it's a really good piece of journalism.
Detailing how it works and as well as how slow facebook are to respond.
What is sensational about that? Unless you dislike reporting of propaganda efforts by governments.
That fake accounts that signal boost support for political figures is fine election campaigning?
“As a result, we’ve taken down more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in countries around the world, including those in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and in the Asia Pacific region.”
Those who'd hold Facebook to account for not programmatically 'fixing' this would do well to also acknowledge the underlying human failings that make these shady strategies allegedly effective.
Maybe even a small attempt to improve voter literacy in Honduras?
Easier to just shift the entire moral blame to FB and implicitly hope every similar social media company acquiesces to your worldview forever.