Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account | Hacker News Reader

Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account

theguardian.com

153 pointsannadane43 comments

The problem is that people are conditioned to think that if something is published then most likely it is real. Maybe we need to overhaul our education system and teach people about manipulation techniques, how to spot manipulative language, how to cross reference interesting information, how to assess whether the source is trustworthy and so on. Then teach about existence of PR agencies who create fake accounts and play certain characters to create an opinion. Unfortunately governments who used to rely on their own propaganda may not like it.

As far as I understand people have already looked into that idea. To quote [1]: “Another, longer-run, approach seeks to improve individual evaluation of the quality of information sources through education. There has been a proliferation of efforts to inject training of critical-information skills into primary and secondary schools (12). However, it is uncertain whether such ef- forts improve assessments of information credibility or if any such effects will persist over time. An emphasis on fake news might also have the unintended consequence of reducing the perceived credibility of real- news outlets. There is a great need for rigorous program evaluation of different educational interventions.” [1] The science of fake news - http://pike.psu.edu/classes/ucas/2018-summer/p/science-fake-...

That helps you teach to people who are currently under 18 years old. Then you just have to wait 50+ years before they replace everyone else. Like a lot of things, we need imperfect interim solutions because we can't wait forever for a perfect one.

And good luck changing every educational system in the world.

“ we need imperfect interim solutions”

This is probably how the whole world was made, interim solutions hacked together. I wonder what social system will have evolved by the time our descendants are no longer recognizably homo sapiens (or even biological)

Word "temporary" makes permanent solution easier to swallow :-)

I sure hope these lockdowns are actually temporary!

Sure, but why is the onus always on the individual for macro-level problems? Even the most mindful and/or intelligent person is susceptible to misinformation and propaganda.

>why is the onus always on the individual for macro-level problems

Because powerful people basically never relent their power willingly. E.g. Netanyahu, trump, putin, and the countless other fascists destroying the world for profit and more power. History shows us that power must be taken from those who would misuse it. We must be ever vigilant to not become those we despise in our efforts to end their reigns of terror lest we perpetuate the cycle.

Gigantic fail. People GIVE these individuals and institutions power. Stop giving them power, take personal responsibility.

Collective action is basically the only way Americans can force the three branches of government to do something they don't want to do. A lone actor is screwed; Billionaires excluded.

That is exactly the mentality that got us into this mess.

What's your solution then?

1. Go about your life and don't worry about the nonsense of the government.

2. Dont participate or contribute to the system as much as possible. ie Working at big unethical corp for a fat paycheck is not helping things.

There are other ways as well. but those came to mind

The problem is that in the countries with democratic systems, these can be easily exploited if you find a % of demographic that would accept handouts in exchange for votes and target them using Facebook etc. they'll happily vote to get free money.

Thank you Sophie for speaking out about this.

It looks like a conflict of interest. FB is wary of closing accounts linked to leading political figures presumably due to a) not wanting to be seen to interfere with politics too much and b) not wanting to receive retributive political action in those countries.

Alternative explanation is lack of resources which might be plausible - perhaps those with more internal experience could comment on that.

Ain't that the overall conflivt of interest, one amplyfied by the internet and social media? Everything became a contest for eye balls. MSM went online, and there they have to compete with Facebook and Twitter for eye balls to keep ad revenue flowing. Facebook is comepting with Youtube and Twitter for traffic, even Google has to keep traffic up unless they want to loose their ad revenue.

And as for the entities placing ads, well, if they don't their competition does. So they go for those with highest traffic and engagement. Again motivating sites to keep user on their sites and keep engagement up. For MSM, and social media, this means controversy and click bait.

So even if Facebook was willing to stop to be used for propaganda, ahich I highly doubt, it could very well be that Facebbok is unable to do so to begin with. They let it happen and they have a tremendous amount of power, they don't and risk becoming irrelevant and loosing that power.

Having watched the case of the azerbaijan misinformation unfolding in twitter and facebook, i m kind of surprised why this girl was fired. If anything she was uber-productive, and her account is very accurate.

I would like the investigation to continue even deeper to find the motives behind facebook's actions. This story is sadly missed in the west, a lot of crimes have been committed while the west was looking away or occupied with trivialities

> When Zhang complained about the lack of action in another internal post in December, she received a response from Rosen that was exemplary of how Facebook justified ignoring abuses in small or poor countries that had failed to garner press attention: referring to the company’s myriad prioritization frameworks.

This is certainly true (and very sad) but don't forget that evil regimes have ways to infiltrate tech companies

"Not only did Facebook temporarily delete the post internally, the company also contacted Zhang’s hosting service and domain registrar and forced her website offline."

Right?! Like - no. You don't get to do shit like that. That's so scummy

Well, they do get to do stuff like that, and are almost certainly not going to face any consequences, because they're Facebook.

Ok, but that's pedantic. I am saying that morally, you can't do that

With cancel culture such as this, who needs a gov to tell you what you can and can't say.

Is there a list of things they have where this action is taken?

Wish they had named and shamed the registrar and hosting co as well - anyone know the domain and how to peek at whois history to determine?

Discussed 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777374 (335 points/151 comments)

I disagree that this article is a dupe, if you're the one that flagged it as such

this is a different article

I'm originally from Brazil, there Bolsonaro's election was very likely boosted by his campaign's use of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram as platforms for attacking the press and his opponents. The kind of fake news that got traction ranged from "toddlers' bottles in the shape of dicks are going to be distributed by <main opponent's party>" to "a 'gay kit' study material to be distributed to kids as young as 6 years old has been created by <his main opponent government>".

Those kind of news really got some traction in Brazil, and are utterly fake. Facebook did nothing, this was spread all around my news feed during 2018, the religious right-wing nuts (neopentecostal types of churches, Prosperity Gospel and all) were swung by their greedy "pastors" latching onto these rumours of what they perceive as imoral and satanic (anything involving LGBTQ, feminism or socialism). Some of these pastors in Brazil are billionaires, owning open broadcast media networks (Rede Record) and wield that power, Brazilian Congress has almost a 1/5 of its elected members coming from Evangelical churches, called "the Evangelical bench".

Anyhow, I digress into that to show a facet of society, of one affected country, that mainstream media in English doesn't usually show. One facet that explains how simple is for an absurd fake news such as a "gay kit" being distributed to kids to help swing elections.

I can't imagine how many similar surreal experiences happened on Facebook in other languages and non-newsworthy countries.

Thank you, Sophie.

Has Facebook ever been implicated in helping elect anyone on the centre left? Or in promoting centre left policies?

Perhaps we could consider asking if "conflict of interest" and "attempts to drive engagement" are really the problem.

Maybe you don't know they nerfed the hunter laptop story on the platform? Perhaps you are unaware of the limiting of right-wing political stuff before the election? (in fairness I think they limited some of the 'also see this page engagement for left stuff at the time too(?) ) -

But they have had all sorts of half-truths, hate-the-other, posting and sharing of all sorts of outfits that promote left, center left and just look-down-upon people on the right - all flowing on the daily.

Certainly to drive engagement in several ways.

Conflict of interest? I feel yes and no - surely they get a seat at the we-can-bribe for attention table like all the other large companies, regardless of which side wins. They can spin it different ways depending on the outcome just fine.

As far as individual or groups of fbook employees conflict of interest aside from the company itself as an entity - I would assume a chunk of folks there were in tears for Hillary some years ago and likely did or tried to do some things to exact revenge for such. - now did they hire an ex obama admin person to have their finger on the 'nerf-this-story button' like twitter did? or something similar that would skew at that kind of level? I don't know yet.

The US Democrats are right wing.

It’s interesting how the Biden story was buried so quickly by both Twitter and Facebook, but that’s just part of a fight between two right-wing groups in the US.

While that may be true in some sense, you have to be able to see that completely ignoring the vernacular sense of the words 'left' and 'right' does nothing to help communication here. Literally nobody talks about the American political spectrum as divided between the far-right and kinda-far-right.

If you ignore the rest of us outside the US, sure.

Yet Facebook and Twitter ban and censor all over the world. It’s relevant what ideology the censors have, in global terms.

I presume the Facebook perspective is that they feel they have no responsibility except for the lightest touch.

You can see that depending on the country they either are quick to remove or very slow(100+ days plus) or not at all when it comes to users creating fake engagement.

They might be motivated by a fear of losing access to a country.

If you remove lies or fake engagement of the political party in power, then they can retaliate.

Of course. They're an American company, a country that elected Trump.

Whose campaign pioneered the usage of fake news and targetting advertising to groups susceptible to it.

And successfully took ownership of the term "fake news" by redefining it as any negative news about themselves.

It does highlight how an American company trying to prevent fake engagement could be considered hypocrisy by other countries.

Those in power don't want opposition and they have the power to change people perceptions of reality. Facebook not acquiescing to them is a liability.

2 years ago this was reported by the New York Times: "A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military" [0]

It highlights how "manufacturing consent" has shifted from traditional government news media to the decentralisation of social media.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

But is this a new problem though? I think this exists with traditional media too. Good example are fake opinion letters. The newspapers also didn't shy from making deals with parties participating in elections - e.g. we will print favourable articles about you if you do X, Y and Z once you win.

Yes, it is a new problem when you take into account scale, cost and targeting. Traditional media couldn't target audiences at the granularity Facebook can. And running propaganda via newspapers or TV channels was limited to national boundaries which is not the case with Facebook. One more aspect is cost - I don't have any data, but its possibly very cheap to distribute fake news or propaganda pieces with social media.

We're suffering from this here as well (in Israel), we're already in the 4th consecutive election and it looks like there will be a fifth. Bibi's (and his family) use of social platforms has been in forms of - posts with blatant lies - fake profiles posting fake inciting content that is then used in their own campaigns to incite their base - fake likes - fake profiles that generate content It's got to the point that we just call any Bibi supporter as a "Bot" (once because they don't get our credit for critical thinking and second time because of the many fake profiles that generate content in his name)

I understand the challenges coming from trying to decide if users are genuine people, or genuinely motivated to behave the way that they are. I also understand that the motives imparted onto Facebook here may or may not be accurate.

However, this:

> the network’s use of Pages to create false personas and fake engagement fell into a serious loophole in the company’s rules. Facebook’s policies to ensure authenticity focus on accounts: users can only have one account and it must employ their “real” name. But Facebook has no such rule for Pages, which can perform many of the same engagements that accounts can, including liking, sharing and commenting.

Just seems like a cut-and-dry description of a serious problem on the platform. In the Honduras example, they said that a single user was responsible for hundreds of business accounts, all of which were liking the president's pages. That is a serious problem and a trivial one to fix. If businesses don't fall under the same criteria of having a one-to-one relationship with a real human, then you can't let them participate in "democratic" processes such as "liking" things, when they're competing with real humans. Something as simple as letting them "like" things, but not letting it contribute to the like count, would go a long way.

I am going to call out a bias. Has anyone noticed there is a new article about Facebook from guardian every week. Sometimes it highlights valid issues but this one seems similar to any media we have every used in history. Isn't guardian's opinion pieces doing exactly the same as the headline?

Social media is out in the world and it is showing truth of humanity. Is the hope that we can go back to world without social media because that ship has sailed.

What is the truth of humanity? What world do you wish to “go back to” and can you provide documentary evidence that this ever existed?

Why was this marked a dupe just as it hit the front page but now that it's been a few hours and had time to drop off it's suddenly not a dupe?

> She argues that Facebook is allowing its self-interest to interfere with its responsibility to protect democracy, and that the public and regulators need to know what is happening to provide oversight.

Firstly, Facebook's a private business which means it will pursue profitable solutions ahead of their concerns about "democracy." As Adam Smith wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" to establish a moral framework before embarking on "Wealth of Nations", we can similarly see the ways that businesses will pursue profitable solutions based on the moral outlook they're working with. It's been pretty clear from the start that Facebook's business case is to monetize from the information users post online. Algorithms that maximize engagement (aka addiction) fall in line to the monetization strategy and moral attitude the company takes.

My final point is that a government's use of Facebook as a propaganda machine is a an age-old practice that shouldn't surprise any student from history (think of the kings who defaced and removed all records from their opponents). But he medium of communication is new, so they will take advantage of that. It will be Facebook's purview to decide whether they will continue these practices to continue, or take a different moral stance and become more "editorial" about their practices. Though on second thought, they have been this way for a long time with conservatives.

Back when radio became popular in the 20s and 30s, the new propaganda oppertunities helped Facsim to rise. Now we have a similar situation, only that social media is the new medium being used for propaganda. And as societies, we have yet to figure out how to manage that on scale. Beyond making mney (the platforms) or using it to manipulate opinion. Ultimately I think we will figure it ou, or get used to it. The path o that is what worries me sometimes, so.

Would you say the exact same comment for , say, the nytimes?

So assuming all this happened exactly as Zhang says: how big a deal is this really? We aren't talking about mobs of fake accounts creating false content; we're talking about a bunch of pages "liking" content by various politicians. It's analogous to the applause at a speech by a politician: does anyone really think, "Wow! Everyone is clapping; this person must have the best ideas!" Nobody could really believe that the number of likes on a politician's Facebook post is indicative of anything meaningful.

Sure, it's better to have what a person sees accurately reflect reality, but what she's talking about is insignificant. It's a thumbs-up icon with a number beside it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com