Disinformation-for-hire in Kenya
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
As a westerner, I've discovered that we forget that we are less than 20% of the global population. Bringing that up in conversation can surprise people.
What percent of the global economy? What percent of industry/invention? What percent of entertainment? What percent of military?
Edit: No one wants to address military
From my personal experience living abroad, we westerners highly overestimate the consumption of our entertainment (movies/shows/music/games) in the non-western world. E.g. log into your favorite western online game in Japan and see what players you end up playing with. Hint: It's basically noone Japanese.
Regarding economy: based on the wikipedia data available here [1] USA+EU+Australia (with GB i think still included in EU there) makes up less than 50% of the global economy, tendency downwards.
Virtually every smaller country in Europe and Latin America consume American media voraciously.
I really wouldn’t consider Latin America to be in the West either.
Generally the dividing line between West and East is the Ural mountains.
No, our media is fucked.
UK media is obsessed with random news from USA, if Sarah Palin says something dumb it will be all over the papers, but if poland gets a new president it might not even be mentioned. In the past year my local news has never printed the name of my local MP but has printed maybe 100 of donald trump's tweets.
The UK and Canadian media seems to be obsessed with US politics, yet here we barely talk about either countries. Why is that so?
There are some people mapping this out manually, I'm surprised that the likes of Twitter don't take a harder stand against this because it likely is going to ruin the platform long term (if that hasn't already happened).
One example:
https://twitter.com/galactic_potato/status/14352650994770002...
Hard to say how many people recognize that, but it's long since happened.
Unless there's imminent legal action or people stop using the service, it's easier just to delay and hope that the horse learns how to sing…
Oh, and I like the opening summary of the 2009 article:
> On the company blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says Tony La Russa lawsuit over fake tweets borders on "frivolous," but details plans to prevent such abuse of the service in the future.
[0]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/twitter-to-r...
> Everyday new hashtags come up peddling the same misinformation against political rivals.
Is how I've been feeling for the past couple of years at least.
It's really not any different here. For good or ill, this is the Twitter-nature.
I deleted my account and made a 'connection-less' one so when I follow links and see tweets directly on Twitter, there's no further engagement to be had, beyond looking at whatever is 'trending'… which is literally, what you describe, localized. I am looking at whatever third parties are trying to promote as the 'vox populi', with a certain amount of organic interaction/reaction with it.
It's the twitter-nature. I know you're not wrong here.
One of the hospitals, at which McElyea has not recently worked, denied that it had treated any Ivermectin patients or turned any away. That doesn't mean there aren't other hospitals in the area that have been handling or even overwhelmed by those cases. It casts some doubt on the story, it's not a slam dunk debunking.
Rolling Stone was wrong to print the story uncritically without conducting its own independent verification of what KFOR reported. There's a damaging trend where news outlets will report on what other news outlets have reported without adding additional verification, sometimes giving flimsy stories more apparent weight.
But Greenwald is trying to pretend that the single hospital's denial is enough to render the entire story, and indeed the entire claim of Ivermectin overdosing, as false. That's dishonest too.
The debate around freedom of speech, for instance, is different for those of us in Kenya and South Africa than it is in the US, just by virtue of having different legal frameworks, recent histories, and other factors. The same is true for the debate in European countries.
The media, too, is a complex phenomenon with the interplay between the big international media companies like the BBC, Reuters, CNN, etc and local media. There's also a difference between local news outlets that publish in English and those that publish in one or more local language. The CNN vs Fox News tribalism that grips so much American political discourse about the news is completely irrelevant.
These disinformation campaigns also have real impact. One campaign orchestrated by the Bell Pottinger PR company on behalf of South Africa's corrupt then president and a family of benefactors helped provide the cover to dismiss key incorruptible individuals in government and paved the way for the capture of key departments, institutions, and state-owned enterprises by private interests. The country has still not recovered from the damage caused.
Nothing in the article as posted indicates that the "disinformation influencers" were nefarious actors. For all the description given, it might have been grassroots citizens action, only labeled "disinformation" by officials or government-aligned sources. The end result is Mozilla making arbitrary choice between two opposing camps of political activists - and reports on Twitter users along those lines with clear hopes of getting them banned.
I'd understand the point if the activism was directly related to open internet, to freedom of expression, interoperability of services, ease of access and so forth - if there were concerns closely related to Mozilla's core mission. However nothing in the article nor in the linked PDF seem to allude to any of such concerns. It feels like a small group of Mozilla employees[1] ran this research and reported on users for their own private reasons.
[1] "in-house activists" might be a more charitable characterization
I really like their activist products such as container tabs, privacy enhancing technologies and reduced tracking (compared to Chrome, Safari etc).
They also do things like give a quarter million to black artists to make art about the effects of AI on systems of oppression. Half a million to broadband towers in the american south. Money for wetland restoration.
This may all seem neat and fine to do if they have that kind of money to hand out but these things come around the same time of having had a large swat of firings of people working on their projects like the Servo team, people working on firefox, etc. (The board also expanded and mitchell baker notably had her compensation increased by quite a lot)
I sponsor Rust through patreon.
I asked many times how can I donate money to mozilla with the guarantee that the money is used for Rust / servo ?
The answer was that this was not possible, so I never could donate through any official channel.
TBH, mozilla does too much random stuff for it to be attractive as a donor.
I'm aware but as far as I know it's the other way around. The foundation extracts revenue from it's subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation. When in a state of decline and faced with the option of axing development that might hamper or reverse this decline i'd expect there to be an option for the foundation to reduce the amount of revenue it extracts. Especially since what it actually gives away seems so little when compared (which makes me look weird at the mentioned compensation again)
The researchers are based in Kenya, writing about Kenyans. They just happen to be employed by Mozilla. Sorry I don’t get why that is a problem?
I take umbrage with those characterizations.
The practices described (pre-arranged release of information, voicing mutual support in coordinated manner, agreed-upon language and form) have for decades been the hallmark of professional marketing and journalism. Back when print and broadcast media were the top game, those methods were used by the small groups of legitimate journalists and marketers.
Twitter correctly recognizes coordinated release of information as signal of particularly important and valuable content. People organically coordinate release of information for it to get its full due impact and attention. People also organically ask their friends and business contacts to chip in with an upvote or reblog (or whatever is the equivalent on Twitter). Calling Twitter's or users' behaviors "callous" or "inauthentic" when it's the regular people - that is way off the mark.
My uncharitable read of it is - this whole venture reeks of gatekeeping for the old-guard legitimate journalism.
At best it's astroturfing, but in most cases it's gone beyond that.
People getting paid money to perform coordinated repost of content sent to them by anonymous sources?
Fake accounts used to amplify and retweet the messages?
What else are you looking for? It's like they told you someone stole money at gunpoint and you said you don't see anything indicative of theft.
You're right, it's only about 5% of the population, but they occupy administrative roles inside organizations and reshape them according to their fundamentalist beliefs. They are convinced they are doing good and have moral authority. As such, they have no qualms about ostracizing or firing dissenters. People are terrified of that and go along with it for fear of retaliation, so it seems larger than it is.
Taking administrative roles with an intolerant belief structure and chilling effect on speech is how the Successor Ideology is so effective despite being small in number.
Plenty to solve.
And Mozilla itself has hardly been politically neutral in the past few years - if anything, I'm more immediately skeptical of anything that Mozilla asserts as true than anything a blue-check twitter account owner in Kenya does.
Detection of inauthentic behavior is very hard and fraught with false positives, so it's really important to be very transparent in the methods.
That said, the numbers are not too small, they do have some interviews with participants and Twitter seems to have removed some accounts - all these lend the report some credibility.
What’s the difference between Mozilla and United Fruit when it comes to political interference? They both were are agitating for their PoV and not concerned with local mores. They both have foreign agendas.
One could argue United fruit advanced agriculture and provided jobs whereas Mozilla gets involved but provides no jobs to locals. Yes United fruit engaged in bad behavior but Mozilla should not get a pass either for interfering in foreign affairs.
i am glad that we here in the west are not subject to this sort of social media engineering and can participate in open and thoughtful debate on topics no matter how our elites feel about them
Because this is exactly what is the case! We are here and can participate in these discussions, more than ever before in history.
There are limits to free discussions (i.e. if you threaten or plot to kill somebody), but these limits have never been less in any country in any time.
So - let's not be overly pessimistic?
Whether you are on your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th vax shot what fully vaxed means is different around the globe. The poorest coutries haven't receive many/enough. Strange health issues are coming up as side effects. The first long term trial ends in 2024. I don't think shutting down discussion on such an important issue makes sense. The science isn't in... maybe something will emerge that will even change your mind.
That said, I don't know from what angle you're deadpanning, or which elites from where you mean, but… heh. noted. how nice for us
The US is very liberal. Most European countries are leaning towards regulation.
See the book "How Democracies Die" for a summary of the three most prominent legal approaches.
See e.g. the book "Hate Spin" on religious hate speech which explicitly deals with this two-sided phenomenon.
Florida governor signs bill barring social media companies from blocking political candidates - May 24, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/24/florida...
[Florida governor] applauds fired whistleblower’s Twitter suspension, the latest in an ongoing feud - June 7, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/07/rebekah-j...
I personally have no issue with any of these platforms moderating to their heart's content for the following reasons:
We are entitled to free speech but we are not entitled to use Twitter's megaphone.
I am against megaphones. I don't like companies like Twitter. With any hope, the more they moderate the more people will move away from centralized platforms. Don't regulate them and they will moderate themselves out of existence (I wish).
When did Twitter ever claim to be a "Town Square?" Furthermore, when would it benefit them to claim that?
-Jack Dorsey
https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-twitters-role-free-s...
I am not endorsing his statement but Twitter's CEO apparently considers it as a town square.
Especially when it is described as ”This industry’s main goal is to sway public opinion during elections and protests” which is different than every other media organization how, exactly?
Media are legitimate influences on public opinion with accountability, transparency and formal ethics codices.
Disinformation is illegitimate (i.e. illegal) influence on public opinion by hidden actors without accountability, transparency and formal ethics codices.
[edit] Perhaps I should say what I mean by legitimate. Legitimate here means: Society agreed to allow media to exist in the form that they do, by creating laws in support and by refraining from creating laws that would prevent them. As long as there is no political consensus and/or riots which would fundamentally undermine the media's standing, they benefit from a special role (and are held to that standard).
Are you seeing much of this lately? Lately as in the last 40 years? I certainly am not.
Yes accountability especially in the US is lacking. But there is some, there are formal ethical codices (i.e. see NPR's https://www.npr.org/ethics), there is proper journalism training (see e.g. the Annenberg schools).
If you compare the US media to other nations, and especially if you look at them historically, they have been pretty good at this.
I'd argue that your standards are probably too high. Accountability is a shitshow and virtually nonexistent across the globe. It's a darn lucky situation if you even have some.
[edit due to reply limit]: Of course NPR is biased, what do you expect? There is no neutrality in things that human believe. The difference is having public guidelines, committing to them and listening to criticism That's accountability.
Replying to your edit: well, that is my point. They are all biased. This idea that having a public code of conduct means anything is nonsense.
When’s the last time a mainstream media organization was held accountable for anything? Even the people that helped sell the WMD lie are still in positions of power.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
The reality of the situation is that there are no meaningful standards of conduct and everyone is biased. Legacy brands with elite clout are no different.
There are many well-documented cases where accountability failed, and brilliant people have written about it (Chomsky, Lippmann etc.).
But - and this is really important - it's not helpful to cynically assume that either everything is OK or that there is no accountability/meaning/use at all.
All of the important things in society (discussions, getting along, identification of problems, negotiating solutions) are not a state, but a process. There is accountability, but only as much as citizens and institutions manage to produce. Go ahead and help (constructively)!
The alternative to politics is (civil) war, the alternative to free media is basically the middle ages.
Thus it is better to recognize that no single entity will ever be truly honest and to instead read a variety of sources and come to your own conclusions.
Publishing a code of ethics means absolutely nothing if it is not followed.
For example, NPR’s code of ethics says “We know that truth is not possible without the active pursuit of a diversity of voices, especially those most at risk of being left out.” and “In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity.”
but just recently they had a segment where they spent an hour trashing free speech without a single person to argue in favor of free speech. So much for “diversity of voices.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/npr-trashes-free-speech-a-brie...
> I'd argue that your standards are probably too high. Accountability is a shitshow and virtually nonexistent across the globe. It's a darn lucky situation if you even have some.
I’d argue your standards are too low. Just because things are worse elsewhere doesn’t mean we should be content that things aren’t quite as bad here.
This is actually a great example:
- I broke the rules (code as law), but was transparent about it
- You held me accountable
- Others can read our exchange and adjust their trust (in me in particular)
That's a good outcome, I guess!
What's going on (by now, obviously) with Twitter and Facebook and all, is that they are a vector for bypassing skepticism, by delivering information purportedly from your personal friend who is personally trusted.
Still no neutrality, but if you can make a web of propaganda through people who are believing things their apparent 'friends' (through various signifiers) are saying, and coordinate that, you can propagandize WAY more effectively than through mainstream media.
And that's what's happening. Everywhere.
> Disinformation is illegitimate (i.e. illegal) influence
So hopefully there's a space in-between: is it still legitimate (or legal) for me as an individual to influence people, or does that count as disinformation? Is it because I don't possess a codex?
> Society agreed to allow media to exist
"Society" was actually never asked. In liberal democracies, you don't have to ask permission to publish something. Anyone is allowed to do it.
> (and are held to that standard)
Goodness, can you really be talking about "mainstream" media? I don't see anyone holding them to any standard.
Of course, the laws and norms governing individuals are different from the laws and norms governing institutions, companies, parties etc.
> "Society" was actually never asked. In liberal democracies, you don't have to ask permission to publish something. Anyone is allowed to do it.
Right, let me be more precise: Society, through its existing mechanisms of decision-making, decided to draft and ratify laws that ...
> Goodness, can you really be talking about "mainstream" media? I don't see anyone holding them to any standard.
Well, the US model is that of the "marketplace of opinions", so the assumption is that there is mutual holding accountable. But you can also count the times that citizens and politicians critique "the media", and I'd say there is pretty much holding accountable going on! :)
If someone poses as other people (which these campaigns do), accountability becomes impossible because normal users cannot tell who said what.
My use of (il-)legitimate ties to the legal framework, which means I don't need to take a normative (=subjective) position - I'm only describing the state of the rules and the mechanisms at play.
You can also use economic terms if you want: Illegitimate manipulation of public opinion doesn't pay (the platforms), advertisements as legitimate manipulation of public opinion pays (the platforms).
It doesn't really matter what the messages in those are, it could be wishing everyone a good day, it is still disinformation, because it is trying to masquerade itself as a popular opinion on Twitter, and as being a real representation of real people's personal opinion that they hold so strongly they are willing to be actively expressing it publicly on Twitter.
To me, this amounts to fraud, and Twitter has a huge problem with this stuff. It's similar in nature to fraud on Amazon with fake reviews, and with selling aftermarket goods and fake brands.
What do you think the network of “real media” is?
We can talk about traditional media on an article that discuss traditional media maybe?
The definition of disinformation is:
> False information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.
And the definition of misinformation is:
> False or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.
As you can see, the definitions aren't relative to some other piece of information. It doesn't mean that some information is incorrect based on some other source of acknowledged correct information.
It means that the intent of the information you were given was to deceive and mislead you, and that the information was thus specifically crafted in a way to do so, generally by being false, inaccurate, cherry picked, fabricated, or manipulated in some way.
In this case, you can see that there are some wealthy people who want to propagate some information in order to mislead people, the deceiving part is that they are not transparent about who they are, and they want to make it look like the information is coming from influencers as part of their own volition, and that the belief is held by a lot of people through trying to manipulate the Twitter recommendations and trending algorithms, making it look like the content is more popular than it really is.
The validity of the content of the tweets doesn't even matter, the misinformation is in the misleading lineage of who is really behind the tweets and what their agenda is, and the false representation of how popular the content is.
The difference between this revolution in social media influencing, and previous revolutions in social media influencing seized and used for fascism such as the use of new radio preceding WWII, is this:
With radio, you were told things by a trusted stranger and believed them because it was on the radio and, thus, news.
Now, you are told things by what is apparently the personal friend of your personal friend, 'privately'. And you believe them because it is real. Your friend said so. Sort of.
It's an advance in propaganda technology for SURE. I don't know where it goes, but it's not like humanity hasn't had to weather this sort of thing before. The parallels are completely obvious, historically. It is nothing more than recontextualizing how to get information past critical questioning, and it's just as effective as the first radio was in its day.
Facebook has strongly different intentions: it is aggressive about wanting to tie single identifiable accounts to single identifiable real people, and wouldn't like the Twitter-nature one bit. Facebook's purpose is to do that, and then make it easier for people to pay money to propagandize exactly whatever people you can define as most vulnerable, for any reason you like, no questions asked. That's Facebook-nature. You can be pretty sure an individual person there is a single, real actual human, and also that you can sell preselected groups of them on anything you want them to believe.
I like that people are complaining about it, don't get me wrong. I think it's pretty clear at what point all this becomes a problem: if it isn't clear already, it will become clearer within ten years, guaranteed, and humanity may or may not survive the result. Complaining is GOOD.
I'm just saying, the reason these social media giants are as huge as they are IS because of their natures. Twitter will not go against Twitter-nature. Facebook will not go against Facebook-nature.
Wikipedia as well. Other people try to use Wikipedia to sway public opinion, but Wikipedia itself seems rather opposed to articles designed for that.
Reuters seems to do some solid work as well. I don't usually get a heavy spin vibe from them, but maybe it's an international spin that I'm not in on.