Almost All of Facebook’s Top Christian Pages in 2019 Run by Foreign Troll Farms
relevantmagazine.com
relevantmagazine.com
> In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms.
Why wouldn’t this article mention the Black American content as well? Certainly this is newsworthy, given the crucial implication here: foreign actors were pushing opposite views on many topics in order to manufacture division.
Why's does that surprise you? Christianity is most popular in poor black southern regions. Black people are more likely to be Christians than white people.
Christianity is also much stronger in Africa than in the West.
I think it's possible in the near future Christianity will become a predominantly black 'thing' worldwide.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/23/black-ameri...
Not sure if you're joking?
The black evangelical Christian church is a media trope. It's a huge part of many black communities in the US, especially in the south.
To add my POV, the phrase "A surprising number of..." doesn't always mean "I'm surprised". I use that phrase to highlight note worthy facts:
E.g. The Tacos are surprisingly tasty (note: Tacos are ALWAYS tasty to me)
Unless you live entirely in their Messenger app, which I do. The timeline is full of contraganda, spam, and things like `Tell me your favorite color without saying it` bullshit
I'd argue that the only meaningful benefit (to me at least) of Facebook is as a contact list and finder. I would delete my Facebook instantly if I felt fairly confident that I wouldn't lose out on any outreach from less-than-weekly acquaintances.
Took me about 2 weeks of hitting hide from content farms to train the algo to steer me away from that junk.
I wonder why they’ve never done that…
Unlike spam, the content farm spreads organically.
Facebook's overt business model is to be a platform for advertising (not just via overt ads, but also through paid reach of what looks like organic content). “Advertising” is just another word for “propaganda”.
So, you've noticed that Facebook “now seems to be” exactly what Facebook overtly is.
Facebook appears to be nothing but clickbaity ads, which if I'm lucky, is trying to get me to buy something I don't need. If I'm unlucky, it's ideological poison for hire fueling culture wars or foreign agents meddling in elections.
I basically never use Facebook now, except if a friend asks me to post something, but whenever I do, and scroll through the timeline, I always end up depressed. Oh and yes, bombarded with all the weird stuff discussed in this thread.
That's not true. It's actually the most effective grassroots-politics tool out there, for "regular people". Everyone has an account already, so signing up to this or that group takes seconds and you can get down to the business of actually organising.
I saw it recently in my neighbourhood: local authority wanted to push a stupid change in road layout, a couple of guys set up a FB group, and in less than a month it had hundreds of members - the road change was protested so vigorously that it had to be scrapped, something rare around this town.
Am I annoyed by this state of things? Heck yeah, I hate FB, but realistically, it's often a force for good for "normal people".
It's a never-ending cycle that benefits both parties.
And who would be behind it if they followed the money? My money is on parties like the Heritage Foundation, which is a quite open front for rich conservatives to pump money into certain goals, and I'm sure there's plenty more that have escaped the spotlight for now.
I mean yeah it's a conspiracy, but since it's in broad daylight nobody cares - it's not shady if it's out in the open.
This is more likely Eastern European scammers who are just looking to build an audience any way they can.
Advertisers, probably. I worked in adtech doing fraud detection back in ~2013 and “fake news” sites were already prevalent, but their business model was usually boring old advertising. They were also big on ad fraud (e.g. serving ads in hidden iframes).
That’s not to say that the Kremlin/IRA were not behind some of it, but Occam’s razor is that most fake news is just a result of sites with no incentive to do honest journalism trying to drive clicks.
On the YouTuber front there were more than one who jumped on the alt-right shock jock bandwagon back then for the same reason. It brought clicks both from the people attracted to that stuff and from the people outraged by it or just gawking at it.
“The content isn't violating or borderline. It does skew very hard towards clickbait and engagement bait, however.”
“The religious pages tend to be a mixture of the heavy engagement bait like the meme from “Light of the World” and sensational click bait stories about children, animals, and police officers.”
“Why Do They Do It? Money is definitely a big reason. There are a few ways to monetize an FB page.
1. Link to a domain where you show ads
2. Enter into our partnership programs
1. Instant Articles
2. Ad Breaks
4. Sell the Page after it reaches a large size.”
“Mostly, they seem to want to skim a quick buck off of their audience. But there are signs they have been in contact with the IRA... If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there.”
The last quote is the one talking about potential political links. There are some serious concerns, but not as concrete as the claims made by the article.
I appreciate your caution about jumping to assume the motives are political, when financial motives on the internet are of course so common.
FB feels like it should be a public utility. It is clearly filling a niche that people feel is needed. The barrier to entry to use is very low. I've encountered so many people who simply don't use other parts of the Internet much at all, and expect almost all content to be mediated through Facebook.
FB will still prioritize things that generate interactions. So if little bits of controversy slip into the DIY discussions, that's still what bubbles to the top of everyone's feed.
It hasn't necessarily happened to your group, it may not necessarily happen, but the point is that this is what the algorithm was optimized to do.
Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks.
I have a few thoughts on all of this. First off in a way I sympathize with all the folks running content farms abroad. You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I also think that much of this fake news is on Americans for eating the shit up.
One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information.
I see your point but I don't necessarily agree. A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Navigating a trustless information landscape is incredibly time consuming as looking for sources and invalidating information is much more time consuming than producing it.
Requiring people to stop acting on their "outrage" feeling is also extraordinary damageing to society as it also stops people from reacting to actual issues.
Finally, if you look at the savvy people do you really believe that they are actually better at detecting fakes? It seems that they are better at identifying information sources that can be trusted, but once trust is established I'm pretty sure they don't spend all their cognitive resources trying to disprove everything they read (well some probably are).
So a bit like with malware being more abundant on more popular OS, even if everyone moved to reputable sources, the trolls would move as well.
I don't believe in censorship either but we need to find a way to disincentivise behaviors that lower trust.
Another major aspect of a healthy society is distrust. People trusting anything they see written down is a major issue for a healthy society. This was rarely discussed when everything that was written down was controlled by the large media conglomerates, but it is becoming a huge point of contention today. Traditional media are furious that they are losing their unique ability to shape publish discourse, and are desperately lashing (there was a NYT article outraged that some site was permitting the creation of private rooms with no control of what is being discussed).
You missed the root cause. The mainstream media lost the trust of the people with their biased reporting. This leads people to look for alternate resources, which are being manipulated like this.
Whenever they started doing that specifically through false-front Facebook groups, Russia has been doing that to the West nonstop, through most media that it could conceivably be done, since it became an independent country, taking over from the USSR which had been doing it for generations previously.
Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality. Both are propaganda.
No, I’m presenting it as if Russia was the topic of discussion when I joined.
> Anything Russia is doing on this front is dwarfed by what the US, UK, France, Germany etc. are doing.
Now you are falsely presenting it as Russia being uniquely moderate in this regard.
> Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality.
RT and RFE are both propaganda, the latter more openly so, not less.
But the discussion here is about false-flag propaganda, not things like RT and RFE.
Well, it's both:
* For misinformation spread through centralized media (TV, radio, newspapers, etc), we do need to stop it, because the privilege of running a media company comes with responsibility to not spread misinformation. The same applies to any official government channels.
* For misinformation that spreads person-to-person, we do need to address people's lack of ability to think critically and search for truth. This is a long-term goal that can be achieved by teaching critical thinking classes (like philosophy) in K12. Finland is taking this approach already[1].
Social media like Facebook falls somewhere in between. To the extent that Facebook can act as a media company (e.g. by providing a platform for groups with membership in tens of thousands), it should have the same responsibilities as TV stations and newspapers of comparable reach (in my personal, biased opinion).
While it doesn't make sense to stop people telling things to each other, it does make sense to go after the hubs where misinformation originates and spreads to many people at once (in my biased opinion).
When it comes to individuals, well, that's why we need educational reforms.
Side note: the entire point of Russian propaganda/misinformation campaigns is not to spread any particular viewpoint, it's to destroy people's ability to search for truth (everything is fake, might as well pick what resonates the most!), reason critically (bad faith reasoning 101), and hold a civil discussion to find common ground (any disagreement can be won by making the other person angry).
It is self-sustaining; affected people start coming up with their own alternative realities which spread like wildfire. Tribalism and fake news are the result.
[1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/how-finland-is-fighti...
I agree with the "ought" here, but don't think it's practical.
I think it's more likely that "democratizing" misinformation/lies/propaganda, combined with online anon- or pseudo-nymity, is simply a (strong) net-negative for, especially, democratic states, as much as we really really want it to be net-beneficial, and as much as we can imagine a world in our heads where it's net-beneficial. I think it may simply not be what we hoped, and not be practically able to ever be that.
> Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks.
Not even. Russians noticed it and did the exact same thing, but everything that happens in Russia or is done by someone of a Russian ethnicity is connected to the Russian government when reported on in the US/UK.
I don't think you do. They're parasites, scarcely better than email spammers or petty criminals.
I don't know if this is actually the case everywhere, but I would assume it's the case in many places.
Just a reminder that that magazine has no connection to MIT. It simply licenses the name from the alumni association (which is how the association funds itself).
http://web.mit.edu/fnl/MITPublications/ lists Technology Review as a publication of MIT.
The terms of service states that it is independent of but owned by MIT.
https://www.technologyreview.com/terms-of-service/
From what I gather, there was a relaunch in 1998, and MIT has owned it since 2001. In general, I’d be extremely surprised if MIT ever just licensed its name out.
Relevant Magazine isn't a news outlet. It's a Christian culture magazine. So the point of the article is "Hey, our culture is being hijacked", not to give a full picture of what's happening in the news.
so, for them, to skip Black American content - pardon the pun, it should be relevant to them too?
Yeah, I don’t think that is Relevant’s goal here:
https://www.relevantmagazine.com/about/
Our Mission
We’re twenty- and thirtysomething Christians seeking God and striving to impact the world around us. We are people who want to live well—outwardly, creatively and intentionally. We are pro-Church and want to love our neighbors as ourselves. We serve the Creator, so we love great art—whether that be redemptive music, movies, books or design. We are daily seeking to show how God is at work in the world and in our generation.
In this case, the first sentence ends in "internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal", with a link -- why not just post the MIT Technology Review article in the first place?
[Also, just as an aside, don't forget that obviously many Christians are Black people].
[And also, as far as your original question, if you scroll down in the MIT Tech Review article to the charts from which the headline of this re-report come from, you'll see that the troll farms were particularly successful in their "Christian" positioning, with 19 of the top 20 pages. The other groups targetted, they didn't achieve that level of penetration. This is notable, but I agree the other groups they were targetting is also notable!]
I can imagine most of HN sees a headline that boils down to "lots of stuff on facebook is fake" and not care. A headline with a clear subject that people can love/hate is much better clickbait.
Also it is of interest that a Christian culture magazine is reporting on this, as that’s the kind of thing that needs to happen en masse to fix this problem. It needs to become a main topic of discussion in the communities being targeted by troll farms, and not just in tech circles.
That this article shows that is happening is newsworthy in and of itself.
Almost all "Black Lives Matter"[1][2] and anti-police[3] brutality, and pro-police status quo pages[3] on Facebook were run by foreigners residing in other countries. Some foreigners are firms and keeping score on how many in person protests and counterprotests they can accomplish.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/04...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/business/facebook-black-l...
[3] https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag...
I always joked to friends that Trump was the Manchurian candidate but I fear the truth was much darker.
I can think of a few reasons.
1. The linked website is focused on issues related to religion.
2. The number of people who identify as Christian in the US is likely far greater than the number of people who identify as black activists.
3. Only one of those groups helped elect a Russian asset as president of the US.
I dont usually care for politics but nobody has given me any convincing arguments on the matter. I have seen Russia gain more with Biden shutting down the pipeline. If someone is colluding with you what have they gained thus far? I just don’t see it at all.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ex-lawyer-clinton-campaign-...
Weakening of the US's power in the world.
Weaker NATO and EU.
Weak/delayed sanctions as a result of Crimea and no other action.
Worsening of US/Iran relations, keeping Iran close to Russia.
Left Syria to Russia.
Ongoing influence in the Republican party, which is now pretty much officially pro-Russia.
Edit: this seems like a pretty good list: https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/17/politics/trump-soft-on-russia...
I'd say we are worse off militarily though, in a relative sense as other powers are rising, eg NK has nukes, China is flexing its muscle _much_ more, Russia's position is better, Iran is largely unchecked.
Our military and weapons development strategy is showing its weaknesses as well though. When exactly is the last thing we actually "won" ? How many places did we spend years/decades with our thumb up our ass, while bleeding lives and money?
It's also interesting that these are the groups that have been identified as the best targets for a propaganda campaign. (Edit: You would think this would be successful for a wide variety of groups across the political and social spectrum.)
It is implausible that people have noticed that serving "Christians" and "African Americans" content they want to click on is profitable, but nobody has put the data together to realize that they can do the same thing to "Liberals" and other favored groups here on HN.
It's just, those articles won't get upvoted and clicked on here. Nobody wants to talk about themselves or their favored groups getting targeted like this.
There's plenty of people here reading this and congratulating themselves on how they aren't stupid like those groups, and then rolling straight over to their own content-farmed, clickbaited news solely posted for ad revenue that fits their own ideology one browser tab over.
"Those groups are the stupids! Not like imtelligent youse!" is one of the perennial clickbait stories. It's part of the reason why clickbait is so dangerous; a certain amount of division is inevitable, but people deliberately deepening the divisions just to make .0001 cents per view is not!
Touché.
Why not link instead to the article this article links to and is based on, which is far more informative:
Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
I can see nearly half of all Americans regularly engaging with SOME Facebook property, if you include Instagram and WhatsApp, etc. But the original old Facebook itself? In the 2020’s? I don’t know a single person who still uses that.
I am responding to a quote claiming that troll fake news "reached 140 million on Facebook". Clearly, this is speaking to the latter.
You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms. That's not "I login once in a blue moon to spy on my ex", or "I have Messenger on my phone because a group that I'm in uses it to announce events". That is "I actively choose to consume angry and dumb political content on a regular basis". Perhaps I overestimate people, but 140 million seems high.
I think you are missing the point of this research. The entire point is that 19 of the top 20 Christian pages, for example, are produced by offshore troll farms, and until recently, this was generally not known.
So no, you do not need to be a fairly active user, not at all. Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide.
That's my take, too. I know exactly the sort of mass-produced garbage content they're talking about, since I see things that my friends interacted with in my Feed. Therefore I am part of the 140 million people who was exposed to the media produced by these operations.
7/10 Americans are Christian[1]
So, there are around 210M American Christians on FB.
So, these posts reached roughly 60% of Christians. Sounds feasible to me. Top brands in a niche like Christians can get broad reach.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_S...
Propaganda can be divided into positioning and payload. Positioning is what is written to attract an audience. Payload is what the propagandist actually cares about.
There's very little payload. These farms aren't trying to "spread chaos" for its own sake. It's just a side effect of trying to gain an audience; clickbait media at its height was exactly the same.
Don't think the payload has anything to do with cultural issues. It's either narrow political stuff (I.e. getting people to believe Syrian rebels staged deadly attacks on themselves) or simply profit.
That’s it. Not profits (too many games possible), but the revenue itself. Call your senators and representatives.
Careful getting stuck in a frame where only a single antipattern exists. First, profit and narrow political stuff is a pretty broad area. Second, religion or culture has the potential to be a force in its own right... whether or not that's been the case here, so far.
Online religious movement exist, and some are big... but none have hit historic proportions yets. That doesn't mean none will. Christianity, or some other religious culture could easily have an arab spring, Trump or Brexit moment. Easily.
The existence of these pages can and might be of historical interest, depending on what happens to happen over the next 5-10 years. Christianity is a lot of people, don't underestimate the significance of religion.
It's not their only goal, but it is definitely among them.
From Dugin's 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics, to this day required reading in Russian military schools:
> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
(Joking, but a huge part of the reformation wars that consumed Europe for at least a hundred years was the question of foreign influence through the pulpit vs. domestic political loyalty/propaganda; you can still occasionally hear people denouncing "papism")
The publication conflates being foreign with trolling. It seems they care more about the speaker than the content.
At this point, trolling as a term has lost all meaning. It basically means anything that isn't standard left-wing-lite inclusivity.
And we so easily forget that countries like Poland and Hungary are deeply Christian conservative countries with links to American republicans. Yes the foreign American influence is real.
For example, Hillary was very popular (kind of not what you would expect) and they were able to make a lot on posting things about her for a long time, elections and after.
Question: Do you know why near every ice cream shop in Croatia is run by Albanians?
Answer: money
It might be the some foreign government involved I this but I doubt they are running this. This is all about money. And this article validates these assumptions.
As someone whose spent a bit of time in the Balkans can I just say that you can buy a Macedonian sim card with no ID for a few dollars and get perfect 4G signal from close to the border in 5 different countries without ever stepping foot in the place?
Not trying to defend what's happening here, but just saying, not all this stuff is as clearcut as it seems. Blaming these places seems a bit premature without understanding the region.
In the 2016 election there was a lot of fake news sites originating from Macedonia, and this is because since late 2000s there has been lots of digital marketers making quick bucks with black hat methods. I used to be a part of the forums, lots and lots of people did this full time, which was way more lucrative than the average 300 USD salary. Heck, high schoolers were dropping out of school to do this full time.
So this has nothing to do with the government of Kosovo or Macedonia or Serbia. And it could be russians routing IPs but I would doubt it, its just digital marketers trying to make a buck
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
Nation states hostile to the U.S. might hypothetically have been involved, but I’ve seen no such conclusions made in the report.
I still have some hope that Zuckerberg will come out soon and say that it was all a big practical joke to see how much people are willing to put up with, after which he pulls the plug. Well, one can dream.
Even more interesting would be Christian anti-vax since this would seem to involve many of the already existing networks discussed here. I've been following the Herman Cain Awards for some time now and you notice a consistency in the memes among particular groups of users. Same with phrasing and messaging. How much discourse is actually affected by these troll farms would be very interesting indeed as it has real life impact, such as huge numbers of needless deaths.
It's not even just about politics. There are multiple large troll farms unbelievably dedicated to producing completely bullshit "life hack" videos that blatantly don't work as posted. This is non-trivially expensive content to produce (not Hollywood-level expensive, of course, but the video content is beyond "point an iPhone at it" level by quite a ways), and it is produced by the bucketload, because the ad viewership is there.
These are parasites that attack any sufficiently-sized interest group of any kind.
Of course, the media eventually converged on this method after their golden goose of classified ads got pulled from under their feet by craigslist Facebook eBay etc.
I wonder how future historians will view this; in hindsight, will we be able to say it was an accident of economics that drove the outrage of today?
It’s no surprise that economically disadvantaged countries would have some subset of people taking advantage of the situation. It is no different than how the mafia takes advantage of gambling, etc.
1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link.
2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues.
3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content?
4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll?
5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people.
And for those who cannot help but ask "But why would....", while that is an interesting and valid question, it is orthogonal to this specific question.
For conventional browsers in a desktop environment I'd suspect all the normal methods of fingerprinting browsers would reveal a lot. And Netflix et al can detect VPNs from a browser, so clearly that's not impossible. I notice that Google Maps on my browser knows where I am despite me using a VPN, but then I'm also logged in to Google on my phone, so maybe it's just tracking my phone location rather than my browser location.
Interesting question - anyone know anything definite?
> 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content?
Bot generated content would definitely qualify as a troll farm.
1) Troll farm = Professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content
2) Through internal Facebook research in which documentation was leaked to journalists.
3) That's irrelevant to the story. The point is that the claimed motives behind the operators of the page are inauthentic and dishonest, and those claims could apply to either/both human and bot-generated content.
4) This question just makes your entire post sound like disingenuous trolling, but people of course expect honesty, and a page called "Kosovo engages with American Christians for profit" would not be criticized in the same way.
5) That's an obvious strawman - the people running the pages have shown to be dishonest in every way that their honesty can reasonably be measured.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21063547/oct-2019-fac...
You know, defining "provocative content" is a subjective endeavor. What is viewed as normal conversation in the real world by most people might be viewed as extremely problematic, unmitigated, obvious hate-speech by some in a Silicon Valley thought-bubble. How do we really clarify this?
> 2) internal Facebook research in which documentation was leaked to journalists.
a) How do we know that some Facebook employees are not using their own biases to give incorrect subjective labels to some content based on their own activist viewpoints? Maybe, maybe not, but I would stress that we're relying on subjective interpretations here and just have to trust them.
b) How do we know that the journalists who are interpreting this data and reporting on it are both willing and able to really do anything other than take the face-value interpretation of the data they were handed? I can count the number of journalists I've seen in my life who tried to dig into the nuanced details behind stories on one hand.
> 3) the claimed motives behind the operators of the page are inauthentic and dishonest
This is a hypothesis which may be (or likely is) reasonably supportable, but I would clarify that mind-reading has never been a thing.
> 4) a page called "Kosovo engages with American Christians for profit" would not be criticized in the same way.
Maybe. My goal isn't to necessarily defend these website operators. They might be, or even most likely are, creating random content to achieve fame and/or profit through social media. Ok, does that separate them from 99.9% of people/businesses/organizations on social media?
> 5) the people running the pages have shown to be dishonest in every way that their honesty can reasonably be measured.
My main goal in this set of comments isn't to necessarily defend the honor of these website operators. Maybe they're pure, manipulative scum?
My main goal is to point out that Facebook (and the media) has shown to be dishonest in every way that their honesty can reasonably be measured. I do not understand how anybody can trust this interpretation of the facts at face value for many, many reasons here.
Is that supposed to say something about journalism or your knowledge of journalism?
482b03a57155b5a44d80243383f9a22f
> 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link.
It's down to intent. I'd define it as: "A troll farm is intended to manipulate opinion in some manner for political goals by (mis)representing itself as a genuine member of the community it intends to manipulate."
> 2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues.
I don't think TFA provides any proof of its claims, but points to a MIT Technology Review article [0] that claims a report "obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it" as its source. It would be entirely reasonable to dismiss the entire article as "fake news" based on this attribution.
> 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content?
Again, no proof provided. Does that make a difference to the intent of the page, though?
> 4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll?
That's not what these pages do (post content in Eastern European languages intended for Eastern European audiences addressing issues faced by Eastern European christians). They're posting in English about things that are contentious for American readers.
> 5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people.
I didn't read that as a definitive claim, but more as an opinion expressed by one person.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210917012652/https://www.techn...
Correct me if I'm wrong but this seems like the issue is that content farms are able to successfully target Facebook's algorithm. (At least for certain topics)
With this sharing, the post spreads like wildfire from timeline to timeline.
How is this any different than what BuzzFeed or Upworthy were doing ten years ago to build their audiences?
It's frustrating that we're not shown content from these groups. Hard to imagine that stuff from "Happiness Is In Your Mind" or "Positive Quotes" lines up with the kind of stuff you'd imagine when you see the words "troll farm".
Its not reassuring, IMO, because the reason it effectively games Facebook and serves foreign interest in is because American Christians lap it up and relay it.
A lot of the "truth crisis" of online media relates to online media usage of the "invisible half."
Facebook went orbital around the same time that the internet went universal. Smartphones made the internet available to all those people who hadn't been using it in the 1990s & 2000s.
Around 2010, your uncle Dave got his first smartphone and started blasting hourly messages from mafia wars achievements. The average Angela & Gabriel from Manilla got connected to free, Facebook-only internet.
No one pays much attention to the laggards directly. I mean, they are noticeable in FBs DAUs, amazon's gross sales and such. They're just rarely noticed as disaggregated people. Facebook, or any distant tech company, has no idea what kind of impact they are have on this vast sea of people. Billions of people go from non computer users to using their smartphones for their media and communications, and no one close to Zuck speaks the language or has any idea what's going on.
We learn in retrospect. For most of the arab spring, social media was the official headquarters of dozens of active rebels, revolutionaries, political movements and everything in between. They had recruited armies on social media before the companies paid much attention to it.
Trump, Brexit, most political events of the last decade have been heavily tied to this phenomenon. It will keep happening.
Consider this. The current religious makeup of the world is the legacy of various religious explosions where a belief system "went viral," one way or another. From now on, this happens online.
The next vatican will be built in Zuck's front yard. From his perspective, he'll just discover one day that facebook now hosts the world's largest religion.
Twitter is inherently more "revolutionary" in aesthetics. Lots of politics, shrill arguments and such. It's also popular among journalists, politicians, and such. It represents a relatively elite user base.
FB is the populist social media site. Your Uncle who never had a computer until he got a smartphone in 2013, he's a facebook user. The fisherman who got a smartphone before home electricity, he's a facebook user.
The dichotomy isn't necessarily FB-Twitter, but a lot of social media's political stuff in the west (Brexit, Trump...) has come from the non elite parts of social media. It was neither mainstream nor fringe, which hints at the populism of it.
Religion is a great candidate for revolution. Major power shifts could happen in broad daylight and journalists, politicians and social media execs probably wouldn't even notice.
It's weaker in other countries. At any rate, it started out weaker.
So this sort of trolling is, in the early 21st century, peculiarly successful at targeting Americans. In that way it's similar to the televangelism craze of the late 20th century. Like televangelism, it is spreading globally.
FB should pay these trolls. They're a huge boost to FB's "engagement" business model. There's nothing to be done about it except mass boycotts (account cancellation) of FB. Clergy and other church leaders could try, if they got organized, to drive such boycotts. But they won't; FB is too convenient.
Similar analysis applies also to targeting of Black communities, in which church leaders are big offline influencers.
Social media is a niche finding, attention grabbing device. There's no mystery in how these got so many people's attention.
The question is what is being done with their attention. Most likely it's just selling them stuff. Most likely. A more unlikely, but also more worrying scenario is that some scheiter has suddenly become a messiah with 100m followers because FB algorithms accidentally did it.
I mean, people will do these sorts of things. But, if Zuck does it accidentally for cheese... I will be mad with him. ISIS was bad enough.
So, almost like a religion?
That's kinda weakness of english language itself, because when everybody is capable of using it, then it's hard to distinguish actual native speakers from foreign actors (and genuine users too) that are proficient at it,
meanwhile let's say that you have group of people only using some not so popular language like X, then it's way harder to pretend to be X user, so at worst you're being trolled by people from your country which may not have as bad intentions.
Or maybe I'm too optimistic about my not so popular language :)
Your insinuation that Christianity implies credulity and unfounded wishful thinking says a lot.
It says almost as much as you insulting someone for having different beliefs than you. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing “believers” should do.
Now, if you'd said FB refuse to ban violating game advertisers, that would be a much more likely state of affairs.
What is the definition of a "troll"? What makes these pages different than any other large social media page, almost all of which are presumably run by people for eyeball-click-generating financial purposes, just like these?
Facebook is full of personal opinions and misleading articles, it will never qualify as journalism, it's wide open to such abuse.
So the two poorest countries in Europe. And ones with incredibly pro-US stances, to the point where they don't have a foreign policy beyond whatever the US ambassador tells them to do.
What the article says without realizing it is that making a living off journalism is impossible in the first world. The rent extracted from monopoly advertising by Facebook and Google has made the majority of journalism and editorial jobs and all the distribution jobs that were part of newspapers untenable.
So you need to find the cheapest English(ish) speakers you can to both write the articles and be the equivalent of the news paper boy. If I were a younger man I'd head to Nigeria and start a troll farm there because the living standard is even lower than that of Macedonia and the number of English speakers higher.
> Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-15.htm
I guess this verse doesn't get much love in sermons, though. It might lead the flock to suspect their shepherds.