> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
I always joked to friends that Trump was the Manchurian candidate but I fear the truth was much darker.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.