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Unless I missed it in skimming The Fine Article (I have a couple minutes between standup and another meeting, so time constraints), they're overlooking an, IMO,

• Stranger43 9y ago
  Except of cause that's also how very real grassroot movement's look especially those not made up of American college students, i.e. you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users. Remembering that almost all of facebooks growth potential is outside of the US. Facebook really cannot afford to just kick off people based on not being us college students. The problem is that while it might be easy to find someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be from a beltway centric viewpoint, it's far harder to differentiate between a bot and some yahoo posting her local mainstream view from a netcafe somewhere in Siberia.
  • rosser 9y ago
    > ...you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users. Which is why I said "further scrutiny", and not robo-ban. The tone of these posts is very much, and very consistently the whole "sow dissension" and "poke at wedge issues" shtick that is demonstrably part of how the Russians have been meddling in our shit — and which Facebook, perhaps knowingly, profited from. (Unless you're also suggesting that's somehow part of the "correct... beltway centric" narrative that NYT, &c, "think" we should have, and which is instead some kind of false-flag, psy-ops disinfo campaign — in which case, never mind; please don't waste my time further.) As your sibling comment describes them, they so often have a feel of "Markov chain gibberish", and not just "not being us college students" or "someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be". EDIT: Parenthetical.
    • Stranger43 9y ago
      The college student problem is btw a very real concern in social science i.e. way to many studies have been made using local college students as study subjects, which is useless in a world where the average person speaks bad English and think the US is the biggest threat to world peace(however wrong that view might be). I.E. you cannot and should not build your algorithm about what is normal for your local but have to look at data that might not be available to people other then Facebook. Foreign influence is a reality in every single election, worldwide, to the point where nobody have even accused Russia of doing something that the US would be comfortable making illegal when it comes to US based organizations interacting with foreign nations. The problem is that the entire debate starts from an obsolete(fake past) view on how interstate relations work in the modern world where the diplomatic corp plays the only major role, where as the reality is that with the modern Internet traditional diplomacy have given way to a much more direct people to people interaction meaning that you cannot just assume that a post being foreign and exposing a viewpoint that's not organic to the beltway are the product of state controlled a botnet, it might be a foreign movement deciding to engage in modern direct diplomacy. And Facebook cannot grow while remaining an US centric platform so the commercial drive for facebook is to become the facilitator of direct people to people diplomacy rather then a defender of the old diplomatic model as some American politicians obviously want them to be. And if you cannot use content or "national style" as a guide to spot bots you have to depend almost entirely of metadata about the IP or client involved especially as false positives based on content analysis have a potential for market backlash.
      • rosser 9y ago
        I'm talking about literally dozens of verbatim-identical posts on known-divisive issues, from different accounts in different cities — or even countries, though many-to-most of them are already in the US, mitigating so much of your counter-argument — and specifically not the viewpoint they're espousing (except insofar as that viewpoint tends, "with a probability approaching unity", to be driving an extant sociocultural or political wedge further in). This is about form, not content. You really need to understand that or we're talking past one another, and this conversation is moot. For another example of what I'm talking about, I saw a video a couple of holiday shopping seasons ago, that showed clips from local newscast after local newscast, from dozens of TV stations across the country, all prattling on — verbatim — about how you should "buy yourself a gift this Christmas!" It's a manipulation, that no-one not seeing the broadcasts from multiple markets will ever notice, because they never see another market's telecast. Obviously, if Facebook can aggregate these posts well enough to present them on a single "trending story" feed, they can damned well perform the step further analysis to check whether they're dropping verbatim posts, and whether there's anything else hinky about the accounts submitting those identical posts. These accounts, if they're fake, are being used to sow disinformation and dissension. They are not dialogue or diplomacy, let alone "direct people to people interaction". Facebook's "right" to grow in non-US markets is completely orthogonal to that, and also — IMO — way less important than, you know, "a functioning democracy." EDIT: phrasing.
• menacingly 9y ago
  I've noticed this too. It's not even just politics. You'll click topics about TV shows and see a ton of the exact same long post with errors from different people in different cities. Some descend into markov chain gibberish while others appear to be trying to genuinely sway public opinion in favor or Kim Kardashian or whatever