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Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

419 points by ucaetano 9y ago

LeoJiWoo 9y ago
Its a time of political upheaval worldwide. Nationalists are rising or at least becoming more vocal in at least Britain, India, United States, Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan. They are direct threats to the established status quo. Censoring their political speech will cause a "Streisand Effect" and only further galvanize a backlash against the establishment. Social Media will probably be broken up by country (Ex. The chinese model), so that national laws on speech can be enforced. However pros and cons of the new political groups must be debated on a public stage.
- apearson 9y ago
  Wait hasn't the status quo been to be nationalist?
  - dbalbright 9y ago
    Negative. The status quo has been neoliberalism.
- pwaai 9y ago
  Not all of these protests or nationalism were organic, they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit There is increasing number of evidence that points to the ex-KGB officer now leading a nuclear armed 2.5 world country. If they can pull one on the US, the rest of Eastern Europe, or frankly any country facing an authoritarian government will face this new 'hybrid war'--combining cyberattacks, psy-ops on social media and backing separatists in the said country. I fear for both of my countries Korea and Canada as they are on the trajectory of colliding with Russian & Chinese interests...and we cannot even trust the US while it's going through an internal conflict. We've collectively realized just how powerful these social media platform is....people are heads down on their smartphones consuming low-dopamine hits that eventually overrides critical thinking. I also think that Facebook and Twitter are going to be facing a political and legal uphill battle once the establishment has thoroughly finished analyzing exactly step by step what happened. Honesty, regardless of his outside image, Putin is sweating. Instead of lifting sanctions he's earned the exact opposite. Instead of keeping former soviet blocs in check he scared them to the arms of US & Nato. This unrest he caused will fade as the US media ramps up their own psy-ops against Putin. I will go far as to predict that the Russian Federation will be broken into multiple countries in the near future as their economy is destroyed by the West....with China picking up scraps and benefiting greatly from the brain drain.
  - alva 9y ago
    > they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit Yes, the 73 pence spent by Russia on covering Brexit (the paid tweets were RT twitter promotions ) were responsible for Brexit. Not that Britain has had a vocal euro-sceptic contingent for over 40 years, satisfaction with the EU has been minor and the EU's handling of the refugee crisis. None of that. It was due to the 73p of Russian promoted tweets.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Quite. The British press has been doing its own indigenous fake news on Europe for years, before being flooded by this inferior foreign product. /s
  - moduspol 9y ago
    > Not all of these protests or nationalism were organic, they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit Nothing scares me more than unfalsifiable claims like this. "The vote didn't go my way, so it must have been illegitimate. If only people weren't entranced by Russian propaganda! My side would have won!" Truly disgusting. We're already seeing justifications for limiting speech. This is a very dark road we're going down.
    - pwaai 9y ago
      There is overwhelming evidence that is rejected by Trump supporters: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941120497823215616 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941120497823215616 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941376110381731841 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941376110381731841 I suggest you to read the facts and decide for yourself. I'm sure HNers are more than capable of connecting the dots.
      - moduspol 9y ago
        That's not overwhelming evidence--it's one guy spinning a narrative by assuming the worst and painting every occurrence in the worst possible way. But hey: HNers are typically good critical thinkers, so I'm sure they've seen spin before and know to take it with a grain of salt.
fortythirteen 9y ago
Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers. That's essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers. That wouldn't happen, because on the one hand no amount of money from the Republicans would persuade ABC/CBS/NBC to support them, and on the other hand they're quite glad to provide free support to the Democrats. The situation is reverse with Fox 'News,' of course. This isn't for any nefarious reason: it's just that pretty much everyone associated with mass media believes that the Republicans are evil and the Democrats are good. There's no amount of money which could persuade me to claim that all murder should be legal; likewise, there's no need to pay me to say that murder should be illegal. The situation is the same for the vast majority of showrunners & news anchors: they really are doing what they believe is right.
  - DigitalJack 9y ago
    The downvotes without reply to zeveb here pretty much prove zeveb's point.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  They do that all the time: Al Gore - 30 Rock Joe Biden/Michelle Obama - Parks and Rec Newt Gengrich - Murphy Brown Donna Brazil - Good Wife etc....
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    For 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, weren't those appearances after the people were already prominent and/or in office? The 30 Rock/Al Gore example in particular happened years after he was done running for public office. And even Parks and Rec wasn't so much advocating for Joe Biden/Michelle Obama as having a left leaning, political character be excited about the opportunity to meet them. I can also remember John McCain appearing on Parks and Rec.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
It's a pretty bad look. When I think of social tech I think of the possibility to magnify the voice/reach of individuals. When I read an article like this all I see is that magnification going solely to big spenders. How do I form an independent political ideology if I'm only being told the part of the story that heavily monied interests want me to hear? Would I ever experience an anti-monied-interest being put on a level playing field with the monied interest?
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  You read books, and you talk to real people imo.
- dqpb 9y ago
  Here is a thought experiment: Imagine a social platform with a nice API, no moderators, no global filters, and you're looking at a thread focused on a particular political issue. Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments". Lets say the volume of content produced by the chatbot is so high that if a user were to randomly browse comments in this thread, there is no statistically significant bias in favor of a particular position. Now the question is how can you enable the users to find "truth", or learn anything, or even meaningfully communicate with other users within this context?
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    I'd say the difference is in this: >Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments". If there are hundreds of thousands of strings then I absolutely can't. But I'd say on most issues there are probably max a few hundred positions. If I have to crawl through the same positions restated different ways over and over then truth is lost, if I can quickly browse one unique string for each position then it will take dedication but I can suss out what I believe and have some sort of backing for it. Dealing with information overload is sort of the unique problem of our times I suppose.
foodislove 9y ago
This is why I don't want Mark Zuckerberg in any public office. I really think the guy has no moral compass because all his actions point to a very sinister "money is everything" attitude and that everything has a price.
- joshAg 9y ago
  well, yeah. He's just another dude in SV that either has no clue about, or pretends to have no clue about, ethics.
- rndmize 9y ago
  Come now, Zuckerberg doesn't even need public office. He's more powerful where he is now than he could ever be in an elected position. Just based on the information in the article, he could offer technical embeds to campaigns he likes and ignore the ones he doesn't, or provide them with a much smaller degree of assistance, with no one the wiser. I don't think there's a single person in the world with as much potential to impact elections and policy choices as Zuckerberg today.
  - lsc 9y ago
    I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating... but my personal hope is that the current election was a fluke caused by things like facebook advertising being so new; The theory, of course, being that we build up immunities to certain kinds of advertising; there's always a race between us humans building up that immunity, and advertisers striving for novelty. If that theory holds, advertisers have a huge advantage every time a new platform rolls out, and that advantage is slowly eroded over time, as we humans get used to the new medium. Is it true? i don't know.
    - meri_dian 9y ago
      Or maybe there's nothing flukey about it. Trump talked about things people cared about in a straightforward, albeit bombastic, way. You may disagree with his approach, but others appreciated he was at least talking about things they cared about. Sure Hillary talked about those issues too, but she wasn't able to set a clear vision or ground her campaign in clearly defined and solid themes. We can only learn from failure by accepting it and studying it, not by dismissing it as a fluke.
decebalus1 9y ago
Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790687 To some extent it's still going on. Protests are still happening (and it's really bad) so lately I've been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about: - anti-protests - anti-EU and basically nationalistic bullshit - religion and how that will solve everything - government does nothing wrong and protesters are a bunch of thugs - links to well-known fake news websites - inciting violence while appearing to be pro-protest Groups of accounts such as these are brigading some popular news postings and I don't really find them inside the anti-protester echo rooms. the accounts look and feel similarly to the spam profiles which were prevalent a few years back having supermodel headshots as profile pictures. I reported about 12 such profiles and the response from Facebook was that I should block these accounts as a resolution, as they aren't doing anything wrong per Facebook community guidelines and they are legit accounts. In contrast, 'famous' people who are famously anti-government (and trolls, that's true, like this guy: https://www.facebook.com/macacaur https://www.facebook.com/macacaur) are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.
- trhway 9y ago
  > are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable. Sounds like hi tech version if voter ID and serving basically the same purpose.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Persona Management software is a real thing. This link is from 6 years ago. In the past 5 years, I'm sure it's been refined and weaponized. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
  - uep 9y ago
    Russian propaganda offices have been documented to be doing this for years as well. We know they've "weaponized" Facebook per the recent US presidential election. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/05/europe-vladimir-putin-russia-social-media-trolls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/05/europe-vladimi... http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/russias-online-comment-propaganda-army/280432/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/rus... http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/05/11/inside-putins-campaign-of-social-media-trolling-and-faked-ukrainian-crimes/#fa953de629db http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/05/11/i...
wavefunction 9y ago
Here's what I don't get. I got back onto facebook about six months ago after deleting my previous account. I was using the account to auth into news article commenting systems. Within 24 hours I apparently had ticked someone off who had reported me, because my account was locked until I scanned a photo ID of myself and uploaded it. If that happened to me, why isn't it happening to _everyone_?
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I hypothesize the shills/bot makers have figured out that accounts need to show recent and a relatively long activity history before unleashing them on comment systems, unlike your account.
- autokad 9y ago
  one time facebook suggested a friend, i got confused and clicked it thinking they were requesting friendship. the person responded by clicking they didnt know me and my account was banned for 3 days. facebook kinda sucks
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    It's like getting credit card offers saying you are "pre-approved". then you apply and get declined.
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      It's like a credit card offer that says you're pre-approved, but when you apply you get declined and your credit score drops significantly.
- shostack 9y ago
  I'm not sure you ticked someone off who reported you vs. tripped an automated check on FB's end that looks at new accounts that use old account identities, and locks them as suspicious (in case they were hacked, or someone trying to steal someone's identity) which is why they request the additional authentication via photo...
leakybit 9y ago
I don't really see a problem here. Facebook is providing training/guidance to customers on how to use it's software platform. Every other advertising platform allows political organizations, so why should Facebook be any different.
- autokad 9y ago
  i agree. Hillary had the opportunity to use the same services and she declined, whats the big deal? its not like she didnt have the budget either, according to this she had substantially more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign-finance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
- quadrangle 9y ago
  You mean you don't see a UNIQUE problem here. "How X enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda" would be an issue of interest and concern NO MATTER WHAT THE X IS.
  - leakybit 9y ago
    Which is the point. In reality the appropriate title is more along the lines: "How media enables Propaganda", so why single out just Facebook when they're just conforming to the industry standard? There's a simple solution to this, which is to write legislation to ban commercial political ads.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      I have the same inclination about ads, but I'm highly skeptical that such a solution would work fully. I'd be willing to give it a try though. The problem is bad enough that it's worth throwing solutions out and trying them until we see what sticks. The point about Facebook anyway, singling them out, is that it happens to be an article about Facebook and how they in particular do this. A similar article on "How Fox News…" or "How ESPN…" or "How the NYT…" would be appropriate also in the case that any of those places had a dedicated political unit which was interesting to report about, especially if it contradicts the way the entity prefers to present itself. Of course, it's reasonable to focus on Facebook merely in their dominance. And finally, it's possible at least that Facebook is actually worse in some ways (or just more effective at spreading propaganda etc), and I'm not ready to rule that out.
makomk 9y ago
What continues to fascinate me about stories like this is just how nakedly, obviously partisan the post-Trump reporting on the evils of social media is. Compare this with, for example, the tone of all the stories about how the Obama campaign used social media to win the previous election...
- praulv 9y ago
  There's a difference inciting violence and hatred versus party propaganda.
- mtberatwork 9y ago
  If I recall, the bulk of those stories occurred during Obama's first campaign. At that time social media was still in its infancy (Twitter, I believe, was only about a year old) and was a new phenomenon.
- oconnore 9y ago
  Most of the stories about social media are focused on the fact that it was non-US entities putting pro Trump posts up.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Social media has dramatically wider penetration, Facebook's algorithms are vastly different, and the malicious actors have figured out what works well. It shouldn't be a shock that the coverage has changed as a result.
qubex 9y ago
Facebook’s Community Standards are a total joke... no later than two days ago I came across a cartoon of a guy on public transport taking an ’upskirt’ without the woman’s consent only to start puking when he saw on his phone that she was menstruate (I kid you not). I of course reported it instantly. I promptly got an anodyne notification that ”I had done the right thing” reporting it it but that it was found ”not to violate Facebook’s community standards” so would not be taken down. I reported it again (this time as ”nudity or pornography”) and within 20 minutes my account was suspended for 24 hours. They’re dirt. And they’re too powerful.
- hkon 9y ago
  Why did this anger you so? Just a cartoon I'm thinking. edit: this is getting ridiculous at this point. downvotes for starting a conversation. come on.
  - qubex 9y ago
    Cartoon or not, or is a depiction of sexual objectification, harassment, profaning somebody’s personal space in a public context, and a denigration of womanhood. What is there to like about it?
    - bourgoin 9y ago
      One thing to like about it is that the poster had the ability to exercise speech without being censored because somebody found their speech distasteful. Of course, opinions on the value of censorship vary. One could argue that Facebook has a special responsibility to society due to their ubiquity, that their community standards are not stringent enough for that reason, and that they should be censoring more speech than they currently do. I guess that's what you mean when you say their standards are a "total joke." If that's so, I still think it would be good practice for them to moderate based on their publicly posted policies and not make exceptions. Facebook has the right to moderate content on their platform however they choose. I think that saying that Facebook is "dirt" and "too powerful" because they moderate the content on their own website according to their own rules is a bit excessive, although I might agree with those descriptors with respect to some other things that they do. You can find Facebook's standards on this topic here: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity I was surprised at how explicit their community standards are. After a thorough read, it seems that in this case, they exercised them with consistency and even-handedness. I also find that to be something to like about your story. 24 hour account suspension seems like reasonable sanction for abuse of the reporting system. Abuse of the reporting system makes moderation difficult and obviously has to be penalized to prevent users from taking down non-violating posts just because they are in disagreement. Allowing users to do that is certainly not a recipe for healthy discourse.
jhiska 9y ago
"Dark art" is really glorifying what those desk jockeys do. It's just a bunch of organized paid trolls with fancy ideas about themselves and what they do, because it's all secret-y and covert-y, but really, they're incompetent people who after slamming their head against the problem many times have group-devised by trial-and-error rather nifty ways of manipulating online conversations. Any place where you can add a comment is manipulable, but their manipulations only work if people aren't aware of their existence in the comments section and of their good-cop / bad-cop group tactics, the methodological flaws of anonymous online voting and why noise-flooding works.
IronWolve 9y ago
I find it laughable that facebook/twitter/etc says it cant tell the difference between "kill Jews" and "kill Palestinians". But 1 groups kill messages will mostly not be censored. Then they hire or allow groups to enforce rules who also cant tell the difference, and allow the "Kill Jew" statements to stay. Yet, seems, most of US can see both "kill xxx" statements are equally bad and should be removed. I don't think most of us have any special skills that make us enlightened, just not so partisan heavy in attitude.
0xbear 9y ago
According to “Let Trump Be Trump” by Corey Lewandowsky, _all_ major ad companies, not just FB, offered help in placing and targeting the ads. This is a standard practice if you spend at least tens of millions of dollars with them. Hillary’s campaign didn’t take their offer because they believed until the very end the election would be a slam dunk.
Indolat 9y ago
Ah Facebook... I stumbled upon a con artist's account on Facebook once. And I couldn't find any way to report it as a scam.
- ct0 9y ago
  Im taking this comment at face value. It's not that hard to report a user for at least the past 3 years.
  - Indolat 9y ago
    You can report a user for "hate speech" or something like that. There isn't any option to report a fraudulent account.
    - rock_hard 9y ago
      Not true. I just did so myself a couple weeks ago
      - Indolat 9y ago
        I didn't see any option for that. Got a screenshot?
- zjaffee 9y ago
  I once found a page that was falsely representing the FBI and they refused to take it down...
oliwarner 9y ago
I can't help but feel we're approaching a reckoning, in both senses, for platforms selling targeted access to their users. It's just too powerful. On one side it's propaganda, on the other it's illegal hiring practices (eg only advertising to young, able bodied men). I can't imagine a democratic world will tolerate this much longer.
- 659087 9y ago
  I sure hope you're right. It's far beyond time for the "changing the world!" and "Don't be evil" style feel-good propaganda of Silicon Valley to be pulled back to reveal the reality of what it has been used as cover for.
arun_einstein 9y ago
Should also remember that media as a industry dislikes new comers like facebook which are taking away their absolute power. They had such sway before social media, that the only news coming from these oligopolies were news and the rest was propaganda. Facebook with all its flaws is still a much more open system compared to traditional media. If you have fake news campaigns you can also make fact news campaigns, whereas with traditional media outlets, you'd have to setup expensive paper or tv channels to actually even begin to address a problem with the existing industry. This is felt quite sharply in India, about which this article complains. The person who killed the journalist in the article is yet to be found. Her own brother gave a statement that it might have been the doing of left-wing extremists in India. Unless you know who is culpable how can you insinuate it was due to some 'nationalist right wing trolls'? This article is just another witch hunt.
- barrkel 9y ago
  If you've ever been caught up in a mob and felt yourself losing your identity in the crowd, so that you could get swept away doing things you'd never do alone, you'll know how dangerous unstructured freedom is for people. We're tribal animals, but we're almost herd-like when we get caught up. It's important that the institutions that whip up the herd and point it around have some kind of checks and balances. We try and get by with the notion of offending public decency, of using concepts like honesty and integrity to shame people into doing the right thing, but it doesn't come naturally - it needs to be chosen, repeatedly and maintained.
rdiddly 9y ago
So what the CIA used to do on behalf of "American interests," Facebook now does without even that much of a moral compass.
idooontcare 9y ago
Facebook is manifesto of loosing privacy and internet ghettos. Please listen facebook's former bosses how they say facebook is manipulating every single thing to fit they own agenda.. and that agenda is far more sinister than you think.. https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk
beedogs 9y ago
Frankly, the world would be a much better, safer place without Facebook in it.
golemiprague 9y ago
The founding fathers were smarter than all of you, they just allowed free speech and let anybody say whatever they want. You can discuss it until tomorrow but that's the only viable solution which proved itself again and again. Facebook should let people say whatever they want and let the public be the judge. I don't need anybody to tell me how to consume my news.
vadimberman 9y ago
I remember back in late 1990s to early 2000s there was a fad for scaremongering articles about how computers and the Internet are the root of all evil. Looks like it's the turn of social networks now. > In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader. ...Seriously? How about another article on SEO companies training political campaign managers how to gain better ranking in Google?
- bagacrap 9y ago
  I think the point is that this is a group within Facebook, when Facebook has claimed that its status as a platform means it's not culpable (for hate speech, Russian sock puppets, age-biased job postings, etc.).
- qubex 9y ago
  Those articles back then probably had in mind some of the things that social media is occasioning now, they just didn't have the specific term for it so they lumped it all together under the big novel catch-all term “Internet”. I've read some eerily prescient forewarnings from that era, particularly about the undesirable side-effects of the “global village”.
panini_tech 9y ago
the stuff about that lady "Gowri Lankesh" is misreported here. Left wingers wish to link that murder to the state whereas the lady had a reputation of defamation and the courts had ruled her to apologize for abusing people without proof. Her family & her brother had disowned her due to her lies and was actually involved with mafia elements. please follow her twitter posts asking for peace among her friends who were "warring". Overall Modi government is voted by Majority Indian population and FB just came into lobby against the Net Neutrality which was rejected by The Indian Government rightly. Attributing Modi government success to FB is spreading news without substance. FB might be meddling in Indian affairs but thats FB's problem.
codeisawesome 9y ago
It is indeed very interesting to consider that the vast majority of internet enabled people across the world don’t read Hacker News, don’t read Bloomberg editorials - they just check their Facebook feed...
killjoywashere 9y ago
Facebook is different. Their leadership has clearly aligned with the Republican party on an operational level. Remember, Zuckerberg gave King Bush the Second his first big public engagement after his retirement. People who support Democrats may use the machinery of Facebook, but when Facebook wants steer the machine, they steer it, ever so slowly and quietly, toward Lakoff's strong father, and away from his nurturant parent.
gimmeminusnow4 9y ago
facebook and cia, is same organization.

419 points by ucaetano 9y ago

Its a time of political upheaval worldwide. Nationalists are rising or at least becoming more vocal in at least Britain, India, United States, Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan. They are direct threats to the established status quo. Censoring their political speech will cause a "Streisand Effect" and only further galvanize a backlash against the establishment. Social Media will probably be broken up by country (Ex. The chinese model), so that national laws on speech can be enforced. However pros and cons of the new political groups must be debated on a public stage.

apearson 9y ago
Wait hasn't the status quo been to be nationalist?
- dbalbright 9y ago
  Negative. The status quo has been neoliberalism.
pwaai 9y ago
Not all of these protests or nationalism were organic, they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit There is increasing number of evidence that points to the ex-KGB officer now leading a nuclear armed 2.5 world country. If they can pull one on the US, the rest of Eastern Europe, or frankly any country facing an authoritarian government will face this new 'hybrid war'--combining cyberattacks, psy-ops on social media and backing separatists in the said country. I fear for both of my countries Korea and Canada as they are on the trajectory of colliding with Russian & Chinese interests...and we cannot even trust the US while it's going through an internal conflict. We've collectively realized just how powerful these social media platform is....people are heads down on their smartphones consuming low-dopamine hits that eventually overrides critical thinking. I also think that Facebook and Twitter are going to be facing a political and legal uphill battle once the establishment has thoroughly finished analyzing exactly step by step what happened. Honesty, regardless of his outside image, Putin is sweating. Instead of lifting sanctions he's earned the exact opposite. Instead of keeping former soviet blocs in check he scared them to the arms of US & Nato. This unrest he caused will fade as the US media ramps up their own psy-ops against Putin. I will go far as to predict that the Russian Federation will be broken into multiple countries in the near future as their economy is destroyed by the West....with China picking up scraps and benefiting greatly from the brain drain.
- alva 9y ago
  > they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit Yes, the 73 pence spent by Russia on covering Brexit (the paid tweets were RT twitter promotions ) were responsible for Brexit. Not that Britain has had a vocal euro-sceptic contingent for over 40 years, satisfaction with the EU has been minor and the EU's handling of the refugee crisis. None of that. It was due to the 73p of Russian promoted tweets.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Quite. The British press has been doing its own indigenous fake news on Europe for years, before being flooded by this inferior foreign product. /s
- moduspol 9y ago
  > Not all of these protests or nationalism were organic, they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit Nothing scares me more than unfalsifiable claims like this. "The vote didn't go my way, so it must have been illegitimate. If only people weren't entranced by Russian propaganda! My side would have won!" Truly disgusting. We're already seeing justifications for limiting speech. This is a very dark road we're going down.
  - pwaai 9y ago
    There is overwhelming evidence that is rejected by Trump supporters: https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941120497823215616 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941120497823215616 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941376110381731841 https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/941376110381731841 I suggest you to read the facts and decide for yourself. I'm sure HNers are more than capable of connecting the dots.
    - moduspol 9y ago
      That's not overwhelming evidence--it's one guy spinning a narrative by assuming the worst and painting every occurrence in the worst possible way. But hey: HNers are typically good critical thinkers, so I'm sure they've seen spin before and know to take it with a grain of salt.

fortythirteen 9y ago

Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers. That's essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.

zeveb 9y ago
> Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers. That wouldn't happen, because on the one hand no amount of money from the Republicans would persuade ABC/CBS/NBC to support them, and on the other hand they're quite glad to provide free support to the Democrats. The situation is reverse with Fox 'News,' of course. This isn't for any nefarious reason: it's just that pretty much everyone associated with mass media believes that the Republicans are evil and the Democrats are good. There's no amount of money which could persuade me to claim that all murder should be legal; likewise, there's no need to pay me to say that murder should be illegal. The situation is the same for the vast majority of showrunners & news anchors: they really are doing what they believe is right.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  The downvotes without reply to zeveb here pretty much prove zeveb's point.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
They do that all the time: Al Gore - 30 Rock Joe Biden/Michelle Obama - Parks and Rec Newt Gengrich - Murphy Brown Donna Brazil - Good Wife etc....
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  For 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, weren't those appearances after the people were already prominent and/or in office? The 30 Rock/Al Gore example in particular happened years after he was done running for public office. And even Parks and Rec wasn't so much advocating for Joe Biden/Michelle Obama as having a left leaning, political character be excited about the opportunity to meet them. I can also remember John McCain appearing on Parks and Rec.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

It's a pretty bad look. When I think of social tech I think of the possibility to magnify the voice/reach of individuals. When I read an article like this all I see is that magnification going solely to big spenders. How do I form an independent political ideology if I'm only being told the part of the story that heavily monied interests want me to hear? Would I ever experience an anti-monied-interest being put on a level playing field with the monied interest?

hkmurakami 9y ago
You read books, and you talk to real people imo.
dqpb 9y ago
Here is a thought experiment: Imagine a social platform with a nice API, no moderators, no global filters, and you're looking at a thread focused on a particular political issue. Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments". Lets say the volume of content produced by the chatbot is so high that if a user were to randomly browse comments in this thread, there is no statistically significant bias in favor of a particular position. Now the question is how can you enable the users to find "truth", or learn anything, or even meaningfully communicate with other users within this context?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  I'd say the difference is in this: >Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments". If there are hundreds of thousands of strings then I absolutely can't. But I'd say on most issues there are probably max a few hundred positions. If I have to crawl through the same positions restated different ways over and over then truth is lost, if I can quickly browse one unique string for each position then it will take dedication but I can suss out what I believe and have some sort of backing for it. Dealing with information overload is sort of the unique problem of our times I suppose.

foodislove 9y ago

This is why I don't want Mark Zuckerberg in any public office. I really think the guy has no moral compass because all his actions point to a very sinister "money is everything" attitude and that everything has a price.

joshAg 9y ago
well, yeah. He's just another dude in SV that either has no clue about, or pretends to have no clue about, ethics.
rndmize 9y ago
Come now, Zuckerberg doesn't even need public office. He's more powerful where he is now than he could ever be in an elected position. Just based on the information in the article, he could offer technical embeds to campaigns he likes and ignore the ones he doesn't, or provide them with a much smaller degree of assistance, with no one the wiser. I don't think there's a single person in the world with as much potential to impact elections and policy choices as Zuckerberg today.
- lsc 9y ago
  I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating... but my personal hope is that the current election was a fluke caused by things like facebook advertising being so new; The theory, of course, being that we build up immunities to certain kinds of advertising; there's always a race between us humans building up that immunity, and advertisers striving for novelty. If that theory holds, advertisers have a huge advantage every time a new platform rolls out, and that advantage is slowly eroded over time, as we humans get used to the new medium. Is it true? i don't know.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    Or maybe there's nothing flukey about it. Trump talked about things people cared about in a straightforward, albeit bombastic, way. You may disagree with his approach, but others appreciated he was at least talking about things they cared about. Sure Hillary talked about those issues too, but she wasn't able to set a clear vision or ground her campaign in clearly defined and solid themes. We can only learn from failure by accepting it and studying it, not by dismissing it as a fluke.

decebalus1 9y ago

Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790687 To some extent it's still going on. Protests are still happening (and it's really bad) so lately I've been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about: - anti-protests - anti-EU and basically nationalistic bullshit - religion and how that will solve everything - government does nothing wrong and protesters are a bunch of thugs - links to well-known fake news websites - inciting violence while appearing to be pro-protest Groups of accounts such as these are brigading some popular news postings and I don't really find them inside the anti-protester echo rooms. the accounts look and feel similarly to the spam profiles which were prevalent a few years back having supermodel headshots as profile pictures. I reported about 12 such profiles and the response from Facebook was that I should block these accounts as a resolution, as they aren't doing anything wrong per Facebook community guidelines and they are legit accounts. In contrast, 'famous' people who are famously anti-government (and trolls, that's true, like this guy: https://www.facebook.com/macacaur https://www.facebook.com/macacaur) are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.

trhway 9y ago
> are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable. Sounds like hi tech version if voter ID and serving basically the same purpose.
r00fus 9y ago
Persona Management software is a real thing. This link is from 6 years ago. In the past 5 years, I'm sure it's been refined and weaponized. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
- uep 9y ago
  Russian propaganda offices have been documented to be doing this for years as well. We know they've "weaponized" Facebook per the recent US presidential election. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/05/europe-vladimir-putin-russia-social-media-trolls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/05/europe-vladimi... http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/russias-online-comment-propaganda-army/280432/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/rus... http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/05/11/inside-putins-campaign-of-social-media-trolling-and-faked-ukrainian-crimes/#fa953de629db http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/05/11/i...

wavefunction 9y ago

Here's what I don't get. I got back onto facebook about six months ago after deleting my previous account. I was using the account to auth into news article commenting systems. Within 24 hours I apparently had ticked someone off who had reported me, because my account was locked until I scanned a photo ID of myself and uploaded it. If that happened to me, why isn't it happening to _everyone_?

stevenwoo 9y ago
I hypothesize the shills/bot makers have figured out that accounts need to show recent and a relatively long activity history before unleashing them on comment systems, unlike your account.
autokad 9y ago
one time facebook suggested a friend, i got confused and clicked it thinking they were requesting friendship. the person responded by clicking they didnt know me and my account was banned for 3 days. facebook kinda sucks
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  It's like getting credit card offers saying you are "pre-approved". then you apply and get declined.
  - ascagnel_ 9y ago
    It's like a credit card offer that says you're pre-approved, but when you apply you get declined and your credit score drops significantly.
shostack 9y ago
I'm not sure you ticked someone off who reported you vs. tripped an automated check on FB's end that looks at new accounts that use old account identities, and locks them as suspicious (in case they were hacked, or someone trying to steal someone's identity) which is why they request the additional authentication via photo...

leakybit 9y ago

I don't really see a problem here. Facebook is providing training/guidance to customers on how to use it's software platform. Every other advertising platform allows political organizations, so why should Facebook be any different.

autokad 9y ago
i agree. Hillary had the opportunity to use the same services and she declined, whats the big deal? its not like she didnt have the budget either, according to this she had substantially more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign-finance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
quadrangle 9y ago
You mean you don't see a UNIQUE problem here. "How X enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda" would be an issue of interest and concern NO MATTER WHAT THE X IS.
- leakybit 9y ago
  Which is the point. In reality the appropriate title is more along the lines: "How media enables Propaganda", so why single out just Facebook when they're just conforming to the industry standard? There's a simple solution to this, which is to write legislation to ban commercial political ads.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    I have the same inclination about ads, but I'm highly skeptical that such a solution would work fully. I'd be willing to give it a try though. The problem is bad enough that it's worth throwing solutions out and trying them until we see what sticks. The point about Facebook anyway, singling them out, is that it happens to be an article about Facebook and how they in particular do this. A similar article on "How Fox News…" or "How ESPN…" or "How the NYT…" would be appropriate also in the case that any of those places had a dedicated political unit which was interesting to report about, especially if it contradicts the way the entity prefers to present itself. Of course, it's reasonable to focus on Facebook merely in their dominance. And finally, it's possible at least that Facebook is actually worse in some ways (or just more effective at spreading propaganda etc), and I'm not ready to rule that out.

makomk 9y ago

What continues to fascinate me about stories like this is just how nakedly, obviously partisan the post-Trump reporting on the evils of social media is. Compare this with, for example, the tone of all the stories about how the Obama campaign used social media to win the previous election...

praulv 9y ago
There's a difference inciting violence and hatred versus party propaganda.
mtberatwork 9y ago
If I recall, the bulk of those stories occurred during Obama's first campaign. At that time social media was still in its infancy (Twitter, I believe, was only about a year old) and was a new phenomenon.
oconnore 9y ago
Most of the stories about social media are focused on the fact that it was non-US entities putting pro Trump posts up.
ceejayoz 9y ago
Social media has dramatically wider penetration, Facebook's algorithms are vastly different, and the malicious actors have figured out what works well. It shouldn't be a shock that the coverage has changed as a result.

qubex 9y ago

Facebook’s Community Standards are a total joke... no later than two days ago I came across a cartoon of a guy on public transport taking an ’upskirt’ without the woman’s consent only to start puking when he saw on his phone that she was menstruate (I kid you not). I of course reported it instantly. I promptly got an anodyne notification that ”I had done the right thing” reporting it it but that it was found ”not to violate Facebook’s community standards” so would not be taken down. I reported it again (this time as ”nudity or pornography”) and within 20 minutes my account was suspended for 24 hours. They’re dirt. And they’re too powerful.

hkon 9y ago
Why did this anger you so? Just a cartoon I'm thinking. edit: this is getting ridiculous at this point. downvotes for starting a conversation. come on.
- qubex 9y ago
  Cartoon or not, or is a depiction of sexual objectification, harassment, profaning somebody’s personal space in a public context, and a denigration of womanhood. What is there to like about it?
  - bourgoin 9y ago
    One thing to like about it is that the poster had the ability to exercise speech without being censored because somebody found their speech distasteful. Of course, opinions on the value of censorship vary. One could argue that Facebook has a special responsibility to society due to their ubiquity, that their community standards are not stringent enough for that reason, and that they should be censoring more speech than they currently do. I guess that's what you mean when you say their standards are a "total joke." If that's so, I still think it would be good practice for them to moderate based on their publicly posted policies and not make exceptions. Facebook has the right to moderate content on their platform however they choose. I think that saying that Facebook is "dirt" and "too powerful" because they moderate the content on their own website according to their own rules is a bit excessive, although I might agree with those descriptors with respect to some other things that they do. You can find Facebook's standards on this topic here: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#nudity I was surprised at how explicit their community standards are. After a thorough read, it seems that in this case, they exercised them with consistency and even-handedness. I also find that to be something to like about your story. 24 hour account suspension seems like reasonable sanction for abuse of the reporting system. Abuse of the reporting system makes moderation difficult and obviously has to be penalized to prevent users from taking down non-violating posts just because they are in disagreement. Allowing users to do that is certainly not a recipe for healthy discourse.

jhiska 9y ago

"Dark art" is really glorifying what those desk jockeys do. It's just a bunch of organized paid trolls with fancy ideas about themselves and what they do, because it's all secret-y and covert-y, but really, they're incompetent people who after slamming their head against the problem many times have group-devised by trial-and-error rather nifty ways of manipulating online conversations. Any place where you can add a comment is manipulable, but their manipulations only work if people aren't aware of their existence in the comments section and of their good-cop / bad-cop group tactics, the methodological flaws of anonymous online voting and why noise-flooding works.

IronWolve 9y ago

I find it laughable that facebook/twitter/etc says it cant tell the difference between "kill Jews" and "kill Palestinians". But 1 groups kill messages will mostly not be censored. Then they hire or allow groups to enforce rules who also cant tell the difference, and allow the "Kill Jew" statements to stay. Yet, seems, most of US can see both "kill xxx" statements are equally bad and should be removed. I don't think most of us have any special skills that make us enlightened, just not so partisan heavy in attitude.

0xbear 9y ago

According to “Let Trump Be Trump” by Corey Lewandowsky, _all_ major ad companies, not just FB, offered help in placing and targeting the ads. This is a standard practice if you spend at least tens of millions of dollars with them. Hillary’s campaign didn’t take their offer because they believed until the very end the election would be a slam dunk.

Indolat 9y ago

Ah Facebook... I stumbled upon a con artist's account on Facebook once. And I couldn't find any way to report it as a scam.

ct0 9y ago
Im taking this comment at face value. It's not that hard to report a user for at least the past 3 years.
- Indolat 9y ago
  You can report a user for "hate speech" or something like that. There isn't any option to report a fraudulent account.
  - rock_hard 9y ago
    Not true. I just did so myself a couple weeks ago
    - Indolat 9y ago
      I didn't see any option for that. Got a screenshot?
zjaffee 9y ago
I once found a page that was falsely representing the FBI and they refused to take it down...

oliwarner 9y ago

I can't help but feel we're approaching a reckoning, in both senses, for platforms selling targeted access to their users. It's just too powerful. On one side it's propaganda, on the other it's illegal hiring practices (eg only advertising to young, able bodied men). I can't imagine a democratic world will tolerate this much longer.

659087 9y ago
I sure hope you're right. It's far beyond time for the "changing the world!" and "Don't be evil" style feel-good propaganda of Silicon Valley to be pulled back to reveal the reality of what it has been used as cover for.

arun_einstein 9y ago

Should also remember that media as a industry dislikes new comers like facebook which are taking away their absolute power. They had such sway before social media, that the only news coming from these oligopolies were news and the rest was propaganda. Facebook with all its flaws is still a much more open system compared to traditional media. If you have fake news campaigns you can also make fact news campaigns, whereas with traditional media outlets, you'd have to setup expensive paper or tv channels to actually even begin to address a problem with the existing industry. This is felt quite sharply in India, about which this article complains. The person who killed the journalist in the article is yet to be found. Her own brother gave a statement that it might have been the doing of left-wing extremists in India. Unless you know who is culpable how can you insinuate it was due to some 'nationalist right wing trolls'? This article is just another witch hunt.

barrkel 9y ago
If you've ever been caught up in a mob and felt yourself losing your identity in the crowd, so that you could get swept away doing things you'd never do alone, you'll know how dangerous unstructured freedom is for people. We're tribal animals, but we're almost herd-like when we get caught up. It's important that the institutions that whip up the herd and point it around have some kind of checks and balances. We try and get by with the notion of offending public decency, of using concepts like honesty and integrity to shame people into doing the right thing, but it doesn't come naturally - it needs to be chosen, repeatedly and maintained.

rdiddly 9y ago

So what the CIA used to do on behalf of "American interests," Facebook now does without even that much of a moral compass.

idooontcare 9y ago

Facebook is manifesto of loosing privacy and internet ghettos. Please listen facebook's former bosses how they say facebook is manipulating every single thing to fit they own agenda.. and that agenda is far more sinister than you think.. https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk

beedogs 9y ago

Frankly, the world would be a much better, safer place without Facebook in it.

golemiprague 9y ago

The founding fathers were smarter than all of you, they just allowed free speech and let anybody say whatever they want. You can discuss it until tomorrow but that's the only viable solution which proved itself again and again. Facebook should let people say whatever they want and let the public be the judge. I don't need anybody to tell me how to consume my news.

vadimberman 9y ago

I remember back in late 1990s to early 2000s there was a fad for scaremongering articles about how computers and the Internet are the root of all evil. Looks like it's the turn of social networks now. > In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader. ...Seriously? How about another article on SEO companies training political campaign managers how to gain better ranking in Google?

bagacrap 9y ago
I think the point is that this is a group within Facebook, when Facebook has claimed that its status as a platform means it's not culpable (for hate speech, Russian sock puppets, age-biased job postings, etc.).
qubex 9y ago
Those articles back then probably had in mind some of the things that social media is occasioning now, they just didn't have the specific term for it so they lumped it all together under the big novel catch-all term “Internet”. I've read some eerily prescient forewarnings from that era, particularly about the undesirable side-effects of the “global village”.

panini_tech 9y ago

the stuff about that lady "Gowri Lankesh" is misreported here. Left wingers wish to link that murder to the state whereas the lady had a reputation of defamation and the courts had ruled her to apologize for abusing people without proof. Her family & her brother had disowned her due to her lies and was actually involved with mafia elements. please follow her twitter posts asking for peace among her friends who were "warring". Overall Modi government is voted by Majority Indian population and FB just came into lobby against the Net Neutrality which was rejected by The Indian Government rightly. Attributing Modi government success to FB is spreading news without substance. FB might be meddling in Indian affairs but thats FB's problem.

codeisawesome 9y ago

It is indeed very interesting to consider that the vast majority of internet enabled people across the world don’t read Hacker News, don’t read Bloomberg editorials - they just check their Facebook feed...

killjoywashere 9y ago

Facebook is different. Their leadership has clearly aligned with the Republican party on an operational level. Remember, Zuckerberg gave King Bush the Second his first big public engagement after his retirement. People who support Democrats may use the machinery of Facebook, but when Facebook wants steer the machine, they steer it, ever so slowly and quietly, toward Lakoff's strong father, and away from his nurturant parent.

gimmeminusnow4 9y ago

facebook and cia, is same organization.