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Removing Bad Actors on Facebook
- jakelarkin 8y ago"inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it. propaganda, information warfare, disinformation, incitement, false flags, fake news ;)
- crispyambulance 8y agoYeah, there exists perfectly good vocabulary words for naming this stuff. Yet for some reason facebook has chosen to neutralize their language. I wonder why? BTW Infowars is still up on facebook, right?
- admax88q 8y agoMaybe because inauthentic behaviour accurately describes all those different words in a single two work statement?
- maze-le 8y agoI'm pretty sure propaganda can be very authentic, as well as incitement. It really only depends on the audience...
- crispyambulance 8y ago"Inauthentic behavior" is not intrinsically offensive by itself and could mean almost anything or nothing at all. "Disinformation campaigns to induce people to vote against their own interests", that's more precise, much better. What? Are we trying to conserve words here?
- xienze 8y ago> "inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it. It's how they can square the circle of "Russians are trying to sow division" with content that is identical to that which is created by domestic actors. E.g., pro-BLM Facebook post posted by an American = good, same pro-BLM Facebook post posted by a Russian? Bad! Sowing division! Inauthentic behavior!
- equalunique 8y ago"Once a KGB, always a KGB!" So does that also apply to all the "former" intel people in the American MSM? They work for three letter agencies that are legally authoized to lie to the American public...
- smileysteve 8y agoRay Bans on Sale! Images haunt my facebook.
- tomc1985 8y agoAll this sounds great until legitimate political orgs get blacklisted because someone at FB thinks they're astroturfing Regardless of who actually created the event, I can imagine that posting a removal notice of a political event is going to trigger the conspiracy nuts and aggravate distrust against FB
- rrauenza 8y agoIf you're skimming this, as I was, and seem confused -- IRA in this article is not the Irish Replubican Army... > Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)
- Timpy 8y ago"But security is not something that’s ever done." I initially read this as "Security is something that nobody ever does." Not to be pedantic, but "finished" would have been less ambiguous.
- nailer 8y agoIt's a pretty common acronym - there's a fund people invest in also called an IRA, and Boston excepted, they're investing in funds for their retirement, not the Irish Republican Army.
- Rjevski 8y agoFacebook themselves are a bad actor.
- iamdave 8y agoThis is something that's been in the noggin for a while, kind of like a bottle of some spice that sits in the back of your kitchen cabinet; you know it's there, but never really use it or even touch it-but you always remind yourself to seek out recipes where it may have some flavor value but otherwise you never use it. "Facebook themselves are a bad actor" is the comment that jiggled the mind-cabinet enough for that spice bottle to fall off the rack and into full view. That's the head space I'm in when I ask this question. So with that Caveat Lector out of the way: Am I out of line in thinking Facebook kind of opened the doors for this by aggressively "graphing" social connections and going full speed at turning relationships into algorithms and then giving everyone and their mama the tools to sculpt all of this data however they please? And that they're probably getting off way too easy? Last night I said to a friend with much sincerity: I miss the days of MySpace and LiveJournal where I could collect all of my friends into one online space, my own little corner of the internet and interact with them on my terms. No nudges to participate in a post, no prompts to go look at what someone else is doing, no suggestions I go buy what my friend just bought and shared simply because "it's my friend". It existed, we were there, and we didn't need MySpace's help to interact with each other. Of course, that was a different Internet where everyone wasn't trying to analyze and monetize your every click and keystroke. Just kind of thinking out loud. But curious what others think.
- mcfunk 8y agoI've had this conversation with friends, too, about missing LiveJournal. The interactions were much more organic and fully fleshed-out. It was about sharing our internal life in a more intentional way that wasn't corporatized (unless you wanted to pay a few bucks to be able to have custom emojis), wasn't related to ad content or data or profiling. In these conversations it seems fairly unanimous that people miss it, but changing patterns is easier said than done, plus LJ itself has that whole "now hosted in Russia" thing that concerns people.
- 8y ago
- mooneater 8y agoIf they publish every time they remove "32 Pages and accounts": 1) that will be a lot of blog posts 2) it will take a rather long time to chew through the vast quantities of fake accounts and bad actors
- peter_retief 8y agoLets get over this bad app called facebook, its actually not that relevant
- praneshp 8y agoRelevant enough for you to type 10 words....
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- peter_retief 8y agohmmm...I guess so, 13 words?
- zapt02 8y agoThis is interesting, but it's not clear from the article what the groups in question were actually doing - they don't seem to be directly connected to the republican party or Russia.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vuln 8y agoObviously Facebook wasn't making enough revenue from these accounts / page(s) to turn a blind eye. Give Facebook $100k and they'll allow you to upend a democracy.
- Timpy 8y agoGive a politician $100K and they'll allow you to upend a democracy
- vuln 8y agoThe combined amount spent in the 2016 presidental campaign was over 5 billion dollars. Maybe Russian money is worth more? https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/03/07/the-2016-presidential-money-race https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/03/07/the-2016...
- cm2012 8y agoThe thing is, the ad spend of the bad actors during the election was basically inconsequential. But the organic reach was huge since inflammatory fake stuff spreads easily, especially if you pay 100s of people controlling individual accounts to boost it.
- vuln 8y ago$100k versus 5 billion dollars spent by the presidential campaigns. Why are these people working for the IRA? Wouldn't they make billions in marketing anything other than political division? https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/03/07/the-2016-presidential-money-race https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/03/07/the-2016...
- ng12 8y agoSo the Russian bots are posting left-wing content? How does that work? EDIT: Looking for clarification, here. Not sure why I'm being downvoted.
- skrebbel 8y agoIf the sources I read were itself not fake, the idea is that they simply try to increase the gap between left and right. Decrease mutual understanding, prevent dialog between sides, increase mistrust. I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though. But hey, I have no idea what their end game is. I'm sure someone here has ideas.
- pnathan 8y ago> I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though. Decreases the will of the US to effectively achieve its aims, which run counter in many ways to the Putin regime. If congress is spending its days shouting at each other, then they can't do awkward things like, e.g., provide substantial support in rhetoric and materials to the Ukraine to address Russia's invasion.
- nrhk 8y agoFoundations of Geopolitics by Durgin lays out the groundwork for Russia's current western strategy. Putin's been implementing it word for word.
- theNJR 8y agoInteresting to note that Amazon seems to have removed this book https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-English-Translation/dp/1521994269 https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-...
- nasredin 8y agoThere's quite a few old and freshly minted Kremlinologists who have been studying Russia their whole life that you can read. (As opposed to random strangers on this forum!) E.g.: Mark Galleotti
- gfodor 8y agoIt sure would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that these bad actors are clearly non-partisan, and are simply trying to cause civil unrest in the US by agitating both sides of the political spectrum. I'm sure these state actors are thrilled that their plan has gone so well -- not only are their agitations seemingly driving the population apart, but the wider politicization of the issue itself, fueled by the media, where people think the bad guys are acting to tip the scales in the favor of the opposition just plays further into the hands of these actors and does more to fracture our society than any of these stupid Facebook ad campaigns they're concocting ever could.
- cm2012 8y agoSo the thing is, it is partisan, towards the republican party. When they showed liberal issues during the election, it wasn't ones that would drive the average liberal vote. It was issues that would drive conservative outrage, like Antifa ads saying to burn down society, etc. And IIRC correctly, the ad spend they did was showing these liberal ads to conservative audiences, which would make no sense if it was non partisan.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gfodor 8y agoThis article shows the state actors actively organizing left-wing counter-protests. Your narrative is part of the problem.
- throwaway82729 8y agoNo, it doesn't. It just says that they were connected to the protests.
- nailer 8y agoThe article specifically states the state actors created an event, and then coordinated with five legitimate pages to co-host the event: > The “Resisters” Page also created a Facebook Event for a protest on August 10 to 12 and enlisted support from real people. The Event – “No Unite the Right 2 – DC” – was scheduled to protest an August “Unite the Right” event in Washington. Inauthentic admins of the “Resisters” Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event. These legitimate Pages unwittingly helped build interest in “No Unite Right 2 – DC” and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests.
- cm2012 8y agoThis is awesome. I'm glad Facebook is getting more involved in moderating astroturfed stuff.
- thecomments 8y agoOnce again, we are seeing very skilled PR from Facebook. Problem: Media have painted Facebook as an enabler of propaganda Reality: There is so much activity on Facebook it is impossible to manage, even with the best AI tools available. There is likely next to nothing they can actually do to stop coordinated exploitation by highly skilled and intelligent state actors. Solution: Make a hollow yet visible action to take steps in the right direction and use it as cover to make a public statement of values knowing that this action is fundamentally inconsequential and that the media and public will be temporarily fooled since most people don’t understand the real situation.
- holowire 8y agoI'm with you on the analysis. > There is likely next to nothing they can actually do to stop coordinated exploitation by highly skilled and intelligent state actors. If they weren't so spineless, the solution is simple, at least in the time leading up to elections. Shut it down. Turn off ads. Disable non-profile pages. Allowing blatant manipulation of the platform deserves a blunt solution. Maybe let people think for themselves for once? Facebook is a convenience, not a necessity.
- sjroot 8y agoThat makes zero business sense and will never happen. It isn't Facebook's responsibility to teach people how to identify advertisements or posts trying to sway their opinion.
- holowire 8y agoI don't disagree, and it's not facebook's responsibility to teach people how to identify manipulative content, but that viewpoint is too narrow. People blindly trust facebook because it is positioned as a safe place on the internet. Users let their guard down and don't think about what they are seeing critically enough to not let themselves be manipulated. And that's exactly what facebook wants from an advertising revenue perspective. It is in their gross negligence of responsibility in keeping user data safe and out of the hands of bad actors that their complicity lies. If facebook wants to assume ownership over our data, then they are responsible for it, and by extension what others do with it.
- YinglingLight 8y ago"On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today. Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events." Facebook is a convenient collateral damage victim the Traditional Media is willing to make to further their narrative. It continues to fuel the cognitive dissonance for 50% of the country.
- sctb 8y agoWe detached this generic political tangent from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654791.
- thetrumanshow 8y agoCornfielding good discussion looks terrible on you HN. Please stop.
- megaman22 8y agoI wonder what FB would do if they had bought more than $11000 measly dollars in ads? All of these examples are identical in form to content that is otherwise plastered all over Facebook and Instagram. Especially Instagram; that's basically all shitposting and memes still over there, like Facebook was in its youth.
- vuln 8y agoThey would have gladly accepted the money and turned the other way. 11k is rookie numbers. I'm sure they'll spend more tomorrow on the new page they spin up.
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoCoordinated attempts to influence elections? Are you sure you didn't mean to write "political campaigns"? Are you also implying that politicians aren't always authentic and honest when they go on campaign? Heavens to Betsy.
- vuln 8y agoThose same people have zero issue with gerrymandering.
- j-c-hewitt 8y agoIs that making 10 million fake accounts that have the first name 'gerry'? I was born yesterday so a lot of these figures of speech are confusing to me.
- mitchty 8y agoThe first hit on google is rather informative as to the terms meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
- machiavelli1024 8y agoGoogle is your friend. In short: gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing voting district boundaries to ensure your victory in as many districts as possible.
- ithilglin909 8y agoYou might consider looking up the word "sarcasm", while you're at it.
- machiavelli1024 8y agoThanks, I've checked it! If I understand it correctly, your comment is a poor attempt at it.
- nikolay 8y agoWhy is Zuck's account still active then?
- mankypro 8y agoWe are witnessing very dangerous times. Groupthink is real now. If you disagree with a new story you can simply claim it’s “fake news”. Getting doxxed is a real possibility. The 4th estate is no longer to be trusted. “May you live in interesting times” is no longer just a fortune in a cookie...
- iamdave 8y agoIf you disagree with a new story you can simply claim it’s “fake news”. Wonder if this is an entirely new phenomenon, or if with Trump we just got some new, and easy to prescribe nomenclature for this phenomenon you describe. Edit: is there something objectionable about what either myself or the person I replied to said, if so I welcome a discussion on it. There's a LOT of downvote activity happening in this thread over completely reasonable arguments that are worth discussing here.
- mankypro 8y agoIt’s funny, the downvote wars going on, I’ve lost karma for a comment that’s innocuous. Just comes to show the world we live in where solipsism is pandemic.
- creaghpatr 8y agoPointlessness of banning a mere 32 pages aside, their stock is up 1% today so they'll box it up as a win internally.
- cs702 8y agoA quick thought: There is one actor on Facebook that Facebook can never -- indeed, will never -- consider removing... regardless of how bad or horrendous the community considers the behavior of that actor. That actor is of course Facebook itself.
- asdfman123 8y agoIf I removed bad actors on Facebook I would lose half of the friends I met doing improv comedy.
- huhtenberg 8y agoAre you here until Friday?
- asdfman123 8y agoNo, but I have a show every Tuesday. For the love of God, please come out. Admission is $2.
- nasredin 8y agoOne annoying thing about the people who run and use this site: they don't like comedy and especially, good puns. Try SlashDot.
- asdfman123 8y agoMy services are very highly valued on reddit and I have the comment karma to prove it.
- monksy 8y ago> "coordinated inauthentic behavior" Shouldn't they come out and say propaganda campaigns. I still have questions about what they deem as acceptable and where they place hte line.
- casefields 8y agoNo because then they’ll have to answer for the “legitimate” propaganda that we are fine with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America Until 2013 it was illegal to broadcast VOA to Americans: https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-14160-us-repeals-ban-broadcasting-voice-america-other-government-funded-news-american-audien https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-14160-us-repeals-ban...
- equalunique 8y agoSpeaking of VOA & Russian meddling, I wonder why CrowdStrike would not recant their Russian hacking claims after Ukraine proved to VOA that they were fabricated: https://www.voanews.com/a/crowdstrike-comey-russia-hack-dnc-clinton-trump/3776067.html https://www.voanews.com/a/crowdstrike-comey-russia-hack-dnc-...
- nvr219 8y agoThey're probably avoiding that word because propaganda is most closely associated with governments and they are not sure that this is driven by a government.
- andrewla 8y agoPeople can reasonably disagree on what constitutes propaganda, which is why I like the language that they are using here. Coordinated inauthentic behavior -- multiple account purporting to be unrelated acting in tandem. Regardless of where you land on the magnitude of election interference vs. information warfare, and state actors vs. trolls vs. hacker collectives, this behavior, using sock puppets to create the impression that information is coming from multiple independent sources, is worth exposing.
- 8y ago
- zjaffee 8y agoI have to say that this is essentially insignificant, they have only removed 32 pages where there are likely 100s of thousands of pages that are run by scammers. This is not something that can be solved without requiring every page that could be verified to have this be done. Maybe a year back, I was contacted by a fraudster claiming to be affiliated with the FBI, they had a facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/FBI-of-Cambridge/161182553906717 https://www.facebook.com/pages/FBI-of-Cambridge/161182553906...), which has still not been taken down even after my report saying what exactly this was. Their response was "Thanks for your report - you did the right thing by letting us know about this. We looked over the Page you reported, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, we understand that the Page or something shared on it may still be offensive to you. We want to help you avoid things you don't want to see on Facebook."
- merpnderp 8y agoGoing after political subversion groups first seems like a great priority. If they are just now starting for real, they’re starting in the right place.
- zjaffee 8y agoAbsolutely, but I think with the case of political subversion, it has a much less clear practical impact on their every day users. I could easily see an older person who isn't as technically inclined seeing that this FBI location has a facebook page and just assuming they are legitimate.
- caf 8y agoIf "impersonating a government agency" doesn't breach their Community Standards, their Community Standards need updating.
- dawhizkid 8y agoWhat is the recall of these efforts, that is, what % of the "true bad actors" are they actually catching? My gut is that it's a whack-a-mole problem and it's not getting better.
- gammateam 8y agothe federal government should send real intelligence officials to police this effort at this point. isn't this literally what the national security letters were for? and don't get started on that slippery slope stuff, we are deeeeep in the mariana's trench with regard to NSL and what the intelligence community does to private companies.
- dionian 8y agoThe Federal Government should not be in the business of censorship.
- gammateam 8y agoif thats the line for you, then they don't need to do that, they need to be there in real time helping Facebook investigate where these users are coming from, instead of getting reports later after the Facebook security team says they're behind 7 proxies.
- samschooler 8y agoThis statement terrifies me: > It’s an arms race and we need to constantly improve too. It’s why we’re investing heavily in more people and better technology to prevent bad actors misusing Facebook To me this sounds like "We need to make sure who is real, so we need more information for our AI algorithm; lets gather more data."
- rossdavidh 8y agoSo, I know it's easy to slam FB, and I'm no fan of the company, BUT...this is a really hard problem. Whether they are just making an attempt for the sake of looking like they are making an attempt, or actually trying to solve the problem, the fact is, preventing an institution the size of a major nation government from manipulating the discourse on their platform, is difficult bordering on impossible. Like spam, we should try, but like spam, don't expect it to get solved any time soon.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agothis is a really hard problem I tried to make this case to an investor who hates Facebook, and their response was: "They have billions of dollars, they can fix it if they want to." Mind you this person is savvier than most about business and technology, and he didn't quite grok the concept of difficulty solving the authentication and content moderation problem at 2B+ user scale is not solved by throwing more people at it. Worth invoking this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- nitwit005 8y agoPeople sometimes forget that the other side can also have billions of dollars.
- antpls 8y ago> Like spam, we should try, but like spam, don't expect it to get solved any time soon. I don't understand. To me, spam was solved decades ago by Gmail with a simple Bayesian filter. I can still read the spam I receive if I look into the spam folder, so there is no censorship or moderation taking place. I can chose what is spam or not and it reduces noise in my inbox. Why not do the same on just everything else?
- pjc50 8y agoIt's not about you. It's about messages other people are receiving about you. For example, Alex Jones insisting that the parents of some murdered children are fakes has resulted in them receiving death threats offline: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/09/sandy-hook-conspiracy-theorist-death-threats-prison https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/09/sandy-hook-c...
- dillondoyle 8y agoI wonder if Facebook will move towards even more 'real world ID' - not only to prevent these types of attacks from fake people - but because it might provide additional revenue lift. Or maybe wouldn't add much revenue value, their real human targeting is pretty great already.
- bengotow 8y agoWait they published an entire blog post and held a press call to announce they "removed 32 Pages and accounts"? Seriously? 32? It's a start (and I'm glad to see they're laying down some precedent) but who needs fancy algorithms and machine learning to find 32 bad accounts? You could find that many by hand by spending a few hours on Facebook.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jlarocco 8y agoTBH, I don't think Facebook can prevent "coordinated inauthentic behavior," as they're calling it. The only solution is for users to be more aware of who they're online "friends" are, and to be aware that they can't trust everything they read online. In a way it's funny this problem snuck up on them like this. They make money by social engineering people to buy stuff. It should be a no-brainer that the exact same techniques can be used for other purposes.
- HuckFackerNews 8y agoIf they control content, they are publishers, not platforms, and that changes how they are taxed and how they are regulated. If they want to be treated like platforms with the power of publishers, that's not going to fly.
- throw2016 8y agoThe problem here is personalized political advertising. This is dangerous. Political advertising should be general so every citizen has the same messaging. So rather than look for bad actors a cleaner solution is to disable personalized political ads, but that will affect revenue. There is no way you can ban or even demonize activism and dissent without back-pedalling on nearly every democratic ideal. It's not a matter of slippery slopes, its bad actors manufacturing crisis to demonize dissent.
- booleandilemma 8y agoAny evidence of bad actors on HN comment threads? Why would attacks be limited to FB?
- vertexFarm 8y agoReturn on investment I'd guess. HN is hardly a pipeline into the hearts and minds of the average US citizen. Facebook is practically the collective unconscious of our country, as disgusting as that sounds.
- kingkawn 8y agoAmusing that the organizing principles of our society are so waekend as to be broken by bad-intentioned memes
- equalunique 8y agoAll flagged comments here should be unflagged.
- buchanae 8y agoMy entire life, I've seen ad campaigns (TV, radio, web, etc) from American politicians; ads which are projected to a wide audience, and which are neither shy nor subtle about bashing their opponents. I'm curious, how would others describe the line between acceptable influence (American political ads) and unacceptable influence (Russian political ads). To be clear, I'm not saying there is no line, I'm just curious to read peoples' description of the difference.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]