9 ms·

Hundreds of Propaganda Accounts Targeting Iran and Qatar Removed from Facebook

130 points by pulisse 7y ago

panpanna 7y ago
The article points out PR firms in Nigeria, Egypt and UAE. > Increasingly, we're seeing more PR firms or strategic communication firms offer computational propaganda as a service for all sorts of clients, including governments. Now consider this, if this happens at this scale for the small cost of $150.000 how many pr-firms are engaging in propaganda against some commercial target right now without your ever noticing?
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I think everyone has taken notice. The propaganda right now is too all encompassing so we can't help but to take notice. Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has gone up and up and up. Continues to increase right now. What can people do though? Other people have the right to free speech. You just have to try to tune out all of the Anti-Tech, Anti-China, Anti-US, Anti-Amazon, Anti-Iran, Anti-Trump, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Obama, Anti-minority, Anti-etc etc etc blather.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
    But the list is growing and constantly updating internal firewall can quickly get exhausting. I definitely agree that a lot of previously unaware people took notice.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    As has been pointed out, you don't have a right to free speech on other people's servers. Y Combinator and Facebook can ban them at their discretion, for any reason or no reason.
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      Things seem to be getting looser, not tighter. Facebook have just changed their policies to make it much harder to challenge false advertising by politicians. This appears to have been done to avoid trouble with Trump. https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in-his https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in-his
      - bostik 7y ago
        It would be simpler and more honest to stamp every single political ad with something like "Contains: lies, untruths, omissions and/or misinformation." Then at least something in a displayed political ad would be true.
    - r00fus 7y ago
      Facebook owns a lot of the virtual "space" where this discussion takes place. If they can willy-nilly make changes that favor some and disadvantage others, they can shape the debate pretty heavily. They're ok with lies that are paid advertisements.
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    Yes, the biggest problem of these programs is that it's deliberately divisive and increases fragmentation into binary pro/anti factions. At the end of the day this always generates violence, hatred and distrust.
  - xoa 7y ago
    >Other people have the right to free speech. Just to add on a bit to other replies, banning people from a private service, socially ostracizing them, vigorously criticizing them, attempting legal forms of economic retaliation (like boycotts), etc are all part of Free Speech too. Free Speech is about not having physical force used to shutdown the market of ideas, because of the millennia of proven destructive effects that has. That doesn't mean all speech and ideas are of equal value though, far from it. The point is to push judging of that into softer spheres, where minds can potentially change (sometimes over generations) and room can remain on the margins for new things to put down roots, and where hopefully eventually higher value ideas can grow. But constant judging is still there. Constant non-violent but vigorous efforts to resist propaganda and the like through revealing it and acting to counter and restrain it are real actions, and completely within the bounds of Free Speech.
  - dang 7y ago
    > Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has gone up and up and up. Continues to increase right now. How do you know this? What do you use to decide? As far as I can tell, the way most people decide this is: if I don't like it, it's propaganda. Nobody thinks that consciously, of course, but it matches what people say surprisingly closely. That has no evidentiary value, except as an indication of what someone dislikes. You learn this very quickly if you're responsible for the community as a whole, because people have such different likes and dislikes that basically everything contentious gets dismissed as 'propaganda' or some such abuse. Two things seem clear: (1) propaganda exists; (2) "I don't like it" is no way to identify it. There needs to be something more objective. When people are worried about abuse on HN and we look into it, our bar is that we have to see at least some evidence, somewhere, of something amiss. That's as low as the bar can get, yet even that is enough to reveal that way over 90%, probably over 99%, of perceptions of propaganda have no basis beyond the feelings of the perceiver.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      Don't you know? Everyone on Hacker News is a bot. Even me. Even you. \end{jest} More seriously... The thing about propaganda is that once someone starts believing it, that someone can potentially (and often does) spread it organically. Hacker News can inadvertently be a hotbed for propaganda spreading of all sorts without even a single bot or paid poster/commenter. I know I've fallen victim to that before, parroting something that ended up being misleading at best because I had been convinced through disinformation that it was the truth and therefore needed spread. I therefore tend to be cognizant of when others appear to be doing the same, seeing in them the same patterns I expressed. In other words: just because it ain't violating the HN community guidelines doesn't mean it ain't propaganda.
      - dang 7y ago
        > just because it ain't violating the HN community guidelines doesn't mean it ain't propaganda That's certainly true. But what objective criteria are there for doing something about it?
  - o_p 7y ago
    >Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has gone up and up and up. True, the Rust shills are ruthless :-)
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Reminds me of a recent New Yorker piece where a local oversight group in a small California town tried to push out corrupt healthcare managers through elections, only to be subjected to massive online influence operations. Fascinating and terrifying[0] 0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad-for-hire https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad...
- pnako 7y ago
  I would not even be surprised to learn that billionaires buy newspapers to push their views.
  - CalChris 7y ago
    Or television networks.
    - TomMckenny 7y ago
      Even though both the Sinclair/Murdoch TV/radio web have vastly greater influence and audiences, explicit cultivate and advertise their bias and run stories uncorroborated anywhere else in the free world, they are not mentioned. This is because the complaint isn't about objectivity, it's about silencing information sources not in-step with the ruling party.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Since at least the 1600's. Except they weren't billionaires then. More like thousandaires. And instead of buying, they just started a new one.
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    Well then prepare to not be surprised: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-closes-sale-to-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/2013/10/01/fca3b16a-2acf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-p...
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Now consider this, if this happens at this scale for the small cost of $150.000 how many pr-firms are engaging in propaganda against some commercial target right now without your ever noticing? You mean like the way certain east (and probably west) coast billionaires spending millions to influence elections in the flyover states?
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  Your point to consider made me think how curiously common negative mention of Apple is in Forbes, for example.
- Faark 7y ago
  Notably absent in heap of recent articles about social media manipulations are western governments. I have a hard time believing that everyone is doing it but us, and our guys don't want/have that capability. This is hardly something that can be brought up to speed anywhere but in the field, so I'd expect there to be traces. Now there could be many of reasons for that absence of news. Media could be constrained by gov. More likely is social networks being forced to keep silent. Soft power of / direct access to those US companies might be good enough for US intelligence to not warrant further actions risking trust in the platforms. Actions might take place on battlefields far away & not observed by western media (like, how would you even start getting around e.g. ID requirements in china... seems kind of hard). Anyway, I just found noteworthy how well this one fits US geopolitical interests.
  - thefounder 7y ago
    There are a lot of fake posts promoting one party or another. I doubt it's all foreign interference. I'm pretty sure most of the political advertising/consulting firms provide some kind of "organic" boost, that being fake account/posts instead of just ads management. This is really the new SEO.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Samsung for example was caught at it: https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paid+students+for+reviews https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paid+students+for+re... Happens on Reddit all the time once you know how to notice it, e.g. posts about the same topic on multiple subreddits getting over 10,000 upvotes in less than 3 hours, sometimes more than there are users of that subreddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bb7t71/reddit_for_sale_how_we_bought_the_top_spot_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bb7t71/reddit_for_s...
josefresco 7y ago
So propaganda is not allowed, by political ads that contain lies are allowed. Aren't lies in political ads by the ruling party or candidate ... propaganda?
- vkou 7y ago
  It's about as consistent as people complaining about the Kremlin lying on Facebook, but not some billionaire lying on Facebook. Bonus points when you don't even know who he is, because his money has been laundered through a PAC. Oh, and we get to subsidize his speech, because it's tax-deductible for him. Double bonus points if, in a slightly different situation, that billionaire has been borrowing money for his various business ventures from friends of the Kremlin, and happens to look a wee bit orange...
  - toast0 7y ago
    You also missed the other subsidy. TV ad spots for political ads have their prices frozen at the beginning of the election season. When the season heats up, other advertisers get pushed out as their prices increase, but politicians keep the frozen price.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      You are correct. The reason this happens made sense at the time it was done, but doesn't anymore. At the time these rules were enacted, TV stations didn't want to carry political ads, and hardly any would accept them. The enforced rate structure was devised not only to encourage TV stations to carry political ads, but to ensure that a party with deeper pockets didn't drown out less-well-funded opinions. When I worked in TV, the sales department hated political season because their bonuses got slashed. A couple of economic crises later, and TV stations look forward to political ads because they it turns out they are more stable, reliable, and often pay in advance. The old standby for TV ads, car dealers, turned out to be not-so-reliable after all, especially with the automaker bankruptcies and people keeping cars longer. With a bird in the hand worth two in the bush, we now have political ads out the wazoo.
- 7y ago
aritmo 7y ago
In the military, this is also called PSYOPS.
pooya13 7y ago
It’s odd that in the entire article they don’t mention anything about the actual content of this propaganda against Iran. I wonder for example, was the current news about Iran attacking oil tankers part of this campaign?
- ianai 7y ago
  You can probably assume it’s whatever Russia and Putin would want it to be.
  - klingonopera 7y ago
    Aren't Russia and Iran more allies than enemies? I mean, yes, I'd agree, but rather because Putin would welcome any type disinformation, not just ones targeted at Iran.
    - Udik 7y ago
      These were propaganda pages against Iran and Qatar. The article says they originate from UAE and Egypt, but not necessarily from their governments. It also says some of the messages are supportive of Saudi Arabia. Currently, the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are subjecting Iran to an economic blockade and/or pushing for a military attack. Russia instead is at least partially on Iran's side and, therefore, opposed to US and Saudi Arabia. And your first reaction is "this could be/ must be Russia"? Do you realize Russia running a propaganda campaign for Saudi Arabia doesn't make any sense? How could you even think of something so counter-intuitive and inconsequential?
jin7 7y ago
I did nothing, but my account has been deleted. Of course, I rarely use Facebook.
- aritmo 7y ago
  Did you post anything political?
  - jin7 7y ago
    No. I post nothing.
    - andreigheorghe 7y ago
      So then you just created this account to tell us that Facebook banned you for no reason even though you posted nothing? Interesting, why did you do that?
      - zakki 7y ago
        Maybe he used the account for stalking.
        jin7 7y ago
        Don't use your maliciousness to rate others.
      - jin7 7y ago
        Can't I complain about it?
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    I did, no particular topic, just generally a lot (think "my comment history minus biting my tongue"), and a few years ago, after 9 years of using it and 100+ RL friends and plenty RL photos, I could no longer log in and was asked to send a copy of my ID, because I might not be a real person. I didn't, not because I think anything in that scan would be new information to them, but as a matter of principle, out of sheer stubborness and a sense of injustice -- they didn't tell me who reported me as not being a person, and I bet you none of the accusers had to show their ID. But being "banned" from FB is much better than quitting... I have zero temptation to go back, it requires no discipline at all, so I'm not complaining.
zachguo 7y ago
Is it really appropriate to let platforms determine what is propaganda or not?
- draw_down 7y ago
  Depends what you mean by “appropriate”, I guess. That word doesn’t really mean anything in this context
- sharkjacobs 7y ago
  Maybe not to determine what "propaganda" is, but I think it's reasonable, and necessary for them to determine what real accounts are. > The accounts, which have now been taken down, appear to have been professionally run by PR firms These aren't real users and presumably violate the terms of service.
  - zachguo 7y ago
    I'm not talking about this specific case. As to what you bring up, how platforms determine what real accounts are is a black box, we don't know how biased their machine learning algorithms and human reviewers are.
    - sharkjacobs 7y ago
      An internet forum which doesn't ban spam bot accounts is less than worthless, this feels of a kind to me.
- empath75 7y ago
  What's the alternative? Forcing them to publish material that they don't want to?
ru999gol 7y ago
and whats the difference to this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/31/us-cuts-funds-for-anti-propaganda-group-that-trolled-activists https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/31/us-cuts-fund... in truth of course the US government is doing exactly the same thing all the time, standard practice.
zarro 7y ago
"The censor was a magistrate in ancient Rome who was responsible for maintaining the census, supervising public morality, and overseeing certain aspects of the government's finances. The power of the censors was absolute: no magistrate could oppose their decisions, only another censor who succeeded them could cancel it. The censors' regulation of public morality is the origin of the modern meaning of the words censor and censorship."
benkarst 7y ago
Buzzfeed eliminating the competition.
ianai 7y ago
Wake me up when it’s the hundred of thousands that are on there.
ilaksh 7y ago
Does Facebook take down the propaganda accounts linked to the US? Or we are all still supposed to believe that the "good guys" stopped using propaganda after WWII?
- Udik 7y ago
  I just checked, these "official" [1] propaganda pages for Israel are still there: https://www.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/ https://www.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/ https://www.facebook.com/HistoryBites/ https://www.facebook.com/HistoryBites/ https://www.facebook.com/ThisExplainsThat/ https://www.facebook.com/ThisExplainsThat/ https://www.facebook.com/WeOnlyHaveOneEarth/ https://www.facebook.com/WeOnlyHaveOneEarth/ [1] https://www.theisraelproject.org/socialmedia https://www.theisraelproject.org/socialmedia "The Israel Project has developed a cutting edge production shop to inform the 21st century media and public conversation. Using videos, memes, infographics and other original productions – TIP is ensuring social media users know the truth about Israel and the Middle East." "the Facebook page Cup of Jane. Serving the young women’s community, it has built up over 450,000 followers in that short time. ... Since then, we have launched multiple communities including HistoryBites for history fans, This Explains That for news junkies and We Only Have One Earth for environmentally-minded folks"
- klingonopera 7y ago
  Taking down anti-Iran propaganda would be something that does not align with US goals. I find it quite surprising that Facebook's doing this, to be honest.
  - Faark 7y ago
    FB is certainly free to clean up once they get inquiries from media. Inaction would make attribution to the US more easy, thus any NSL forcing FB to cooperate is likely limited in scope to internal measures like scanning for fake accounts.
markdown 7y ago
And WEST PAPUA!!! Frustrating to see the Indonesian genocide of the West Papuan people is ignored. There is far far worse going on in West Papua then is going on in Iran or Qatar, but Buzzfeed chooses to write about them instead. The FB press release clearly mentions Indonesia and West Papua but it's ignored yet again by the western press. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/removing-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-in-uae-nigeria-indonesia-and-egypt/amp/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/removing-coordinated-in...
throwaway672 7y ago
The problems on Twitter are worse. There are networks of verified accounts pumping out orchestrated propaganda on this topic, and others. A blue check mark seems to be a license to generate money with impunity. There are networks operating out of first world countries with verified accounts, that have third-world minions that amplify their messages through retweets and likes. It is surprising that corporations continue to associate with the open sewer of propaganda, hate and harassment that Twitter is. Has the time come for a clean clone of Twitter for business to interact with their customers?
throwaway122378 7y ago
Individuals posting propaganda is far less concerning to me than a private company deciding what propaganda is.

130 points by pulisse 7y ago

The article points out PR firms in Nigeria, Egypt and UAE. > Increasingly, we're seeing more PR firms or strategic communication firms offer computational propaganda as a service for all sorts of clients, including governments. Now consider this, if this happens at this scale for the small cost of $150.000 how many pr-firms are engaging in propaganda against some commercial target right now without your ever noticing?

bilbo0s 7y ago
I think everyone has taken notice. The propaganda right now is too all encompassing so we can't help but to take notice. Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has gone up and up and up. Continues to increase right now. What can people do though? Other people have the right to free speech. You just have to try to tune out all of the Anti-Tech, Anti-China, Anti-US, Anti-Amazon, Anti-Iran, Anti-Trump, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Obama, Anti-minority, Anti-etc etc etc blather.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  But the list is growing and constantly updating internal firewall can quickly get exhausting. I definitely agree that a lot of previously unaware people took notice.
- jfengel 7y ago
  As has been pointed out, you don't have a right to free speech on other people's servers. Y Combinator and Facebook can ban them at their discretion, for any reason or no reason.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    Things seem to be getting looser, not tighter. Facebook have just changed their policies to make it much harder to challenge false advertising by politicians. This appears to have been done to avoid trouble with Trump. https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in-his https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in-his
    - bostik 7y ago
      It would be simpler and more honest to stamp every single political ad with something like "Contains: lies, untruths, omissions and/or misinformation." Then at least something in a displayed political ad would be true.
  - r00fus 7y ago
    Facebook owns a lot of the virtual "space" where this discussion takes place. If they can willy-nilly make changes that favor some and disadvantage others, they can shape the debate pretty heavily. They're ok with lies that are paid advertisements.
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  Yes, the biggest problem of these programs is that it's deliberately divisive and increases fragmentation into binary pro/anti factions. At the end of the day this always generates violence, hatred and distrust.
- xoa 7y ago
  >Other people have the right to free speech. Just to add on a bit to other replies, banning people from a private service, socially ostracizing them, vigorously criticizing them, attempting legal forms of economic retaliation (like boycotts), etc are all part of Free Speech too. Free Speech is about not having physical force used to shutdown the market of ideas, because of the millennia of proven destructive effects that has. That doesn't mean all speech and ideas are of equal value though, far from it. The point is to push judging of that into softer spheres, where minds can potentially change (sometimes over generations) and room can remain on the margins for new things to put down roots, and where hopefully eventually higher value ideas can grow. But constant judging is still there. Constant non-violent but vigorous efforts to resist propaganda and the like through revealing it and acting to counter and restrain it are real actions, and completely within the bounds of Free Speech.
- dang 7y ago
  > Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has gone up and up and up. Continues to increase right now. How do you know this? What do you use to decide? As far as I can tell, the way most people decide this is: if I don't like it, it's propaganda. Nobody thinks that consciously, of course, but it matches what people say surprisingly closely. That has no evidentiary value, except as an indication of what someone dislikes. You learn this very quickly if you're responsible for the community as a whole, because people have such different likes and dislikes that basically everything contentious gets dismissed as 'propaganda' or some such abuse. Two things seem clear: (1) propaganda exists; (2) "I don't like it" is no way to identify it. There needs to be something more objective. When people are worried about abuse on HN and we look into it, our bar is that we have to see at least some evidence, somewhere, of something amiss. That's as low as the bar can get, yet even that is enough to reveal that way over 90%, probably over 99%, of perceptions of propaganda have no basis beyond the feelings of the perceiver.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Don't you know? Everyone on Hacker News is a bot. Even me. Even you. \end{jest} More seriously... The thing about propaganda is that once someone starts believing it, that someone can potentially (and often does) spread it organically. Hacker News can inadvertently be a hotbed for propaganda spreading of all sorts without even a single bot or paid poster/commenter. I know I've fallen victim to that before, parroting something that ended up being misleading at best because I had been convinced through disinformation that it was the truth and therefore needed spread. I therefore tend to be cognizant of when others appear to be doing the same, seeing in them the same patterns I expressed. In other words: just because it ain't violating the HN community guidelines doesn't mean it ain't propaganda.
    - dang 7y ago
      > just because it ain't violating the HN community guidelines doesn't mean it ain't propaganda That's certainly true. But what objective criteria are there for doing something about it?
- o_p 7y ago
  >Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has gone up and up and up. True, the Rust shills are ruthless :-)
save_ferris 7y ago
Reminds me of a recent New Yorker piece where a local oversight group in a small California town tried to push out corrupt healthcare managers through elections, only to be subjected to massive online influence operations. Fascinating and terrifying[0] 0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad-for-hire https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad...
pnako 7y ago
I would not even be surprised to learn that billionaires buy newspapers to push their views.
- CalChris 7y ago
  Or television networks.
  - TomMckenny 7y ago
    Even though both the Sinclair/Murdoch TV/radio web have vastly greater influence and audiences, explicit cultivate and advertise their bias and run stories uncorroborated anywhere else in the free world, they are not mentioned. This is because the complaint isn't about objectivity, it's about silencing information sources not in-step with the ruling party.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Since at least the 1600's. Except they weren't billionaires then. More like thousandaires. And instead of buying, they just started a new one.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  Well then prepare to not be surprised: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-closes-sale-to-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/2013/10/01/fca3b16a-2acf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-p...
reaperducer 7y ago
Now consider this, if this happens at this scale for the small cost of $150.000 how many pr-firms are engaging in propaganda against some commercial target right now without your ever noticing? You mean like the way certain east (and probably west) coast billionaires spending millions to influence elections in the flyover states?
jjtheblunt 7y ago
Your point to consider made me think how curiously common negative mention of Apple is in Forbes, for example.
Faark 7y ago
Notably absent in heap of recent articles about social media manipulations are western governments. I have a hard time believing that everyone is doing it but us, and our guys don't want/have that capability. This is hardly something that can be brought up to speed anywhere but in the field, so I'd expect there to be traces. Now there could be many of reasons for that absence of news. Media could be constrained by gov. More likely is social networks being forced to keep silent. Soft power of / direct access to those US companies might be good enough for US intelligence to not warrant further actions risking trust in the platforms. Actions might take place on battlefields far away & not observed by western media (like, how would you even start getting around e.g. ID requirements in china... seems kind of hard). Anyway, I just found noteworthy how well this one fits US geopolitical interests.
- thefounder 7y ago
  There are a lot of fake posts promoting one party or another. I doubt it's all foreign interference. I'm pretty sure most of the political advertising/consulting firms provide some kind of "organic" boost, that being fake account/posts instead of just ads management. This is really the new SEO.
Razengan 7y ago
Samsung for example was caught at it: https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paid+students+for+reviews https://www.google.com/search?q=samsung+paid+students+for+re... Happens on Reddit all the time once you know how to notice it, e.g. posts about the same topic on multiple subreddits getting over 10,000 upvotes in less than 3 hours, sometimes more than there are users of that subreddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bb7t71/reddit_for_sale_how_we_bought_the_top_spot_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bb7t71/reddit_for_s...

josefresco 7y ago

So propaganda is not allowed, by political ads that contain lies are allowed. Aren't lies in political ads by the ruling party or candidate ... propaganda?

vkou 7y ago
It's about as consistent as people complaining about the Kremlin lying on Facebook, but not some billionaire lying on Facebook. Bonus points when you don't even know who he is, because his money has been laundered through a PAC. Oh, and we get to subsidize his speech, because it's tax-deductible for him. Double bonus points if, in a slightly different situation, that billionaire has been borrowing money for his various business ventures from friends of the Kremlin, and happens to look a wee bit orange...
- toast0 7y ago
  You also missed the other subsidy. TV ad spots for political ads have their prices frozen at the beginning of the election season. When the season heats up, other advertisers get pushed out as their prices increase, but politicians keep the frozen price.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    You are correct. The reason this happens made sense at the time it was done, but doesn't anymore. At the time these rules were enacted, TV stations didn't want to carry political ads, and hardly any would accept them. The enforced rate structure was devised not only to encourage TV stations to carry political ads, but to ensure that a party with deeper pockets didn't drown out less-well-funded opinions. When I worked in TV, the sales department hated political season because their bonuses got slashed. A couple of economic crises later, and TV stations look forward to political ads because they it turns out they are more stable, reliable, and often pay in advance. The old standby for TV ads, car dealers, turned out to be not-so-reliable after all, especially with the automaker bankruptcies and people keeping cars longer. With a bird in the hand worth two in the bush, we now have political ads out the wazoo.
7y ago

aritmo 7y ago

In the military, this is also called PSYOPS.

pooya13 7y ago

It’s odd that in the entire article they don’t mention anything about the actual content of this propaganda against Iran. I wonder for example, was the current news about Iran attacking oil tankers part of this campaign?

ianai 7y ago
You can probably assume it’s whatever Russia and Putin would want it to be.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  Aren't Russia and Iran more allies than enemies? I mean, yes, I'd agree, but rather because Putin would welcome any type disinformation, not just ones targeted at Iran.
  - Udik 7y ago
    These were propaganda pages against Iran and Qatar. The article says they originate from UAE and Egypt, but not necessarily from their governments. It also says some of the messages are supportive of Saudi Arabia. Currently, the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are subjecting Iran to an economic blockade and/or pushing for a military attack. Russia instead is at least partially on Iran's side and, therefore, opposed to US and Saudi Arabia. And your first reaction is "this could be/ must be Russia"? Do you realize Russia running a propaganda campaign for Saudi Arabia doesn't make any sense? How could you even think of something so counter-intuitive and inconsequential?

jin7 7y ago

I did nothing, but my account has been deleted. Of course, I rarely use Facebook.

aritmo 7y ago
Did you post anything political?
- jin7 7y ago
  No. I post nothing.
  - andreigheorghe 7y ago
    So then you just created this account to tell us that Facebook banned you for no reason even though you posted nothing? Interesting, why did you do that?
    - zakki 7y ago
      Maybe he used the account for stalking.
      - jin7 7y ago
        Don't use your maliciousness to rate others.
    - jin7 7y ago
      Can't I complain about it?
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  I did, no particular topic, just generally a lot (think "my comment history minus biting my tongue"), and a few years ago, after 9 years of using it and 100+ RL friends and plenty RL photos, I could no longer log in and was asked to send a copy of my ID, because I might not be a real person. I didn't, not because I think anything in that scan would be new information to them, but as a matter of principle, out of sheer stubborness and a sense of injustice -- they didn't tell me who reported me as not being a person, and I bet you none of the accusers had to show their ID. But being "banned" from FB is much better than quitting... I have zero temptation to go back, it requires no discipline at all, so I'm not complaining.

zachguo 7y ago

Is it really appropriate to let platforms determine what is propaganda or not?

draw_down 7y ago
Depends what you mean by “appropriate”, I guess. That word doesn’t really mean anything in this context
sharkjacobs 7y ago
Maybe not to determine what "propaganda" is, but I think it's reasonable, and necessary for them to determine what real accounts are. > The accounts, which have now been taken down, appear to have been professionally run by PR firms These aren't real users and presumably violate the terms of service.
- zachguo 7y ago
  I'm not talking about this specific case. As to what you bring up, how platforms determine what real accounts are is a black box, we don't know how biased their machine learning algorithms and human reviewers are.
  - sharkjacobs 7y ago
    An internet forum which doesn't ban spam bot accounts is less than worthless, this feels of a kind to me.
empath75 7y ago
What's the alternative? Forcing them to publish material that they don't want to?

ru999gol 7y ago

and whats the difference to this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/31/us-cuts-funds-for-anti-propaganda-group-that-trolled-activists https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/31/us-cuts-fund... in truth of course the US government is doing exactly the same thing all the time, standard practice.

zarro 7y ago

"The censor was a magistrate in ancient Rome who was responsible for maintaining the census, supervising public morality, and overseeing certain aspects of the government's finances. The power of the censors was absolute: no magistrate could oppose their decisions, only another censor who succeeded them could cancel it. The censors' regulation of public morality is the origin of the modern meaning of the words censor and censorship."

benkarst 7y ago

Buzzfeed eliminating the competition.

ianai 7y ago

Wake me up when it’s the hundred of thousands that are on there.

ilaksh 7y ago

Does Facebook take down the propaganda accounts linked to the US? Or we are all still supposed to believe that the "good guys" stopped using propaganda after WWII?

Udik 7y ago
I just checked, these "official" [1] propaganda pages for Israel are still there: https://www.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/ https://www.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/ https://www.facebook.com/HistoryBites/ https://www.facebook.com/HistoryBites/ https://www.facebook.com/ThisExplainsThat/ https://www.facebook.com/ThisExplainsThat/ https://www.facebook.com/WeOnlyHaveOneEarth/ https://www.facebook.com/WeOnlyHaveOneEarth/ [1] https://www.theisraelproject.org/socialmedia https://www.theisraelproject.org/socialmedia "The Israel Project has developed a cutting edge production shop to inform the 21st century media and public conversation. Using videos, memes, infographics and other original productions – TIP is ensuring social media users know the truth about Israel and the Middle East." "the Facebook page Cup of Jane. Serving the young women’s community, it has built up over 450,000 followers in that short time. ... Since then, we have launched multiple communities including HistoryBites for history fans, This Explains That for news junkies and We Only Have One Earth for environmentally-minded folks"
klingonopera 7y ago
Taking down anti-Iran propaganda would be something that does not align with US goals. I find it quite surprising that Facebook's doing this, to be honest.
- Faark 7y ago
  FB is certainly free to clean up once they get inquiries from media. Inaction would make attribution to the US more easy, thus any NSL forcing FB to cooperate is likely limited in scope to internal measures like scanning for fake accounts.

markdown 7y ago

And WEST PAPUA!!! Frustrating to see the Indonesian genocide of the West Papuan people is ignored. There is far far worse going on in West Papua then is going on in Iran or Qatar, but Buzzfeed chooses to write about them instead. The FB press release clearly mentions Indonesia and West Papua but it's ignored yet again by the western press. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/removing-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-in-uae-nigeria-indonesia-and-egypt/amp/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/removing-coordinated-in...

throwaway672 7y ago

The problems on Twitter are worse. There are networks of verified accounts pumping out orchestrated propaganda on this topic, and others. A blue check mark seems to be a license to generate money with impunity. There are networks operating out of first world countries with verified accounts, that have third-world minions that amplify their messages through retweets and likes. It is surprising that corporations continue to associate with the open sewer of propaganda, hate and harassment that Twitter is. Has the time come for a clean clone of Twitter for business to interact with their customers?

throwaway122378 7y ago

Individuals posting propaganda is far less concerning to me than a private company deciding what propaganda is.