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Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

180 points by LinuxBender 6y ago

j4nt4b 6y ago
Title should be "Facebook, Twitter create global array of disinformation networks"
ardy42 6y ago
> Facebook also banned a U.S. marketing firm named Rally Forge, which it said had worked with conservative activism organization Turning Point USA and a self-proclaimed environmental body called Inclusive Conservation Group. > Accounts controlled by Rally Forge attempted to influence public conversations around news events by flooding the comments section of news articles from prominent outlets, Facebook said. Wow, a literal American 50 cent party-like effort. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-internet-trolls-pumping-488-million-posts-harvard-stanford-ucsd-research/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-intern...
JoshTko 6y ago
Isn't this essentially a repeat of 2016? They basically did nothing until voters have made up their minds. Damage has already been done.
effnorwood 6y ago
Does this mean both companies agreed to close forever?
ivanstame 6y ago
Who the fuck are twitter and facebook to determine what is true or not. We need to stop this behavior, this is insane.
shirakawasuna 6y ago
One should be wary of promoting the idea that these companies will create a valid and trustworthy tiered system of validity in news media. News media already has serious problems that are generally ignored, go unrecognized, or become part of false partisan narratives. Indicating that they are to be trusted and this other class shouldn't be might sound fine at first, but the fight will be at the line drawn between the two. Will less popular media outlets be flagged as illegitimate? What if a site pushes a conspiracy theory that's actually well-backed but is considered harmful by one of these companies? Even assuming good faith, look at the coronavirus filtering and compare it to what the "trusted" media sources and CDC were saying back in January and February regarding masks. If you were to independently say, "hey, what they're saying about mask efficacy doesn't make much sense. Everyone should wear some kind of mouth covering just in case", would you be flagged as dangerous misinformation? Because that position would be correct and warranted but also fly in the face of the cited authorities and experts (who were curated in a biased way to begin with, ignoring Chinese scientists' recommendations and the experiences of East Asian countries with other pandemics). Remember, in January and February, those in the US and often EU were being told that masks didn't really protect you, could even increase your risk, and to specifically not purchase and wear them. This was always an inconsistent narrative, of course, because the point of this misinformation was to reserve stock for healthcare professionals because masks do work and healthcare professionals needed them. We need better systems for addressing misinformation than placing the burden on platforms who will inevitably work in their own interest and attempt to automate processes that should be manually (and expensively) done on an individual basis.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  It is ludicrous to place any trust in any validity vetting these corporations will enact. That's placing the foxes in charge of the hen house. We need independent bodies, with regulatory power, and anything less is simply enabling the oppressors and their democratic destruction.
m0zg 6y ago
Let me guess. ShareBlue is unaffected.
IncRnd 6y ago
A 2016 study by Dov H. Levin found that, among 938 global elections examined, the United States and Russia (including its predecessor, the Soviet Union) combined had involved themselves in about one out of nine (117), with the majority of those (68%) being through covert, rather than overt, actions. ... According to the study, the U.S. intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, while the Soviet Union or Russia intervened in 36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention
ajxs 6y ago
I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information. The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. When we're confronted with an actually Orwellian phenomena people seem to either not notice or not care. It's not as though the viral propagation of false, misleading and harmful information began with social media, or even with the internet. This phenomena was alive and well long before modern technology, which has surprisingly done very little to change it. I'm genuinely shocked how little backlash there's been against big-tech censorship. I grew up as a liberal in the 90s and early 00s. Freedom of speech and fostering an environment for information to propagate freely were ideals held sacred. It's been sincerely disappointing to see how many of my fellow so-called-liberals are willing to accept huge multinational corporations (of all things) censoring information "For their own good".
- dragontamer 6y ago
  My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved. The disinformation in our social networks is beyond a breaking point. Its incredibly difficult to have a reasonable discussion when alternative facts exist... I dare say impossible. ----- What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? While my mother is over the age of 60, I don't believe her to be stupid. My sister is literally going for her PH.D (and is an accomplished Masters with multiple years of experience in the CDC tracking stuff down), she's certainly not stupid. Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path. There's an entire network of corrupted information that's building up alternative facts. ------- > The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war akin to "Ender's Game". Peter vs Valentine Wiggin (or better known by their online personas: Locke and Demosthenes). Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain. At first it was just ads, but now it includes a suite of alternative facts for political purposes.
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
hanniabu 6y ago
Only after they've done their damage and likely reached critical mass to survive through this on other parts of the internet.
Giorgi 6y ago
3500 accounts? single bot will make those in several weeks
- marketingPro 6y ago
  Why bother with bots when desperate peasants can sign up for free. governments with fractional reserve banking Anti-bot detection only affects the 99%. The 1% simply can pay for capachas or mechanical turks.
- colpabar 6y ago
  but did you see the headline? it was an entire global array!
- ryankrage77 6y ago
  My thoughts exactly, it will take a dedicated organization less than a day to re-create 3500 accounts
- actuator 6y ago
  > Facebook said it had found 10 networks, some of which it had previously identified publicly. I think this is the more important bit, I don't know how they prevent abuse by the same network again. These guys can just manufacture new identities.
  - 908087 6y ago
    Or switch to the ones they've already manufactured for this purpose.
  - effingwewt 6y ago
    908087's reply is dead but should not be. As someone who ran bots since they were simply macros this is exactly what is done. If you find a botnet you can assume they have an additional ~50% or greater 'clean' accounts on standby for exactly this situation. These become easier to obtain over time via purchasing or black hatting accts, etc. The longer you run undetected the longer you have to stockpile clean accts as you know its simply a matter of time. I would imagine if 100% of your revenue depends on it you'd be even more prepared. I know back in the Diablo 2 days some of us were friendly with blizdevs who would warn us of impending banwaves, upcoming updates to server code and whatnot. I'm quite sure the same still applies today only at a far larger scale since back then online communication was still young. Anyways all this to say if they are experienced and know its coming they wont be down for long, if at all.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
It's wonderful to hear they've decided to shut down their services.
- mberning 6y ago
  I would love to know the true scope of “inorganic” content on these platforms. It is surely appalling. At some point users will realize that they are wasting their life staring into a screen that presents them with mostly engineered information.
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    You mean like how every 'reputable' news outlet uncritically repeated the US's Iraq war propaganda for months and fired journalists who criticized it? Or do you mean people you don't like saying things on social media?
    - mberning 6y ago
      Legacy media is in the same boat, and has been for a long time, as you pointed out. When it comes to social media I think it is sprawling. Even a topic as pedestrian as lawn care is completely overrun by inorganic material.
      - sthnblllII 6y ago
        >Legacy media is in the same boat And yet only independent journalists on social media are being silenced. Funny how that works out no?
fred_is_fred 6y ago
Not sure why we should trust that this will actually happen since they knew it was going on and let it occur. In the end these fake bots drive engagement and therefore share price - they have no financial incentive to stop it, unless the number of people refusing to use the platform grows. Personally I won't use Facebook, using it feels like I am actively assisting with the destruction of democracy in the United States. I can't imagine that's a common feeling.
hirundo 6y ago
I don't trust Facebook or Twitter to distinguish disinformation from information. Why would anyone?
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  They can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened people understood this, hundreds of years ago. Its time for another amendment. EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21 https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    > Today, we’re announcing a new consumer alert to stand against racism. I read this, laughed, and closed the tab. The world has gone mad.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Wow, I had not seen that from Yelp. That is a horrible idea, and because they control brick and mortar reputation more than anything else, there is nothing that can be done about it. Hopefully they get sued for libel and realize what a dumb approach this is.
  - cageface 6y ago
    Those enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.
    - hnracer 6y ago
      Maybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.
dawnerd 6y ago
Twitter still doesn’t have a way to report misinformation. I’ve been seeing an almost 100% success rate in accounts s report having actions taken.
- OneGuy123 6y ago
  Who says it's actually misinformation? The media? The localy bribed politician owning the media?
  - posixplz 6y ago
    Facebook and Twitter don’t make the determinations alone. They contract internationally recognized fact checking organizations. Is it perfect? No. Do we need to curtail online disinformation at a platform-level? Yes, clearly we can’t rely on the critical thinking skills of the reader to make a rational determination — if we could, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. This and several posts on this thread seem to think it’s impossible to discern fact from fiction, that every opinion, even if false and presented as factual, deserves equal time. I fear that if we cannot have factual, cogent policy debates, our democracies are doomed.
    - cryptica 6y ago
      >> They contract internationally recognized fact checking organizations. Is it perfect? No The fact-checking organizations have themselves been independently vouched for by several highly trusted organizations. They are as close to perfect as we can possibly get. Unfortunately there are too many bad actors in this country who are hell-bent on destroying our democracy. Huge segments of the population are actively engaged in the misinformation campaign so that's why radical steps need to be taken. We cannot let people with ill intent ruin the country by misleading the public and stirring up controversies and conspiracy theories. Clearly, everything is fine. The economic recovery has been very quick; everyone made a lot of profit recently and it's all going great now (stocks prices have been soaring in fact) - But you wouldn't know it from reading all these fake news on Facebook. These social manipulators need to be stopped.
seneca 6y ago
Twitter has shown they have an extreme political bias over and over. It is insane to trust them to identify and censor "misinformation". This is just another censorship campaign hiding behind the current flavor of "think of the children". I'd rather have these raving lunatics (and to be clear, many of these propagandists are exactly that) spouting nonsense than trust Twitter to curate the truth.
- tyre 6y ago
  Which extremism exactly?
kache_ 6y ago
My dream is to work for the engineering divisions for these companies regarding automation around controlling the flow of information. It seems like such a fascinating problem
- marketingPro 6y ago
  I'm sure it's not so simple. You do the tasks you are told. There are departments you never heard of tell you "we need a backdoor in the event of an Emergency" That department doesn't realize they were told to do this by a director who knows the true purpose is propaganda.
  - twitter_anon 6y ago
    That is most certainly not the way engineering at Twitter works.
- driverdan 6y ago
  Seems like hell to me. It's obvious they're not willing to actually take action. For example, Twitter could easily and automatically remove a ton of white supremacist accounts using machine learning but haven't. Many of these accounts follow obvious patterns that ML can easily detect. Why don't they do it?
- gredelston 6y ago
  Good luck. I'm not convinced that's automatable.
  - entropie 6y ago
    Everything around software will eventually automatable.
    - j4nt4b 6y ago
      See Google support.
- 6y ago
aresant 6y ago
Disinformation content works because it drives huge engagement. Huge engagement pays the bills for FB and twitter. If we expect change we need an analog to a carbon or pollution tax for social. “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”- Charlie Munger
- twitter_anon 6y ago
  This is a popular sentiment on HN, but it oversimplifies the situation. Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does. Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales. Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on. Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations. Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform. Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads). I suspect there are some here who won't believe this; a few may be tempted to throw out a certain pithy Upton Sinclair quote. I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well? Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section? Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative?
    - twitter_anon 6y ago
      > Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well? I have no idea about Facebook. I barely even use it so all my information is second-hand. > Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section? We're not, at least not intentionally. Do you think we are? If so, why? The Trending section is still biased towards things that are being talked about frequently. Unfortunately, that means outrage-inducing topics will tend to bubble up there. We're working on making trend identification more sophisticated in order to provide better context, but it's a really hard problem with such short snippets of context. > Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative? "Political engagement" overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, "outrage engagement". Outrage engagement is a net negative; political engagement that does not devolve into misinformation and toxicity is not. We are actively trying to decrease engagement with misinformation and outrage, but it's a hard problem. Also, frankly, it's being hampered by a lack of focus internally that is leaving the teams involved with no clear direction other than "do something, now!". Non-toxic political engagement is a net positive for us. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by shutting it all down, assuming we even could (it's fundamentally the same problem, though a little bit easier). I see how other people might see that as the better option to shut down the toxicity and misinformation, though.
known 6y ago
"Prosecute politicians who failed to fulfill their poll promises" --Khehar, Ex Chief Justice of India https://archive.vn/x7O4e https://archive.vn/x7O4e
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  I keep seeing this and no-one has ever managed to give an answer to "Sure but how?" Just look at US politics right now - any Democrat who had won in 2016 would have failed to fulfil probably most of their promises but that would be down to McConnell clogging up the Senate (which was basically his poll promise.) Does the Democrat get punished for someone else blocking them? And that's just a simple trivial example...
drawkbox 6y ago
Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more. Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.
- mountainb 6y ago
  People will look at you funny if you inject fentanyl in public, but we should have the same negative social reaction to social media users and the same negative social reaction to the platform makers as one does to dealers of hard drugs. The immunity from consequences written into the law is creating some toxic effects. Give a corporation a grant of legal immunity and you should not be surprised that they everything that they can to shunt negative externalities onto society to the extent that it improves their metrics (financial and otherwise). If you gave an industrial corporation a grant of immunity for emitting pollutants, would you be surprised if they set every river they could on fire...?
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  >The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more. I'm afraid it's more like Snowcrash, where the Internet is akin to the "snow", the static pattern that crashes most people's brains, and only a few are naturally immune, naturally critically minded. >Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate. I think this is unfortunately the case, most people are basking in their confirmation bias and social media dopamine hits. Reason is hard, finding reliable trustworthy data is hard, etc. Path of least resistance is to give in.
- intrasight 6y ago
nefasti 6y ago
But but ... They are the disinformation network :(
upofadown 6y ago
I guess this is the world's "Eternal September"[1]. Eventually everyone will understand how this all works and this will no longer be a significant issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  Except Usenet never actually recovered and now is deader than disco. It was replaced for the most part with more aggressively moderated web forums with automated spam controls.
gpmcadam 6y ago
Honestly, I find Twitter's editorially driven hash-tag auto-complete and "trends" to be one of the biggest sources of misinformation out there. It's laughable and frankly patronising that they even pretend to not have an opinion or a political leaning. The more they try to wiggle out of the Web of "disinformation", the more firmly they become lodged in it.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  Right, this is my main problem with the big social media networks. They claim objectivity, but then show you things you don't follow. Pick one. Facebook/Twitter cannot truthfully claim "Whoa, we can't remove holocaust deniers! We're a neutral platform!" and then turn around and show me trending topics, news, and people. If you're so fucking neutral, then only show me things I follow, and don't insert ad content into the feed like it's real. Put if off to the side like a regular advertisement. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rednerrus 6y ago
Does this mean they're shutting down?
- null0pointer 6y ago
  I thought this as well. FB and Twitter are themselves the misinformation networks.
rndmize 6y ago
This headline is like saying "border patrol arrests extensive cartel smuggling network" after the feds grab a few dozen drug mules. The incentives are still there. The structure is still there. The opposing operating group is still there, untouched, as is the source of "contraband". We don't know how many networks exist; how many remain; how many operate successfully within Facebook/Twitter's rules while having the same effect as the banned ones (to extend the drug comparison, these would be the causes of the opioid crisis). On a structural level, I don't see how FB/Twitter can fix this, and don't think they would if they knew.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
No china? Dos not make any sense.
holidayacct 6y ago
Now they just need to dismantle the global array of advertising networks and they would have accomplished something.
rezeroed 6y ago
I think twitter is dismantling itself. A couple of months ago they were auto-suspending new accounts - create account, spend ~20 mins following people and looking around, then "are you a robot", then a few minutes later "give us your phone number" else suspended. They seem to think new users are going to get so hooked in 20 mins they'll give up their phone number. I returned to an auto-suspended account a couple of weeks ago and found that "suspended" had changed to mean read-only. Bye-bye twitter.

180 points by LinuxBender 6y ago

Title should be "Facebook, Twitter create global array of disinformation networks"

> Facebook also banned a U.S. marketing firm named Rally Forge, which it said had worked with conservative activism organization Turning Point USA and a self-proclaimed environmental body called Inclusive Conservation Group. > Accounts controlled by Rally Forge attempted to influence public conversations around news events by flooding the comments section of news articles from prominent outlets, Facebook said. Wow, a literal American 50 cent party-like effort. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-internet-trolls-pumping-488-million-posts-harvard-stanford-ucsd-research/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-intern...

JoshTko 6y ago

Isn't this essentially a repeat of 2016? They basically did nothing until voters have made up their minds. Damage has already been done.

effnorwood 6y ago

Does this mean both companies agreed to close forever?

ivanstame 6y ago

Who the fuck are twitter and facebook to determine what is true or not. We need to stop this behavior, this is insane.

shirakawasuna 6y ago

One should be wary of promoting the idea that these companies will create a valid and trustworthy tiered system of validity in news media. News media already has serious problems that are generally ignored, go unrecognized, or become part of false partisan narratives. Indicating that they are to be trusted and this other class shouldn't be might sound fine at first, but the fight will be at the line drawn between the two. Will less popular media outlets be flagged as illegitimate? What if a site pushes a conspiracy theory that's actually well-backed but is considered harmful by one of these companies? Even assuming good faith, look at the coronavirus filtering and compare it to what the "trusted" media sources and CDC were saying back in January and February regarding masks. If you were to independently say, "hey, what they're saying about mask efficacy doesn't make much sense. Everyone should wear some kind of mouth covering just in case", would you be flagged as dangerous misinformation? Because that position would be correct and warranted but also fly in the face of the cited authorities and experts (who were curated in a biased way to begin with, ignoring Chinese scientists' recommendations and the experiences of East Asian countries with other pandemics). Remember, in January and February, those in the US and often EU were being told that masks didn't really protect you, could even increase your risk, and to specifically not purchase and wear them. This was always an inconsistent narrative, of course, because the point of this misinformation was to reserve stock for healthcare professionals because masks do work and healthcare professionals needed them. We need better systems for addressing misinformation than placing the burden on platforms who will inevitably work in their own interest and attempt to automate processes that should be manually (and expensively) done on an individual basis.

bsenftner 6y ago
It is ludicrous to place any trust in any validity vetting these corporations will enact. That's placing the foxes in charge of the hen house. We need independent bodies, with regulatory power, and anything less is simply enabling the oppressors and their democratic destruction.

m0zg 6y ago

Let me guess. ShareBlue is unaffected.

IncRnd 6y ago

A 2016 study by Dov H. Levin found that, among 938 global elections examined, the United States and Russia (including its predecessor, the Soviet Union) combined had involved themselves in about one out of nine (117), with the majority of those (68%) being through covert, rather than overt, actions. ... According to the study, the U.S. intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, while the Soviet Union or Russia intervened in 36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

ajxs 6y ago

I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information. The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. When we're confronted with an actually Orwellian phenomena people seem to either not notice or not care. It's not as though the viral propagation of false, misleading and harmful information began with social media, or even with the internet. This phenomena was alive and well long before modern technology, which has surprisingly done very little to change it. I'm genuinely shocked how little backlash there's been against big-tech censorship. I grew up as a liberal in the 90s and early 00s. Freedom of speech and fostering an environment for information to propagate freely were ideals held sacred. It's been sincerely disappointing to see how many of my fellow so-called-liberals are willing to accept huge multinational corporations (of all things) censoring information "For their own good".

dragontamer 6y ago
My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved. The disinformation in our social networks is beyond a breaking point. Its incredibly difficult to have a reasonable discussion when alternative facts exist... I dare say impossible. ----- What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? While my mother is over the age of 60, I don't believe her to be stupid. My sister is literally going for her PH.D (and is an accomplished Masters with multiple years of experience in the CDC tracking stuff down), she's certainly not stupid. Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path. There's an entire network of corrupted information that's building up alternative facts. ------- > The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war akin to "Ender's Game". Peter vs Valentine Wiggin (or better known by their online personas: Locke and Demosthenes). Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain. At first it was just ads, but now it includes a suite of alternative facts for political purposes.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago

hanniabu 6y ago

Only after they've done their damage and likely reached critical mass to survive through this on other parts of the internet.

Giorgi 6y ago

3500 accounts? single bot will make those in several weeks

marketingPro 6y ago
Why bother with bots when desperate peasants can sign up for free. governments with fractional reserve banking Anti-bot detection only affects the 99%. The 1% simply can pay for capachas or mechanical turks.
colpabar 6y ago
but did you see the headline? it was an entire global array!
ryankrage77 6y ago
My thoughts exactly, it will take a dedicated organization less than a day to re-create 3500 accounts
actuator 6y ago
> Facebook said it had found 10 networks, some of which it had previously identified publicly. I think this is the more important bit, I don't know how they prevent abuse by the same network again. These guys can just manufacture new identities.
- 908087 6y ago
  Or switch to the ones they've already manufactured for this purpose.
- effingwewt 6y ago
  908087's reply is dead but should not be. As someone who ran bots since they were simply macros this is exactly what is done. If you find a botnet you can assume they have an additional ~50% or greater 'clean' accounts on standby for exactly this situation. These become easier to obtain over time via purchasing or black hatting accts, etc. The longer you run undetected the longer you have to stockpile clean accts as you know its simply a matter of time. I would imagine if 100% of your revenue depends on it you'd be even more prepared. I know back in the Diablo 2 days some of us were friendly with blizdevs who would warn us of impending banwaves, upcoming updates to server code and whatnot. I'm quite sure the same still applies today only at a far larger scale since back then online communication was still young. Anyways all this to say if they are experienced and know its coming they wont be down for long, if at all.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

It's wonderful to hear they've decided to shut down their services.

mberning 6y ago
I would love to know the true scope of “inorganic” content on these platforms. It is surely appalling. At some point users will realize that they are wasting their life staring into a screen that presents them with mostly engineered information.
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  You mean like how every 'reputable' news outlet uncritically repeated the US's Iraq war propaganda for months and fired journalists who criticized it? Or do you mean people you don't like saying things on social media?
  - mberning 6y ago
    Legacy media is in the same boat, and has been for a long time, as you pointed out. When it comes to social media I think it is sprawling. Even a topic as pedestrian as lawn care is completely overrun by inorganic material.
    - sthnblllII 6y ago
      >Legacy media is in the same boat And yet only independent journalists on social media are being silenced. Funny how that works out no?

fred_is_fred 6y ago

Not sure why we should trust that this will actually happen since they knew it was going on and let it occur. In the end these fake bots drive engagement and therefore share price - they have no financial incentive to stop it, unless the number of people refusing to use the platform grows. Personally I won't use Facebook, using it feels like I am actively assisting with the destruction of democracy in the United States. I can't imagine that's a common feeling.

hirundo 6y ago

I don't trust Facebook or Twitter to distinguish disinformation from information. Why would anyone?

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
They can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened people understood this, hundreds of years ago. Its time for another amendment. EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21 https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  > Today, we’re announcing a new consumer alert to stand against racism. I read this, laughed, and closed the tab. The world has gone mad.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Wow, I had not seen that from Yelp. That is a horrible idea, and because they control brick and mortar reputation more than anything else, there is nothing that can be done about it. Hopefully they get sued for libel and realize what a dumb approach this is.
- cageface 6y ago
  Those enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.
  - hnracer 6y ago
    Maybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.

dawnerd 6y ago

Twitter still doesn’t have a way to report misinformation. I’ve been seeing an almost 100% success rate in accounts s report having actions taken.

OneGuy123 6y ago
Who says it's actually misinformation? The media? The localy bribed politician owning the media?
- posixplz 6y ago
  Facebook and Twitter don’t make the determinations alone. They contract internationally recognized fact checking organizations. Is it perfect? No. Do we need to curtail online disinformation at a platform-level? Yes, clearly we can’t rely on the critical thinking skills of the reader to make a rational determination — if we could, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. This and several posts on this thread seem to think it’s impossible to discern fact from fiction, that every opinion, even if false and presented as factual, deserves equal time. I fear that if we cannot have factual, cogent policy debates, our democracies are doomed.
  - cryptica 6y ago
    >> They contract internationally recognized fact checking organizations. Is it perfect? No The fact-checking organizations have themselves been independently vouched for by several highly trusted organizations. They are as close to perfect as we can possibly get. Unfortunately there are too many bad actors in this country who are hell-bent on destroying our democracy. Huge segments of the population are actively engaged in the misinformation campaign so that's why radical steps need to be taken. We cannot let people with ill intent ruin the country by misleading the public and stirring up controversies and conspiracy theories. Clearly, everything is fine. The economic recovery has been very quick; everyone made a lot of profit recently and it's all going great now (stocks prices have been soaring in fact) - But you wouldn't know it from reading all these fake news on Facebook. These social manipulators need to be stopped.

seneca 6y ago

Twitter has shown they have an extreme political bias over and over. It is insane to trust them to identify and censor "misinformation". This is just another censorship campaign hiding behind the current flavor of "think of the children". I'd rather have these raving lunatics (and to be clear, many of these propagandists are exactly that) spouting nonsense than trust Twitter to curate the truth.

tyre 6y ago
Which extremism exactly?

kache_ 6y ago

My dream is to work for the engineering divisions for these companies regarding automation around controlling the flow of information. It seems like such a fascinating problem

marketingPro 6y ago
I'm sure it's not so simple. You do the tasks you are told. There are departments you never heard of tell you "we need a backdoor in the event of an Emergency" That department doesn't realize they were told to do this by a director who knows the true purpose is propaganda.
- twitter_anon 6y ago
  That is most certainly not the way engineering at Twitter works.
driverdan 6y ago
Seems like hell to me. It's obvious they're not willing to actually take action. For example, Twitter could easily and automatically remove a ton of white supremacist accounts using machine learning but haven't. Many of these accounts follow obvious patterns that ML can easily detect. Why don't they do it?
gredelston 6y ago
Good luck. I'm not convinced that's automatable.
- entropie 6y ago
  Everything around software will eventually automatable.
  - j4nt4b 6y ago
    See Google support.
6y ago

aresant 6y ago

Disinformation content works because it drives huge engagement. Huge engagement pays the bills for FB and twitter. If we expect change we need an analog to a carbon or pollution tax for social. “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”- Charlie Munger

twitter_anon 6y ago
This is a popular sentiment on HN, but it oversimplifies the situation. Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does. Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales. Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on. Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations. Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform. Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads). I suspect there are some here who won't believe this; a few may be tempted to throw out a certain pithy Upton Sinclair quote. I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well? Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section? Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative?
  - twitter_anon 6y ago
    > Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well? I have no idea about Facebook. I barely even use it so all my information is second-hand. > Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section? We're not, at least not intentionally. Do you think we are? If so, why? The Trending section is still biased towards things that are being talked about frequently. Unfortunately, that means outrage-inducing topics will tend to bubble up there. We're working on making trend identification more sophisticated in order to provide better context, but it's a really hard problem with such short snippets of context. > Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative? "Political engagement" overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, "outrage engagement". Outrage engagement is a net negative; political engagement that does not devolve into misinformation and toxicity is not. We are actively trying to decrease engagement with misinformation and outrage, but it's a hard problem. Also, frankly, it's being hampered by a lack of focus internally that is leaving the teams involved with no clear direction other than "do something, now!". Non-toxic political engagement is a net positive for us. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater by shutting it all down, assuming we even could (it's fundamentally the same problem, though a little bit easier). I see how other people might see that as the better option to shut down the toxicity and misinformation, though.

known 6y ago

"Prosecute politicians who failed to fulfill their poll promises" --Khehar, Ex Chief Justice of India https://archive.vn/x7O4e https://archive.vn/x7O4e

zimpenfish 6y ago
I keep seeing this and no-one has ever managed to give an answer to "Sure but how?" Just look at US politics right now - any Democrat who had won in 2016 would have failed to fulfil probably most of their promises but that would be down to McConnell clogging up the Senate (which was basically his poll promise.) Does the Democrat get punished for someone else blocking them? And that's just a simple trivial example...

drawkbox 6y ago

Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more. Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.

mountainb 6y ago
People will look at you funny if you inject fentanyl in public, but we should have the same negative social reaction to social media users and the same negative social reaction to the platform makers as one does to dealers of hard drugs. The immunity from consequences written into the law is creating some toxic effects. Give a corporation a grant of legal immunity and you should not be surprised that they everything that they can to shunt negative externalities onto society to the extent that it improves their metrics (financial and otherwise). If you gave an industrial corporation a grant of immunity for emitting pollutants, would you be surprised if they set every river they could on fire...?
SkyMarshal 6y ago
>The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more. I'm afraid it's more like Snowcrash, where the Internet is akin to the "snow", the static pattern that crashes most people's brains, and only a few are naturally immune, naturally critically minded. >Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate. I think this is unfortunately the case, most people are basking in their confirmation bias and social media dopamine hits. Reason is hard, finding reliable trustworthy data is hard, etc. Path of least resistance is to give in.
intrasight 6y ago

nefasti 6y ago

But but ... They are the disinformation network :(

upofadown 6y ago

I guess this is the world's "Eternal September"[1]. Eventually everyone will understand how this all works and this will no longer be a significant issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jeremyjh 6y ago
Except Usenet never actually recovered and now is deader than disco. It was replaced for the most part with more aggressively moderated web forums with automated spam controls.

gpmcadam 6y ago

Honestly, I find Twitter's editorially driven hash-tag auto-complete and "trends" to be one of the biggest sources of misinformation out there. It's laughable and frankly patronising that they even pretend to not have an opinion or a political leaning. The more they try to wiggle out of the Web of "disinformation", the more firmly they become lodged in it.

orthecreedence 6y ago
Right, this is my main problem with the big social media networks. They claim objectivity, but then show you things you don't follow. Pick one. Facebook/Twitter cannot truthfully claim "Whoa, we can't remove holocaust deniers! We're a neutral platform!" and then turn around and show me trending topics, news, and people. If you're so fucking neutral, then only show me things I follow, and don't insert ad content into the feed like it's real. Put if off to the side like a regular advertisement. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rednerrus 6y ago

Does this mean they're shutting down?

null0pointer 6y ago
I thought this as well. FB and Twitter are themselves the misinformation networks.

rndmize 6y ago

This headline is like saying "border patrol arrests extensive cartel smuggling network" after the feds grab a few dozen drug mules. The incentives are still there. The structure is still there. The opposing operating group is still there, untouched, as is the source of "contraband". We don't know how many networks exist; how many remain; how many operate successfully within Facebook/Twitter's rules while having the same effect as the banned ones (to extend the drug comparison, these would be the causes of the opioid crisis). On a structural level, I don't see how FB/Twitter can fix this, and don't think they would if they knew.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

No china? Dos not make any sense.

holidayacct 6y ago

Now they just need to dismantle the global array of advertising networks and they would have accomplished something.

rezeroed 6y ago

I think twitter is dismantling itself. A couple of months ago they were auto-suspending new accounts - create account, spend ~20 mins following people and looking around, then "are you a robot", then a few minutes later "give us your phone number" else suspended. They seem to think new users are going to get so hooked in 20 mins they'll give up their phone number. I returned to an auto-suspended account a couple of weeks ago and found that "suspended" had changed to mean read-only. Bye-bye twitter.