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Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations
- erdo 5y agoI presume a firefox extension along the lines of Social Fixer would be able to filter all the likes/comments that come from pages rather than personal accounts. (But of course, a user needs to be aware of the issue in the first place, in order to want to install an extension to fix it)
- gregasquith 5y agoYeah, the problem is those that are seeing/potentially being manipulated by this are (I would imagine) highly unlikely to use a browser extension or (more likely, in developing nations where Facebook is forcing itself on users through the Internet.org project) on the mobile app anyway
- ilovepitchdecks 5y agoBecause of the sensational headline, I'm not even going to click on this. Is there even a real difference between The Guardian and the Daily Mail?
- hntroll666 5y agoI tend to agree, but the Guardian does have expert knowledge on the subject of deceiving and harassing citizens.
- ilovepitchdecks 5y agoAfter I read your comment the second time 5 minutes later, I had a realization (?): Are you actually being sarcastic? (That would explain the downvotes too. And your username.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- propertymagnate 5y agoI suspected the headline was sensationalist but on reading the article, I would say it isn't, and the headline is correct. It has examples of the campaigns of national political parties of different nations (hence world leaders) using a loophole that facebook pages can do certain things facebook accounts can't to boost their engagement and/or avoid the scrutiny an account would get. It also has a really good non-techy breakdown explaining how it works. I think it's HTML5? Having read it, I would say it's a really good piece of journalism.
- Jonnax 5y agoIt's an article about governments creating fake facebook pages posing as people to influence political debate on facebook. Detailing how it works and as well as how slow facebook are to respond. What is sensational about that? Unless you dislike reporting of propaganda efforts by governments.
- zpeti 5y agoI wonder if writers of articles like this are aware of the complexity of a problem like this, algorithmically, legally and ethically. All 3 are insanely difficult.
- sprafa 5y agoThe incredible thing is Big Tech has convinced us the solution is "too expensive" when they are making hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Here's the truth - if you own a social media platform and you allow for microtargeting and psychological profiling, you have responsibility for what's mass shared throughout.
- mgoetzke 5y agoEXACTLY. Micro-Targeting must be regulated world-wide to not allow it for political ads etc.
- inglor_cz 5y agoGood governance tends to get into money. It needn't be too expensive, but it definitely costs something. Facebook, Google et al. are trying to run a billion-sized community with extremely tight budgets, because they do not want to sacrifice their profits or make their services paid instead of free. Of course it does not work.
- mhoad 5y agoI’m not sure if you actually read the article but it was written with the whistleblower who was literally a data scientist and kept pointing out how easy it was to clearly identify (and therefore stop) these cases in question. They weren’t sophisticated in any way. The problem here wasn’t that it was difficult, it’s because Facebook had no incentive to care
- gregasquith 5y agoThe quote “There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook,” kind of sums it up!
- franklampard 5y agoBetter headline: ex employee thinks there are too many fake Facebook pages accounts
- mhoad 5y agoLet me give you some more context rather than this shitty throwaway cynicism. This is an issue that the employee thought was important enough to share that she had to give up almost $70k in severance. https://twitter.com/szhang_ds/status/1381518041737949185?s=21 https://twitter.com/szhang_ds/status/1381518041737949185?s=2...
- Jonnax 5y agoBut you think that's not a problem? That fake accounts that signal boost support for political figures is fine election campaigning?
- franklampard 5y agoIt is and actions were taken: “As a result, we’ve taken down more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Around half of them were domestic networks that operated in countries around the world, including those in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and in the Asia Pacific region.”
- rscoots 5y agoIt's only a problem if citizens are somehow influenced by the # of Facebook likes a politician gets. Those who'd hold Facebook to account for not programmatically 'fixing' this would do well to also acknowledge the underlying human failings that make these shady strategies allegedly effective. Maybe even a small attempt to improve voter literacy in Honduras? Easier to just shift the entire moral blame to FB and implicitly hope every similar social media company acquiesces to your worldview forever.
- commoner 5y agoThe Guardian has more coverage in this article, which was published at the same time: "How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-... It's interesting how Guy Rosen, a co-founder of the spyware company Onavo, is now Facebook's "vice-president of integrity": > Facebook had “moved slower than we’d like because of prioritization” on the Honduras case, Rosen wrote. “It’s a bummer that it’s back and I’m excited to learn from this and better understand what we need to do systematically,” he added. But he also chastised her for making a public complaint, saying: “My concern is that threads like this can undermine the people that get up in the morning and do their absolute best to try to figure out how to spend the finite time and energy we all have and put their heart and soul into it.” > Rosen had joined Facebook in 2013, when the company acquired his startup, Onavo, a mobile web analytics company that Facebook would go on to use to track usage of rival apps. Details on Onavo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
- qwertox 5y ago> It's interesting how Guy Rosen, a co-founder of the spyware company Onavo, is now Facebook's "vice-president of integrity" Sounds like a bad joke.
- HenryBemis 5y agoSounds like a perfect fit for Facebook.
- EastSmith 5y agoImagine Radiohead's Creep playing on the background and it fits perfectly.
- remarkEon 5y agoI thought that song was originally written by Nine Inch Nails, or am I misremembering? Edit: fellas I asked a question downvotes aren’t necessary
- bloat 5y agoThe quick summary here is that while a person is supposed to have only one Facebook account, that account can have an unlimited number of Facebook pages, which can all be set up to look like individual users, and can all comment, like, and post just like an individual user. The article gives examples of these pages making hundreds of pro-government comments on various political posts.
- freddealmeida 5y agoI think we need a new journalism. One that can avoid the last 20 years of structured news. Though I think this is impossible now. Not without an outsized reaction by the population that doesn't even care. Facebook exists because most people can accept those crimes committed against them. They really don't even understand them all. Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore
- dna_polymerase 5y ago> Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore Why would that surprise anyone? He had Moxie implement the Signal protocol in WhatsApp.
- CallingOutBS 5y ago> Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal Was this ever confirmed? Is it possible Zuckerberg just installed it to check out the competition? Is it possible he has it installed as a WhatsApp backup, if FB/WhatsApp is down (exactly the sort of thing the CEO of FB/WhatsApp needs to be prepared for)? And we've concluded "Zuckerberg uses Signal"?
- HenryBemis 5y agoIf he installed it for 5mins to 'test the competition'.... then.... he did it on his "main" phone? Don't they have throwaway phones for that? Would he allow his full contact list to be uploaded?
- ethbr0 5y agoWe don't need a new journalism, we need a new economic model to support the old old journalism (pre-1990s). The three foundational planks that we've since lost are (1) strong newsroom editorial control of content, independent of revenue, (2) long form & investigative journalism as a stable, viable profession, & (3) journalists and journalism outlets with reputation (able to counter-balance the weight of those they report on). The greatest tragedy of Google and Facebook has been that they appropriated advertising money that used to support actual journalism, and in return offered us free social and utility apps, but definitely not journalism. IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.
- oilbagz 5y agoITT: folks whose livelihood depends on that Facebook Ads campaign manager payout, vs. those of us who would rather live in a world free from this sort of manipulation. DAE miss AOL?
- cblconfederate 5y agoA lot of people may also be supporting the regimes of those countries
- disabled 5y agoFrom the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-...: > "But it quickly became clear that no one was interested in taking responsibility for policing the abuses of the president of a poor nation with just 4.5m Facebook users. The message she received from all corners – including from threat intelligence, the small and elite team of investigators responsible for uncovering CIB campaigns – was that the abuses were bad, but resources were tight, and, absent any external pressure, Honduras was simply not a priority." We can assume that hostile nations have known this for awhile, and they have also been exploiting this. This is tragic but true. Sophie Zhang is a hero.
- CFA178B 5y agoThere was never any point in facebook being any "force for good" or "revolution" as people might have hoped for. If you read investors reflections on early FB days strategic meetings, you see the picture much more clearly. Tech gets cheap, people are dumb, surveillance pays, what's not to like about this business?
- jimmaswell 5y agoIt's happened: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Revolution Facebook is the de facto social network and lets people connect and spread information on an unprecedented scale, for good or bad.
- john_minsk 5y agoFacebook shouldn't moderate anything; Facebook content should drop in value to where it belongs: personal updates from friends and funny videos; People need to start voting on actual policies each politician/party proposes, not based on Facebook information from unknown accounts. Will that be enough?
- blfr 5y ago> The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America. Alternatively, Facebook itself is more interested in manipulating political outcomes in the US, Taiwan, South Korea, and Poland, and less so or not at all in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.
- yrgulation 5y agoNot pertinent to the main issue, but I just find it funny how the guardian never forgets to include such “facts” about countries: “poor, small and non-western countries”. Does similarly when it talks about racial “equality” up to the point its readership will pretty much always associate certain countries and ethnicities with poverty. Basically, promoting stereotypes.
- MajorBee 5y agoDoes it do anyone any favours by pretending that these countries are not "poor, small, and non-western"? I suppose you can replace "poor" with "developing", but it's a fine balancing act between unfaithful stereotyping and patronizing epithets.
- djhn 5y agoCalling Mexico small and poor is a weird choice. Would China and Brazil qualify as well?
- rodolphoarruda 5y agoI'm absolutely surprised that Brazil is not even mentioned in the article. Political manipulation since early 2019 in Brazil has been jaw dropping.
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- cblconfederate 5y agoFacebook is worse than state-controlled media in those countries, and they have a moral obligation to stop doing business in oppressive countries. People know that state-controlled media is biased, but oppressive leaders can demand censorship from facebook at whim and nobody knows about it. And i would not be surprised if bribes inside facebook are involved , as some of those countries are known to run extensive bribery operations e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_laundromat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_laundromat
- SSLy 5y agoI live in one of those countries (Poland), and certainly the state-controlled media/energy/industry conglomerate is worse, thank you.
- cblconfederate 5y agoBut you know that it's state-controlled. Would you say that facebook in Turkey is not state-controlled, even though it s not branded as such?
- nradov 5y agoDo you have a list of which countries are oppressive and which are not?
- cblconfederate 5y agoMany are listed in the article itself.
- m-p-3 5y agoWhat about more clearly identifying when a comment, like, etc is made by a page instead of an account, and include the account(s) managing the page in its transparency report?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIt's not a loophole if you can drive a truck through it. That's like claiming that abusing slaves was a 'loophole'
- csemaan 5y agoThe Guardian, and a few other outfits in global media sold its readership very hard on the "Gadhafi killing his own people" fallacy to enable Islamist gangs to plunder and maim and kill and ruin the societal fabric of Libya (and a few southern neighbors). Since then, Libya is a wasteland, its inhabitants enslaved as a whole (as opposed to the few political (read Islamists) prisoners' under the Gadhafi dictatorship), deaths in the tens of thousands, prisoners are not accounted for under any authority. Also the Guardian, just like most MSM holds a grudge against FB: how dare they eat their pie, all of it, and they let people escape from their 'single-eyed war-enabling worldview'? Lay the FB 'hate' aside, will ya? For all its dehumanizing power (as much as the rest of 'social media' and technology in general) FB has not committed the 1/10000th of the harm these champions of virtue in the MSM have done for the last couple centuries (steamrolling their power on most wars, worldwide or not).
- sp332 5y agoSo at any given moment, we're only allowed to criticize one thing - the worst thing in the entire world? After all, anything else is, you know, not that bad.
- spazrunaway 5y agoYes. We need a hell of a lot less destructive criticism that leads to war.
- sp332 5y agoThat is why I'm anti-Facebook. Remember the role they played in the Myanmar genocide?
- u801e 5y agoWhich genocide are you referring to?
- newswasboring 5y ago
- h2odragon 5y agoLeaders "deceiving their citizens" was never a problem until facebook came along! How unconscionable that they didnt anticipate and fix this problem! People who want Facebook, or "someone" to be the arbiter of the One True Truth are doomed to fail, because nothing is true.
- williesleg 5y agoThanks Joe Biden.
- known 5y ago"Media is not spreading free opinion; It's generating opinion" --Oswald (b. 1918) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West
- kitsune_ 5y agoI think in the near future, working at Facebook will probably have same stigma as working for Philipp Morris or similar...
- cblconfederate 5y agoAzerbaijan is not poor or small, please change the submission title , it s insulting
- dijit 5y agoPoor and Small are comparatives. Compared to the UK, USA, France, Italy, Germany, China, Russia and on and on: Azerbaijan is poor and small. It ranks 112th in the world for size, 99th for population, 86th for GDP. When comparing things, especially when it's relevant to the subject (facebook doesn't care about comparatively small and poor countries) then it is not offensive. Unless you want to take offence.
- cblconfederate 5y agoIt's average, about the population size of Sweden, would anyone call sweden small? The problem is that the title deflects from the issue which is not that these countries are poor (Azb is rich enough to run an extensive laundering operation to whitewash their corruption). Facebook does the same in Turkey for example, and who knows how many other countries.
- dijit 5y agoYes, people definitely call Sweden small.
- triceratops 5y ago> would anyone call sweden small? Yes. I think everyone calls Sweden small. Probably even Swedes themselves. Sweden is small and rich.
- EastSmith 5y agoThis would have not be a problem if there was no algorithm to show you the top stories. Just show the stories in chronological order - let the users think before subscribing to 1000 pages and having 800 friends.
- chrisseaton 5y agoBut users want the most interesting or important or relevant content to be highlighted.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoIt seems like Facebook users don’t have a choice in which content gets highlighted. I would much prefer a simple chronological feed of only posts from my friends and followed list.
- no-s 5y agoyeah. it's like we don't get an honest say in what we get to see. Like advertising, heheh.
- nullserver 5y agoOff topic. Last week wife got an email that her Facebook was logged into. Told her to open app and change password immediately. Too late. Account email and phone number already changed. No way to use old ones to get control back. 15 year old account with a huge amount of memories gone. Best possible was to indicate a problem, so account is disabled. But no way to use it anymore. Apparently this has happened to around half of her cohorts. It’s now part of life to just make new accounts periodically. Utterly shocking that account email and phone can be changed in 20 minutes and no way to change them back.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoA teaching moment for using strong passwords.
- nullserver 5y agoThat’s missing the point. And frankly victim blaming. Allowing all the security info to be changed moments after logging on with no way to put them back is absurd.
- nitrogen 5y agoThe reverse compromise, where the email is hacked would require exactly that though. It's not a problem with one solution. It's many problems that require a human point of contact.
- Iolaum 5y agoIt's actually a moment for 2FA. Also the other commenter is right about victim blaming. The notification about a suspicious login should give appropriate options to safeguard one's account from a takeover.
- spoonjim 5y agoIs it just me or are activist women in Bay Area tech disproportionately transgender? It seems like 20% or even more when you hear these “woman fighting corrupt behavior from the inside” stories.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tolbish 5y agoWell San Francisco has the highest LGBT concentration of any metro in the US by a decent margin.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- libraryatnight 5y agoIf we discovered any other type of product was this dangerous, it'd be pulled from the shelves. But in this case the ones that would do the pulling are probably benefiting the most from manipulation.
- jimmaswell 5y agoI'm inclined to feel like the political landscape is already FUBAR in lots of these corrupt countries, so any negative from Facebook doesn't really make a difference, but the good that can come from Facebook ("Facebook revolutions"[0]) exists, so it's a net positive. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Revolution
- Gravyness 5y agoWhat's up with this articles that jump into "facebook is evil" so fast? Its obvious that a huge, worldwide company is slow to address manipulative ads in small communities.
- babesh 5y agoFacebook is power and control over several billion people and countries across the world. That is superpower level power. Mark Zuckerberg will never give up that level of power because either he wields that power or someone else will. Weak countries don’t matter in matters of power and this is an example of it. Also, Facebook has no issues at all when it comes to manipulation when it is to its benefit. It has done so before. If you believe that Facebook doesn’t have that power then you must also believe that people aren’t easily manipulated. Advertising is proof against that belief.
- reducesuffering 5y ago> Mark Zuckerberg will never give up that level of power because either he wields that power or someone else will. I'm leaning towards this is the most misunderstood aspect of Zuckerberg. The Google founders also lamented how difficult it was to steer morally straight when so many internal company issues arose when the stock price was flat: their most talented employees leaving and morale dropping. Zuckerberg is a smart cookie and is probably quite aware what's been created with Facebook. But it's absolutely worse under a bean-counter "money at all cost" corporation. Long term, federating and allowing people to retain their social graph across any client platform, breaking up the network effect, seems to be the only way forward.
- leroman 5y agoWe're suffering from this here as well (in Israel), we're already in the 4th consecutive election and it looks like there will be a fifth. Bibi's (and his family) use of social platforms has been in forms of - posts with blatant lies - fake profiles posting fake inciting content that is then used in their own campaigns to incite their base - fake likes - fake profiles that generate content It's got to the point that we just call any Bibi supporter as a "Bot" (once because they don't get our credit for critical thinking and second time because of the many fake profiles that generate content in his name)