6 ms·

Kenyan social media campaign designed to undermine the country’s judiciary

57 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

InfiniteRand 5y ago
Even though I do think disinformation is a real problem in the world, I think you need to take disinformation research with a grain of salt because my impression is that disinformation specialists regularly employ disinformation to inflate their own importance
- ComodoHacker 5y ago
  Why would they draw attention to their successful business?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- z3c0 5y ago
  I can't tell if you're just being humorous, or if you actually believe that the Mozilla Foundation deserves speculation here. If it's the latter, I'd like to know more.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and say any organization that dedicates resources to fighting "misinformation", in this current political climate, definitely deserves some skepticism and speculation. Are there plenty of falsehoods swirling around online? Absolutely. But keep in mind that "misinformation/disinformation" is increasingly being used in a partisan fashion. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes as a rhetorical trick.
    - soco 5y ago
      Getting into fatalism or relativism is not doing anybody service. If one sees something wrong, they should take a stance, even while knowing that not all that glitters is gold.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Just look at so-called "fact checkers" these days. What started off as a useful service to the Internet and society has grown in importance and been warped into a political weapon that is used to promote propaganda. The fact that you're downvoted is just more evidence that we're nowhere near people waking up to the danger of the problem of mindlessly delegating their thinking and research obligations to entities that have been captured by politics.
1cvmask 5y ago
You get what you pay for. The biggest disinformation influencers who parrot the governments like stenographers are showered with millions as news anchors, talking heads and get juicy book deals. These amateur troll farms are a joke in comparison. They have not lied countries into wars unlike the other more insidious kinds.
- refurb 5y ago
  Who needs to pay someone $15/hr when you’ve got the MSNBC producer on speed dial?
  - beej71 5y ago
    News anchor only has so much reach. Why stop there when you could get more for cheap?
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  Not all trolls farms are amateur. The article says exactly otherwise. > Since 2009, more than $60 million has been collected by firms that promote messages using bots and other amplification strategies, according to research from the Oxford Internet Institute. The man that owns Wagner owns one of the most prominent ones.
tester34 5y ago
I do wonder what's the cost of relatively skilled, proficent at rhetorical gymnastics and eristics with domain knowledge individual?
- Zenst 5y ago
  Corporate lobbyists get paid very well. Which is probably the top of that game without going into politics.
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    I think this is a winners takes most of the pie situation, not unlike the situation with CEOs and OnlyFans models. I also believe that there are 2 distinct paths - public advocacy where one manipulates the plebs who vote for people in power, and political advocacy where one manipulates the people with legislative power.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Here is my conspiracy theory: From discussion with people I disagree with, I often find a similar M.O. - An actual legitimate academic suddenly starts outputting content that is completely left field from their expertise. - The content is Sophistry at best or blatant lies at worse. However it consistently serves a destabilizing purpose. - A critical mass gathers around them, with youtube/twitter/fb giving them momentum. Examples: - Bjorn Lomborg, Political Science academic turned climate science denialist. - Steven E. Koonin, published physicist turned climate science denialist - John W. Oller, Linguistics Academic turned Editor of a make believe Immunology Journal claiming adverse Covid vaccine effects. Perhaps I am just looking for patterns and malice but it makes me worried that there is more orchestration than what we assume there to be.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    Noam Chomsky, linguist turned political commentator and becomes a leading voice for the left and critic of American foreign policy? John Maynard Keynes, English mathematician becomes an economist and leading proponent of stimulus programs that have helped millions? Here is what Hayek said about Keynes for instance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8l47ilD0II https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8l47ilD0II Sometimes an outsider is unaffected by the established biases and censorship, in their thinking.
sigmaprimus 5y ago
>>> “Using both technology and human review, we proactively and routinely tackle attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them at scale by actioning millions of accounts each week for violating our policies,” Platform Manipulation = promoting anything JD disagrees with?
- Atlas667 5y ago
  It is a private company after all. You are pointing out the contradiction of having private business do a public service for profit. There is no way to solve that without controlling our platforms collectively.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    Social media is practically the archetype of a public utility. Of course it should be nationalized or democratized or open-sourced or whatever.
    - swayvil 5y ago
      I disagree you so so I'm gonna censor you (via downvote). That's some good LordOfTheFlies action there folks.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    You got the first half. A private business will always be self interested. Collective ownership is not the only solution. Alternatives include public benefit corporations, non-profits and federal government ownership.
    - Atlas667 5y ago
      That does not guarantee mass representation of user interests. Mostly the interests of those with enough power to influence that corporation, nonprofit, or federal company will be represented. Which is what happens today and we are right back where we started. I believe that mass representation of user interests for social media could be achieved through popular usage of distributed platforms and popular developing. To have a popular platform nodes must run the mass accepted protocol/version. Else you just have a fragmented network. The majority could rule in this scenario if we have the right ideological framework to sustain it. What you propose is not a real solution.
sigmaprimus 5y ago
People are hired in the west at a higher rate of pay to influence and promote political and other points of view under the guise of corporate social media managers. How is anyone being paid to influence not manipulating the "Platform"? I think it is past due time for legislation preventing all public money from being used for social media, including tax exempt NGOs and government intern salaries that hire social media managers.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > I think it is past due time for legislation preventing all public money from being used for social media, including tax exempt NGOs and government intern salaries that hire social media managers. Seems to me that we are in a choice between the devil and the deep sea. Governments and NGOs spending money on these platforms further enables the continued existence of said platforms and all of the problems that they entail. But because the social media main players are so big, not spending money means leaving the table open for others to further their own agenda to an even greater extent. It’s difficult.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  To me, the major difference is a proper representation of the source. If Widgets inc pays a person to publish a bunch of influencing articles which are signed by "Joe Shmoe, social media manager of Widgets, inc", that's appropriate, but if the exact same content would signed by "Joe Shmoe, just a random bloke from Kansas writing my own thoughts about what's wrong in this world", that's misleading.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
With the selective honesty from most media outlets, you don't need disinformation agents, the people themselves will flood the internet with all kinds of cacophony.
walls 5y ago
So are we just ignoring that troll farms have likely caused thousands of COVID deaths?
- pphysch 5y ago
  Correlation is not necessarily causation. Anti-vaxxers and government mismanagement long predate online trolls.
  - crazy_horse 5y ago
    There are absolutely covid misinformation campaigns. It would take very, very little for a single person influenced by one of those to have led to thousands of deaths. Correlation does not equal causation sounds like an argument that would be peddled on Reddit. HN gets close to crank territory on this. It's a nuanced, real-world situation.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      Yes, there are misinformation "campaigns", but can you prove they are a deciding cause rather than another parallel expression of the underlying anti-authoritarian angst?
      - crazy_horse 5y ago
        The point of the misinformation campaigns is to tap into that angst. You could create new issues if you want after you have a captive audience, but they start by looking for targets. How else would you do it?
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    That's true, they firebombed the house of the first white person to vaccinate people in Boston back in 1721. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smoyer 5y ago
A bit off-topic but why does the Mozilla Foundation have researchers looking at this sort of data (I've been donating assuming I was supporting Firefox which frankly is the only thing I care about from Mozilla).
- comrh 5y ago
  https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/
- daqhris 5y ago
  Well, I believe that there are many other endeavours under the umbrella of Mozilla Foundation. Another project (personally I'm more familiar with this) that's not very notorious but has a whole team of researchers is Common Voice, i.e. open-source datasets for training voice tech systems. From their website : "Mozilla is a global non-profit dedicated to putting you in control of your online experience and shaping the future of the web for the public good." -> https://foundation.mozilla.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Mozilla funds a lot more than just Firefox. I consider it an activist organisation that happens to also build a browser, because that seems to be what they're focusing on themselves. For example Mozilla Foundation has a special program for projects in countries with low internet penetration[1]. They also sponsor education and culture in some poorer countries like Brazil and Kenya [2]. On a technical front, Mozilla also funds some open projects that intend to be an alternative to Google's services, like their open voice recognition program or their open location service (which helps devices resolve your location based on cell towers, like Google and other companies (Apple?) do). Mozilla has chosen not to allow the public to directly fund development of Firefox, instead leveraging the foundation to fund both their activism and browser development from the same pool of money. Perhaps they wouldn't be able to maintain their activism without the income from the donations intended for Firefox, or maybe they only do this to simplify their accounting; I'm not that familiar with their plans or finances. According to this article [3] software development made up about 61% of the Foundation's expenses, but this information can probably be considered outdated because since a large part of the Rust/Servo team have been fired. [1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/fellows-for-open-internet-engineering/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/f... [2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/fellows-for-tech-and-society/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/f... [3]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-of-mozilla/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
myfavoritedog 5y ago
So now we're against paying people to be on the front lines of political battles? In that case, someone should put some legislation in place to stop unions from paying their members to participate in politics.
RegnisGnaw 5y ago
Sooner or later, every country will implement Internet control to crack down on this. China has lead the way in this. The US elections and the COVID crisis has shown us that this is needed.

57 points by adrian_mrd 5y ago

Even though I do think disinformation is a real problem in the world, I think you need to take disinformation research with a grain of salt because my impression is that disinformation specialists regularly employ disinformation to inflate their own importance

ComodoHacker 5y ago
Why would they draw attention to their successful business?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
z3c0 5y ago
I can't tell if you're just being humorous, or if you actually believe that the Mozilla Foundation deserves speculation here. If it's the latter, I'd like to know more.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say any organization that dedicates resources to fighting "misinformation", in this current political climate, definitely deserves some skepticism and speculation. Are there plenty of falsehoods swirling around online? Absolutely. But keep in mind that "misinformation/disinformation" is increasingly being used in a partisan fashion. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes as a rhetorical trick.
  - soco 5y ago
    Getting into fatalism or relativism is not doing anybody service. If one sees something wrong, they should take a stance, even while knowing that not all that glitters is gold.
myfavoritedog 5y ago
Just look at so-called "fact checkers" these days. What started off as a useful service to the Internet and society has grown in importance and been warped into a political weapon that is used to promote propaganda. The fact that you're downvoted is just more evidence that we're nowhere near people waking up to the danger of the problem of mindlessly delegating their thinking and research obligations to entities that have been captured by politics.

1cvmask 5y ago

You get what you pay for. The biggest disinformation influencers who parrot the governments like stenographers are showered with millions as news anchors, talking heads and get juicy book deals. These amateur troll farms are a joke in comparison. They have not lied countries into wars unlike the other more insidious kinds.

refurb 5y ago
Who needs to pay someone $15/hr when you’ve got the MSNBC producer on speed dial?
- beej71 5y ago
  News anchor only has so much reach. Why stop there when you could get more for cheap?
crazy_horse 5y ago
Not all trolls farms are amateur. The article says exactly otherwise. > Since 2009, more than $60 million has been collected by firms that promote messages using bots and other amplification strategies, according to research from the Oxford Internet Institute. The man that owns Wagner owns one of the most prominent ones.

tester34 5y ago

I do wonder what's the cost of relatively skilled, proficent at rhetorical gymnastics and eristics with domain knowledge individual?

Zenst 5y ago
Corporate lobbyists get paid very well. Which is probably the top of that game without going into politics.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  I think this is a winners takes most of the pie situation, not unlike the situation with CEOs and OnlyFans models. I also believe that there are 2 distinct paths - public advocacy where one manipulates the plebs who vote for people in power, and political advocacy where one manipulates the people with legislative power.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
Here is my conspiracy theory: From discussion with people I disagree with, I often find a similar M.O. - An actual legitimate academic suddenly starts outputting content that is completely left field from their expertise. - The content is Sophistry at best or blatant lies at worse. However it consistently serves a destabilizing purpose. - A critical mass gathers around them, with youtube/twitter/fb giving them momentum. Examples: - Bjorn Lomborg, Political Science academic turned climate science denialist. - Steven E. Koonin, published physicist turned climate science denialist - John W. Oller, Linguistics Academic turned Editor of a make believe Immunology Journal claiming adverse Covid vaccine effects. Perhaps I am just looking for patterns and malice but it makes me worried that there is more orchestration than what we assume there to be.
- EGreg 5y ago
  Noam Chomsky, linguist turned political commentator and becomes a leading voice for the left and critic of American foreign policy? John Maynard Keynes, English mathematician becomes an economist and leading proponent of stimulus programs that have helped millions? Here is what Hayek said about Keynes for instance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8l47ilD0II https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8l47ilD0II Sometimes an outsider is unaffected by the established biases and censorship, in their thinking.

sigmaprimus 5y ago

>>> “Using both technology and human review, we proactively and routinely tackle attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them at scale by actioning millions of accounts each week for violating our policies,” Platform Manipulation = promoting anything JD disagrees with?

Atlas667 5y ago
It is a private company after all. You are pointing out the contradiction of having private business do a public service for profit. There is no way to solve that without controlling our platforms collectively.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Social media is practically the archetype of a public utility. Of course it should be nationalized or democratized or open-sourced or whatever.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    I disagree you so so I'm gonna censor you (via downvote). That's some good LordOfTheFlies action there folks.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  You got the first half. A private business will always be self interested. Collective ownership is not the only solution. Alternatives include public benefit corporations, non-profits and federal government ownership.
  - Atlas667 5y ago
    That does not guarantee mass representation of user interests. Mostly the interests of those with enough power to influence that corporation, nonprofit, or federal company will be represented. Which is what happens today and we are right back where we started. I believe that mass representation of user interests for social media could be achieved through popular usage of distributed platforms and popular developing. To have a popular platform nodes must run the mass accepted protocol/version. Else you just have a fragmented network. The majority could rule in this scenario if we have the right ideological framework to sustain it. What you propose is not a real solution.

sigmaprimus 5y ago

People are hired in the west at a higher rate of pay to influence and promote political and other points of view under the guise of corporate social media managers. How is anyone being paid to influence not manipulating the "Platform"? I think it is past due time for legislation preventing all public money from being used for social media, including tax exempt NGOs and government intern salaries that hire social media managers.

codetrotter 5y ago
> I think it is past due time for legislation preventing all public money from being used for social media, including tax exempt NGOs and government intern salaries that hire social media managers. Seems to me that we are in a choice between the devil and the deep sea. Governments and NGOs spending money on these platforms further enables the continued existence of said platforms and all of the problems that they entail. But because the social media main players are so big, not spending money means leaving the table open for others to further their own agenda to an even greater extent. It’s difficult.
PeterisP 5y ago
To me, the major difference is a proper representation of the source. If Widgets inc pays a person to publish a bunch of influencing articles which are signed by "Joe Shmoe, social media manager of Widgets, inc", that's appropriate, but if the exact same content would signed by "Joe Shmoe, just a random bloke from Kansas writing my own thoughts about what's wrong in this world", that's misleading.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

With the selective honesty from most media outlets, you don't need disinformation agents, the people themselves will flood the internet with all kinds of cacophony.

walls 5y ago

So are we just ignoring that troll farms have likely caused thousands of COVID deaths?

pphysch 5y ago
Correlation is not necessarily causation. Anti-vaxxers and government mismanagement long predate online trolls.
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  There are absolutely covid misinformation campaigns. It would take very, very little for a single person influenced by one of those to have led to thousands of deaths. Correlation does not equal causation sounds like an argument that would be peddled on Reddit. HN gets close to crank territory on this. It's a nuanced, real-world situation.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    Yes, there are misinformation "campaigns", but can you prove they are a deciding cause rather than another parallel expression of the underlying anti-authoritarian angst?
    - crazy_horse 5y ago
      The point of the misinformation campaigns is to tap into that angst. You could create new issues if you want after you have a captive audience, but they start by looking for targets. How else would you do it?
- mikewarot 5y ago
  That's true, they firebombed the house of the first white person to vaccinate people in Boston back in 1721. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smoyer 5y ago

A bit off-topic but why does the Mozilla Foundation have researchers looking at this sort of data (I've been donating assuming I was supporting Firefox which frankly is the only thing I care about from Mozilla).

comrh 5y ago
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/
daqhris 5y ago
Well, I believe that there are many other endeavours under the umbrella of Mozilla Foundation. Another project (personally I'm more familiar with this) that's not very notorious but has a whole team of researchers is Common Voice, i.e. open-source datasets for training voice tech systems. From their website : "Mozilla is a global non-profit dedicated to putting you in control of your online experience and shaping the future of the web for the public good." -> https://foundation.mozilla.org/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/
jeroenhd 5y ago
Mozilla funds a lot more than just Firefox. I consider it an activist organisation that happens to also build a browser, because that seems to be what they're focusing on themselves. For example Mozilla Foundation has a special program for projects in countries with low internet penetration[1]. They also sponsor education and culture in some poorer countries like Brazil and Kenya [2]. On a technical front, Mozilla also funds some open projects that intend to be an alternative to Google's services, like their open voice recognition program or their open location service (which helps devices resolve your location based on cell towers, like Google and other companies (Apple?) do). Mozilla has chosen not to allow the public to directly fund development of Firefox, instead leveraging the foundation to fund both their activism and browser development from the same pool of money. Perhaps they wouldn't be able to maintain their activism without the income from the donations intended for Firefox, or maybe they only do this to simplify their accounting; I'm not that familiar with their plans or finances. According to this article [3] software development made up about 61% of the Foundation's expenses, but this information can probably be considered outdated because since a large part of the Rust/Servo team have been fired. [1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/fellows-for-open-internet-engineering/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/f... [2]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/fellows-for-tech-and-society/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/f... [3]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-of-mozilla/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...

myfavoritedog 5y ago

So now we're against paying people to be on the front lines of political battles? In that case, someone should put some legislation in place to stop unions from paying their members to participate in politics.

RegnisGnaw 5y ago

Sooner or later, every country will implement Internet control to crack down on this. China has lead the way in this. The US elections and the COVID crisis has shown us that this is needed.