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The whole PR discourse around these issues mentioned in the article is broken. > Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedon
by RNCTX 5y ago
The whole PR discourse around these issues mentioned in the article is broken.
> Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook.
I have yet to see a mainstream press article mention that people in other countries are not nefarious others in hoodies and sunglasses typing away at green screened terminals for Putin. The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead.
> Combined, the troll farms' pages reached 140 million Facebook users a month, dwarfing the reach of even Walmart's Facebook presence.
Do people go to Walmart's Facebook page? I can't think of any reason to go to a retailer's Facebook page, personally.
> "But if you just want to write python scripts that scrape social media and anonymously regurgitate content into communities while siphoning off some monetary or influence reward for yourself… well you can fuck right off."
Yet no one had a problem with Fark and Digg.
> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee.
Of course he did, this is the real crux of the whole thing. He's fishing for donors and looking to jumpstart his political consulting career, so that he can help the DNC dupe people into voting for ballot referendums that make Uber exempt from labor laws, instead of helping Facebook ad buyers dupe people into buying t-shirts with unlicensed logos.
All of this sturm and drang aside, the more simple explanation for how to "solve these problems" is to not have all-encompassing social media platforms. The internet was largely fine when teenage boys who call each other slurs were limited to gaming forums and anonymous chats that grandmas and moms would never find. There's no reason outside of the monetary self-interest of those associated with Facebook and Twitter for these groups of people to be on the same app together at the same time.
- goatsi 5y ago>The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead. The pages weren't even being run for a political purpose, it was all about the adsense dollars. Pro Trump stories just pulled the maximum amount of traffic from Facebook. >Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”) https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/
- RNCTX 5y agoRight above in the same paragraph in that article: > After seeing the BMW, Boris decided to start some websites of his own. He already knew there was money to be made off the internet; for a while, when he was 17, he’d been one of the many peons around the world laboring online for MicroWorkers.com, earning something like a tenth of a cent for liking a YouTube video or leaving a comment. I mean, this is the whole explanation for youtube as a platform, isn't it? You can't see who upvotes, so everyone can simply buy said upvotes. It also explains why google will play an endless string of youtube videos on my sleeping laptop despite me being asleep as well, and why Netflix auto-plays movies you scroll past. The whole of the major internet sites (except Amazon, simply because it's a store) seems to be mainly concerned with rigging menial stats.
- smsm42 5y agoThe Walmart thing really made me giggle. I mean, who even goes there? When I was on FB, I never visited Walmart page even once, over the years. What kind of a titan of social media they think Walmart is? What kind of serious discussion about social media can we have with people that think Walmart page is a measuring stick of popularity?