Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-disinformation-facebook-twitter/facebook-twitter-dismantle-global-array-of-disinformation-networks-idUSKBN26T2XO

by LinuxBender • 6 years ago

180 241 6 years ago

reuters.com

hanniabu• 6 years ago

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

Giorgi• 6 years ago

3500 accounts? single bot will make those in several weeks

ryankrage77• 6 years ago

My thoughts exactly, it will take a dedicated organization less than a day to re-create 3500 accounts

actuator• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Or switch to the ones they've already manufactured for this purpose.

effingwewt• 6 years 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.

hartator• 6 years ago

single bot will make those in several weeks

Minutes!

marketingPro3• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

but did you see the headline? it was an entire global array!

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

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

mberning2• 6 years 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.

sthnblllII3• 6 years 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?

fred_is_fred• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

MrBuddyCasino2• 6 years 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

cageface2• 6 years 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.

enumjorge2• 6 years ago

Understandable. How do you propose we deal with the current wave of propaganda and misinformation that these platforms enable, especially since they’re already having a very real effect on politics all over the world?

srsQtho00• 6 years ago

Thomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years.

James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.

If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions. Don’t lump them all together as believing in the same values.

tyre4• 6 years ago

What do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns?

Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world.

No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brainwashing, but the speed and adaptability and design of these systems is so different as to be categorically unrecognizable.

So. What do you propose?

scoot_718• 6 years ago

They have to. Doing nothing is so much worse. It won't be an amendment, it'll be the end of the constitution.

realHistory00• 6 years ago

Thomas Jefferson wrote the living should not be ruled by the dead, and that the Constitution should expire after 19 years.

James Madison wrote the Senate should protect the moneyed from democracy, and the Constitution was forever.

If you’re going to point at their ideas, don’t cherry pick nebulous middle ground cartoon versions of their actual positions, and lump them together as on the same page.

Some enlightened people that knew much less about reality than we do and have been dead for 200 years.

Old ideas of American civic life have become a religion unto themselves. Jefferson wrote of that too: laws must change as human awareness grows.

It’s time to change things, I would agree. I’d start by burying old idols. Little left to be gleaned from men who died without knowing of Einstein, Godel, and the rest of modern invention.

op03• 6 years ago

Temporarily it's fine I think.

Cause no one else has the skills or resources. And things are happening too fast and at huge scales to depend on local law enforcement/courts to handle it. You can see them freaking out everyday.

There was a time I thought the US and EU wld get things under control specifically after Brexit and Trump but its quite obvious govts don't have what it takes right now.

Will be interesting to see what the counter reaction is from bad actors. I highly doubt they are going into retirement now.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes

Here's the opposite catastrophic failure mode which the enlightened free speech defenders fail to notice (or do notice but don't care because they're not the affected parties - or at least doesn't think it affects them or are simply accomplices)

Truckloads and truckloads of unchecked fabricated BS drowning the discourse. Mob censorship.

bdamm• 6 years ago

They're removing bots. I for one appreciate the lowered noise floor. If a platform (Facebook) is claiming that it's for people, then we should know when a post is from a person or a bot.

root_axis6• 6 years ago

The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach.

Such as?

ben_w2• 6 years ago

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The catastrophic failure mode of doing nothing is that democracies vote to stop being democratic, and do so with deafening applause. It has happened before.

Let them fight disinformation; also require them to be open about how they are doing it so they can’t become a disinformation provider of their own — there are already enough people, left and right, who think FB et al are censoring their ‘truths’ for nefarious reasons.

ciarannolan• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

cryptica2• 6 years ago

Because Mark Zuckerberg created a lot of wealth so he has proven himself to be trustworthy and he has a lot at stake. On the other hand, run-of-the-mill elected officials don't have as much money so they are not trustworthy since they don't have much to lose if things go bad.

Why would Mark Zuckerberg want to harm a country that his business depends on? Why would someone destroy their own house? It makes no sense. On the other hand, politicians have plenty of incentives to harm the country; since they can just sell out to foreign powers in order to gain favors and make a quick buck after they leave office.

Politicians cannot be trusted because they have nothing to lose from making things worse. Corporations on the other hand can be trusted because they have a lot to lose if the country goes down the drain.

In times like these, it's important that we all come together and support our corporations in order to protect our democracy.

sneak• 6 years ago

People already trust these companies 100% to decide what they can read, de facto:

The evidence is that your FB messenger inbox is not filled with porn spam 400 times per second.

This is all fine and good until these centralized, sometimes-censored systems are commandeered by the state to censor person-to-person communications (whether it be on a certain topic, using certain keywords, or all messages to/from users in a certain geofence).

This is turnkey tyranny, and you wouldn't even know it had happened. The command to the service providers would be gag ordered, it wouldn't be visible, it wouldn't be reproducible, and it wouldn't make the news.

I am convinced that this represents one of the greatest threats to our society: the danger is imminent. If it hasn't happened already, it will soon.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24630900

unethical_ban4• 6 years ago

What is the alternative? Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? "Feed me the libraries worth of bullshit from the Internet, and I will sort through this free market firehose to come to a logical, evidence based conclusion", hm?

Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their internal data, there is certainly technical stats to identify related accounts participating in bad faith campaigns.

I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh.

However, if you look at Twitter or Facebook on any given day, you can see that a lot of bullshit, emanating from every possible angle of the political spectrum, still exists. Much of it organic, much of it bots, I'm sure. Let's stop hitting the panic button every time they remove Iranian bot networks.

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

What is the alternative?

Improve your informational diet first by consciously discounting whatever you read on Facebook, and second by spending less time on Facebook.

Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation?

There's no need for snark.

The issue being discussed is particular to these sorts of platforms. Reputable news sources still exist.

vinhboy• 6 years ago

Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation?

Thank goodness someone is calling this out other than me. Sites like these are filled with people who think they are smart don't need any help, and worse, expect everyone else in the world to be at their level.

I too am glad social media companies are finally waking up and taking action against this stuff.

Can you imagine a world where Google decided they wouldn't filter spam because it was too controversial?

marketingPro3• 6 years ago

(or HN)

Things get a bit too Hail Corporate, especially with specific brands.

apostacy2• 6 years ago

I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh.

I mean, these companies have a monopoly or near monopoly on communications, and they have openly said they are going to arbitrarily remove information that they don't like, without any kind of transparency or accountability.

Is the fact that congress is not enacting a law supposed to mean that it is not censorship, and that we can't complain about it?

Would you be ok with other private networks doing it?

Besides, if we must have censorship, could we at least have someone more deserving of our trust do it? These policies of removing "fake news" greatly worsened COVID-19. As late as February, they were removing "disinformation" that it was infectious human to human.

Telling someone to mask up in early March could get you banned.

Posting first party evidence of the chaos in China in January could get you banned. It was fake news and disinformation. They were protecting us.

These companies should be begging us for a second chance to filter the truth for us.

Not just are these companies fallible, but they also have a very obvious neoliberal agenda. I've watched every single progressive podcast I liked get shadowbanned or outright removed from every major platform over the last year.

Why are people so eager for this?

chrisco255• 6 years ago

Agreed. Unless they're dismantling themselves I really don't trust this effort.

obviouslynotme• 6 years ago

Or anyone really. After 2016, I stopped watching and reading the current news completely. Everyone is lying to you now. I just wait 6 months before having an opinion on anything. That gives more than enough time for most of the rumors and mistakes to iron themselves out. As an unexpected side effect, I am happier than I have ever been. The world isn't going to end and I need to stop worrying that it will.

sb057• 6 years ago

The world isn't going to end and I need to stop worrying that it will.

Debatable, but even if it is, you still shouldn't waste your time worrying about it.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

I don't use Facebook or Twitter as a serious source of news or foundational information. It's fun sometimes. If Facebook or Twitter disappeared tomorrow, society would not regress or be hurt in any way.

Anything that collects a mass number of likely untrained/uneducated people in a common space, where they can create a post record of anything with no restriction of content to the world at large, will never be a serious source of news or foundational information. You may sift through this and get something useful or interesting once in a while, but it is simply incapable of as a whole of being anything great.

The fact that these networks exist as primarily ad businesses is probably the best thing that can become of them.

The most useful/meaningful thing totally free/open social networks can do in a general sense is provide a venue for people to post raw media of events, such as crimes, etc. which can be useful if you are near that locality, but the comments and subsequent discussion have a very low chance of being anything but emotional expressions.

I am fine with whatever actions Facebook or Twitter take to do this if they feel the need. Facebook and Twitter are not government agencies. People choose to use them. People whine and bitch about how everyone they know are on Facebook and Twitter, but alternatives do exist and it is possible to use them. You can also just text/SMS your friends and family.

klyrs• 6 years ago

In general? Not really. On specific issues where there is overwhelming evidence and consensus coming from outside? Yes, it's good that they act on that.

It's true that absolute truths are hard to find. But absolute bullshit is much much easier to identify, and should be curtailed when it's doing harm.

jeremyjh2• 6 years ago

Are you suggesting they shouldn’t identify user accounts in violation of terms of service (e.g. spam bots) and terminate them?

dawnerd• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Who says it's actually misinformation? The media? The localy bribed politician owning the media?

posixplz• 6 years 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.

seneca2• 6 years 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.

tyre4• 6 years ago

Which extremism exactly?

kache_• 6 years 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

gredelston• 6 years ago

Good luck. I'm not convinced that's automatable.

entropie• 6 years ago

Everything around software will eventually automatable.

seneca2• 6 years ago

They're building a propaganda machine the likes of which Joseph Goebbels couldn't even have dreamed. It will certainly be fascinating, so long as you can ignore the unprecedented levels of damage it does.

j4nt4b3• 6 years ago

Yup. And the worst part is that the techniques used are entirely outside our regulatory environment. The rules that constrain a journalist don't apply to the head moderator with their finger on the trigger at Facebook. Drive engagement today, suppress voters tomorrow, justify anything under the sun before you know it.

marketingPro3• 6 years 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_anon3• 6 years ago

That is most certainly not the way engineering at Twitter works.

driverdan• 6 years 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?

aresant• 6 years 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

gralx5• 6 years ago

That it drives huge engagement is an indictment of public education.

prostoalex• 6 years ago

The primary driver seems to be a psychological need to feel unique, unlike "the sheep" out there https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-the-pandemic-is-tu...

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

I think your view of what misinformation looks like is a bit outdated. It's not just dumb chainmails anymore.

One claim I saw passed around recently, for example, was that this particular video on the White House lawn was greenscreened. The people I saw discussing it were saying things like "you can tell cause of how pixelated the background is" or "look, the trees are on a 10 second loop!". I don't know what we could put in the public education curriculum to stop people from falling for this kind of thing.

ben_w2• 6 years ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Engagement only measures engagement. I find Star Trek engaging, but one thing it isn’t is educational.

kfarr• 6 years ago

Yes, on the other hand a lot of misinformation tactics hook into built-in human tendencies and requires more than just general education to identify and be immune.

SQueeeeeL• 6 years ago

If this were true, what would it affect about the argument?

dicomdan• 6 years ago

There's a lot of educated people who are nevertheless highly partisan.

Social networks pray on the deeply rooted instincts that are hard to suppress.

twitter_anon3• 6 years 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.

luckylion2• 6 years 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?

anti_twttr_anon• 6 years ago

In advance, please excuse the tone of this response: I am angry at the company and the industry you are defending, not really at the human who I'm responding to, but I cannot summon the energy right now to go back through this any more times and to keep stripping out the vitriol while retaining the intent.

I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.

Cool, hi.

Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does.

half-truth; engagement in the aggregate does not pay the bills alone, but advertisers pay for people to see sponsored tweets, and more people see the sponsored tweets if more people are online for more time, and more people are online for more time if engagement is higher, so... engagement in the aggregate does in fact pay the bills.

Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales.

false; this is a nice rosy image of advertisers as rational actors operating with perfect information that is not at all realistic.

If an advertisement performs poorly, who is to blame: twitter? the ad copywriter? a graphic designer? the product's dev team? A product owner? The marketer who made a buy on some specific targeting segment? Their manager? The guy who hired those two? The CMO? The CEO? Marketing teams get fired constantly, almost annually, but very few firms are ever going to all-out stop advertising on social media platforms on the basis of poor conversion on their ads, because they cannot know for certain that it's not their fault, and they have to keep playing the game even if it is rigged.

The thinking here is easy to comprehend: "Walmart is still doing it... so we must be doing it wrong."

Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on.

again, false. Advertisers do this all the time, because they're cargo-cult following buffoons and there's money sloshing around fucking everywhere.

Advertising money gets laundered, advertising money greases wheels, advertising money gets used by incompetents and people's nephews and rapacious over-confident investors who are running their own little schemes, and a billion other things, and it even occasionally gets used by savvy nerds who come to suspect it isn't actually working, but I assert: most advertisers will repeatedly pay for a lot of dumb shit that does not work at all. Always has been.

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.

This is an interesting academic distinction and I'm sure you know more about specific content -> behaviour readouts than I do, but the theory is simple: more time online results in more impressions and more impressions yields more conversions. Not a higher rate, mind you: just. more.

It does not really matter why or when or how we see the words "coca cola". All that matters is that we see those words more. Every day, more times per day, more places, more people. We need to be thinking about them always.

That is what they're paying for, and it doesn't even have to make sense! That might not even get them anything, but they have more money than they can possibly spend, so they may as well spend it on trying to get us to look at and think about them.

Can it be more optimal? Could you squeeze blood from this stone? Sure, probably, but whether I'm on twitter reading great video-game recommendations or reading flame wars is a pittance compared to whether I'm online or not at all.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the optimal situation is to make users cycle in and out of the outrage content: get me mad so I stick around a bit longer, cool me down with something funny/sweet, then show me an ad, then get me mad again. Repeat.

Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform.

this is absurd. It's absurd! It really makes me question your intent and good faith.

The platform is designed to be used, by definition! What, are you telling us twitter does not want its users online? You're saying that engagement is "expensive", is twitter running some kind of other service? Something outside of users looking at and posting tweets? This is nonsensical to the point of being upsetting.

It is like Philip Morris fretting over all the tobacco they're going to have to pay to harvest so that people can keep smoking. If only they didn't have to! You made an advertising platform and people must be present on it to be advertised to. End of story.

Now, of course, there are costs to be optimized. A dumb example: if you know you can't show me an ad between now and when I will naturally end my session, you should maybe try to get me offline right now, before I download any more video data, but that stuff is just sand on the beach for the difference it makes.

Maybe you think this matters because it is the work you do, or it's work you know does get done, but it does not matter in the big picture.

Side-rant: Twitter could fire 95% of its employees tomorrow and probably be more profitable than it is today in the long term, but it won't, again because of cargo cults and social wisdom.

Almost none of the feature work that has been done by twitter in the last 8+ years has materially mattered: the product is done, and you're mostly paid to arrange deck chairs on a ship that's sailing along smoothly and to look pretty. Employee headcount, profit, ad impressions: at the end of the day, all of this is just disembodied marketing metrics for investors to speculate on and to try to extract cash from before the whole thing tanks out someday.

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).

This recap of your argument is just a rehash, but it restates the basic flawed premise in full:

"Advertisers are rational and have perfect information and will pay only for the optimal conversion strategy up to the optimal point of cost/benefit, so if we ever over or under-shoot at all, we'd lose money and we'd go right out of business!"

So, let me recap as well:

- Twitter is an advertisement platform.

- Twitter relies on dollars spent by advertisers. We agree so far, I think.

- Advertisers pay both per impression and per click.

- Advertisers have bad information, and act on social wisdom as much as or more than anything else. They cannot evaluate your performance by how well their advertisements do on your platform. This right here is the secret sauce!

- Engagement (i.e. time spent paying attention to the platform) may not raise conversion rates, (i.e. clicks per impression), but higher engagement is strongly correlated with more conversion overall. People gotta be online.

- Engagement is the core metric of your business.

To put this all very simply: if I am on twitter all day, it's a hell of a lot more time for me to run into and to think about Harry's Razors than if I never went on there at all.

That is the product you are selling to advertisers, and they will pay for it for a long time, even if it doesn't really make any sense or money.

csnover• 6 years ago

While I agree the parent is oversimplifying the connection between engagement and ad revenue, I would say that there is also an oversimplification in the way you represent the usefulness of engagement to the company and the people working there.

First, when a company has shitty earnings, what metrics do they typically use in their investor reports to make the company still look palatable? New user acquisitions. Increased engagement. It doesn’t matter that the engagement is not generating money because it still lets them say “well, we lost a billion dollars this quarter, but user engagement is up 80% YOY so things are looking good for the future! (Please keep buying our stock/fund our next round!)”

Second, engineers working at a social networking company can’t directly influence what advertisers spend, but they can influence the behaviour of users, and leverage that for personal gain. “Look at how valuable I am, I developed this enhanced rage generating machine that increased engagement by 20% in A/B testing! Give me the big bonus now!” It’s a much harder sell to say “hey, Boss, I deleted a feature which was causing immeasurable subjective harm to society! It probably caused 100,000 users to delete their accounts and move to Gab! Give me the big bonus now!”

known• 6 years ago

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

zimpenfish2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

JumpCrisscross• 6 years ago

Social media is the new tabloid salacious media

We’re living through a modern rehash of yellow journalism [1]. Both were spurned by free societies adapting to new communication technologies.

thih9• 6 years ago

I see a "[1]", but I don't see anything referencing it, did you mean to add a link?

If anyone else is unfamiliar with the term, I found a wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

olivermarks5• 6 years ago

I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective. this feeds social network frenzy, a lot of which is people parroting and attempting to amplify ideas from their preferred channels. There's always been a huge corporate yellow journalism problem, now it is possible to instantly orchestrate rage and frenzy repeated across countless personal accounts. Fear and hatred is highly corrosive....

bilbo0s• 6 years ago

"Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias"

I'm not sanguine. Be honest, which would you bet on happening in the majority of cases?

I wonder sometimes if it's almost part of some fundamental psychology?

vorpalhex3• 6 years ago

Do you believe the general public is better at filtering out misinformation than they were 100 years ago? What about 500 years ago?

It takes time but people do seem to get better at filtering out mis-information. I believe (and we have some evidence) that we can speed this up by helping teach critical dissection of articles and content and build the skill set to weigh sources.

The problem will never go away entirely. It's an arms race between people who want to get closer to understanding reality, and the people selling a story to some end (profit, power, etc). Like all arms races, sometimes one side lags behind but they usually adapt and leap ahead.

seph-reed• 6 years ago

It may very well be the cosmic filter.

Humans have a "truth default" in communication. We take almost everything we hear as fact by default. Bots will have no trouble at all making the majority of people think, see, and do whatever they want.

andy_ppp2• 6 years ago

We need a broadsheet social media that is (relatively) healthy for you.

bentcorner• 6 years ago

IMO removing clickable links and link previews would go a long way to make social media better.

meekmind2• 6 years ago

Yes. This.

Thinking is hard and it requires training and conditioning to do. I'm not talking about what to think, but rather how to think.

It's an incredible convenience to delegate thinking, like the difference between spending 3 hours debugging some code versus having the answer readily available on StackOverflow.

Conversely, that convenience comes with a cost of a stunted intellect, where an individual can become so dependent StackOverflow that they are incapable of doing something new or difficult if it hasn't already been done.

Neither is necessarily better or worse, there are good arguments for the "hard way" and the "easy way". The important thing is recognizing the distinction and appreciating the value of both.

soindepend• 6 years ago

This is a tangent but is the meme about programmers being dependent on Stack Overflow really all that true? It's something I've heard about a lot -- I've been coding for fifteen years, professionally for seven, and certainly I have used Stack Overflow occasionally, but I go to the language documentation a lot more often, and honestly write a lot of code without looking at more than the source of the libraries I'm interacting with -- which are often proprietary so SO wouldn't be any help anyway -- or the standard library.

Who's on Stack Overflow all the time? I've never even made an account. I guess I referenced it more often when I was a younger programmer but never all that much..

mistermann• 6 years ago

You're "not wrong", but my reading of your comments leads me to believe that you're pointing the finger exclusively (or at least, overwhelmingly and possibly disproportionately) at one side of the dispute.

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.

Social media is an epistemic cesspool, there's no doubt. But do not all of your criticisms also apply (if perhaps to a lesser degree) to all media, and politics, and individual and collective activity, and.....well, everything?

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 feel rather uneasy about whether this is actually as true as it may seem. The thing about "what's true" is, if you've been fooled, you do not realize it. For sure, there are some particularly bad actors online that are often concentrated in certain communities, but how might one know of other bad actors that are not in your mental inventory, or actors who are in your mental inventory labelled as trustworthy, when they are not actually highly trustworthy?

The variance in quality of epistemic and logical reasoning that can be observed, in extremely large quantities even here on HN, when comparing discussions of a technical topic compared to a political topic, is vast - and yet....does it seem likely that the people writing these things here are doing it with conscious and deliberate intent? Does it seem likely that HN folks consciously choose to become peddlers of disinformation, or might it be more likely that this is a consequence of the unusual, often counter-intuitive, and not yet understood innate nature of the human species?

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.

Indeed. Let's hope everyone can truthfully commit to doing this.

I wrote a bit more on this general idea (with respect to conspiracy theorists) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24730753

mountainb• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

intrasight2• 6 years ago

I have hundreds of Facebook friends. I read their posts or add my own posts perhaps twice a day. 90% are status updates and/or photos of what they are up to. I find it extremely useful. It's a micro-blogging service. When did this moniker "social media" come into being? What does that even mean? I should say that I have everything except direct posts disabled - including all "shares" and all ads - and that's why to me it's just a micro-blogging site.

bilg21• 6 years ago

Would you mind sharing how you've disabled ads and shares? I could not find such options in facebook settings. Only thing I can think of is adblock or writing my own software to pull feeds and filter them.

phonebucket• 6 years ago

Repeat after me, social media is not reality.
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 find a tinge of irony in this: HN being a form a social media in itself, and this statement also reflecting a general mistrust of social media within HN.

nefasti• 6 years ago

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

upofadown• 6 years 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

jeremyjh2• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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.

rednerrus• 6 years ago

Does this mean they're shutting down?

null0pointer• 6 years ago

I thought this as well. FB and Twitter are themselves the misinformation networks.

rndmize• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

No china? Dos not make any sense.

holidayacct• 6 years ago

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

rezeroed• 6 years 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.

j4nt4b3• 6 years ago

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

JoshTko• 6 years 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.

ivanstame• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Let me guess. ShareBlue is unaffected.

IncRnd• 6 years 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

ajxs7• 6 years 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".

dragontamer6• 6 years 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.

throwawayay02• 6 years ago

What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here?

It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care. People don't care about a lot of things and will repeat memes and jokes. We all "believe" things that are more or less false just because we don't care about them. Your relatives believe in things you may think are false but to them is just rubbish tidbits of information that do not affect them. Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life, why must we enforce that people now must be informed of the "right beliefs to have"? Who picks what things are important as well?

Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well.

Udik• 6 years ago

My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved.

That is an interesting example because while Obama is factually not a Muslim, period, the question about what Breonna Taylor "deserved" is a political one- a matter of opinions. So you're putting in the same bucket objectively fake information and opinions with which you strongly disagree, and calling for measures that can prevent both from spreading.

ajxs7• 6 years ago

Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path...

You're wrong. The difficulty has always been that the most pervasive so-called 'misinformation' is usually fairly plausible, difficult to validate, or simply matters of opinion or interpretation. The notion that Obama is a Muslim strains credulity, and it's not a widely held belief. What about more complex information, such as religious or political texts? These are even more difficult to validate and cause much more harm. Maybe we should just outright ban the communist manifesto? That seems to have caused a large amount of social harm and could be fairly readily classified as 'disinformation'. What about the Christian bible? The Koran? They're full of difficult to validate claims.

What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here?

What disinformation? The information you don't like, or the information I don't like?

We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war... Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain...

The fact that you seem to see that information has been weaponised, but can't seem to see that big-tech's censorship is pursuant to their own political aspirations is alarming. Are you legitimately this biased, or just being disingenuous?

sthnblllII3• 6 years ago

Name the groups.

tshaddox3• 6 years 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.

Who thinks this? Are you just assuming that anyone who approves of social media networks removing disinformation also thinks that is a bigger problem than the social media networks being powerful gatekeepers?

ajxs7• 6 years ago

The two beliefs are mutually exclusive. If you support social-networks removing what they decide is 'disinformation' by implication you think this is the bigger risk. This is the mechanism by which they become the gatekeepers of information.

dunnevens• 6 years ago

My teen years were the second half of the 80s. Like a lot of kids my age, I’d sometimes seek out weird stuff outside of the pre-internet mainstream. One of my favorite books from back then was “High Weirdness by Mail”. Which was a very funny tongue-in-cheek catalog of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, cults, etc. I won’t detail all the weird stuff I got in the mail, but it suffices to say that most of it was roughly on the same level as Q.

But the key difference between now and then was: I had to seek this crap. Someone had to put together their zine or cassette or, very rarely, their full color glossy magazine. All at their own expense and then send it off to me. Ordinary people would never see this stuff. The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff. And this material was too labor intensive & expensive to distribute widely without the mainstream.

So it’s obviously very different now. People like my mom would have never sent a dollar to a post office box in Idaho to get a newsletter about how Ronald Reagan was a microchip controlled antichrist. But these days I frequently have to alleviate her fear from some conspiracy crap that popped up on her timeline unsolicited. Or to tell my aunt that there’s absolutely no evidence Biden is receiving antifa messages from a hidden earpiece.

I don’t know what the answer is. But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new. Having something like Q approach mainstream status is new. At least for Americans in the past 50 years. It’s a potentially very dangerous situation. Maybe one day, a vast majority of the population will discount what they read online without corroborating evidence, but we’re not there yet.

free_rms2• 6 years ago

So, what, we're gonna decide what's "suitable" for normal people to see?

Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all".

But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.

ajxs7• 6 years ago

The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff...

This is a side-effect of the legacy media organisations no longer having a monopoly on the dissemination of information. Think for a moment on what kind of disinformation you may have unwittingly taken at face value for fact simply because every single news media outlet reported it.

This is exactly the concern that my original post highlighted. My fear is that if we allow them to become the arbiters of online information, it goes far beyond simply censoring the ridiculous and becomes a highly effective means of pursuing their own political agendas.

But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new...

It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena.

friendlybus• 6 years ago

I also grew up in a liberal society and what made liberalism so valuable was that institutions were locked into a narrow and boring path.

It's becoming more clear that general humanity has less and less interesting things to say and is clamouring for power via outrage. I'm all for maintaining the vital ability to sort signal from noise outside of class and cash mechanisms. There's got to be some signal left to find though.

Straight commercial censorship is predictable and fightable. The coming danger is thought control from religious people who think their interpretation of what-not-to-do is more important than your liberalism.

dredmorbius• 6 years ago

Propaganda and censorship are attributes of the same underlying aspect: monopoly. Centralised control.

Both problems have the same effective solution: break up the monopolies.

Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience, selective promotion, discovery, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of centralised control.

Gatekeeping and censorship are functions of excludability, audience gating, distraction, negative selection (obfuscation), stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of centralised control.

Audiences, a public, divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to either propaganda or censorship.

Or of surveillance, whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state-actor varieties, which is also an inherent property of centralised control.

It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

actually Orwellian phenomena

This isn't an Orwellian phenomenon. This is just the typical bad reading of Orwell that Americans have tried to squeeze out of the book because of their free speech fetish.

The central key issue of the book isn't a big scary guy with a mustache stealing your newspaper, it's reality inversion, it's the inability of everyone in society to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction, which is the basis for, not the consequence of totalitarianism. It's the moment when someone blatantly tells a lie, and everyone eats it up, when the world starts to feel unreal and like a bad movie.

The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar. What's Orwellian is people going to Facebook, reading blatant lies and untruths, and being unable to distinguish that from what is real. And that is actually caused by the disappearance of gatekeepers, who play a vital role in maintaining liberal institutions.

npunt• 6 years ago

Yeah freedom in America tends to favor 'freedom to' rather than 'freedom from'. Cutting these disinformation sources off gives us freedom from some amount of manipulation. Meanwhile, if we're more concerned with the freedom to say anything anywhere, whatever limits imposed will be perceived by default in a negative light.

There's merit in examining from both perspectives for any given issue. However, if our objective is a better signal-to-noise ratio of truth in the context of slamming every human's stray thoughts, emotions, and urges into each other in realtime, the 'freedom from' perspective is probably a better approach right now.

ajxs7• 6 years ago

The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar...

From this sentence, I assume that Stalinist Russia's approach to the subject of 'truth' would constitute a 'productive use of authority'?

Do you think that the reporting in the early 2000s mainstream media regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed stockpile of chemical weapons constitutes a good example of the establishment media being good stewards of the truth? This propagation of blatantly false information by the establishment led all the way up to the invasion of Iraq. A war that is these days generally seen as a regime change for the benefit of interested parties, established under false pretenses.

Or is all of this just 'not true communism' to you? Do you support the ways that governments, intelligence agencies and the media have been proven to have colluded to invert our reality? Or would you support some other, idealised government doing it? I have no idea what world your head lives in.

Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

Related Stories