Facebook deletes 17 accounts, dusts off hands, beams: We've saved the 2018 elections Facebook has deleted dozens of pages and accounts that were apparently coordinating to push divisive messages to the American public in the lead-up to this year's US midterm elections. We're told 17 profiles and eight pages in all were chopped from Facebook along with seven Instagram profiles. The social media giant said the …
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Facebook is NOT a source for information!
It is when you don't trust the media or your source is people like Alex Jones .
Information doesn't work like that. Pizza and beer don't become health foods just because your normal diet consists of Cool Ranch Doritos by the pound,
But try and convince those people that it's not. THat's why I mentioned Alex jones . Any sane person would dismiss him as a loon People see face book as a way to share the truth.Their truth The truth that the regular media is to scared to report . IE they already have a position and just looking for some thing to back them up. Facebook is not what I would considered a primary source on info . Any thing I read on face book I fact check. The more it agrees with my position the more I fact check it before I repost.
They should at least log the URL and prevent anyone else linking to it.
I had that happen when someone reported a video as being "offensive". It wasn't, unless you object to vintage pop music shows (this was from France, so it didn't have the excuse of containing gratuitous images of Jimmy Savile). But because of that, the video is blocked for all time.
So surely they should be able to do something about that...
Not surprising when you consider their stock price just took a 20% hit to the short and curlys and seeing how Twitty's share price got smacked after they kicked off a few names. There was no way FB wanted to double up by saying yeah, we just decimated our perceived product base. They might come back in a few months or a year or price boost of >15% and say, "see what good do-bees we are, we fixed the intarwebs!" but it isn't going to happen too soon.
If public education (in all countries that have it) would teach critical thinking and right vs wrong, the entire batch of issues would simply go away.
But that wouldn't fit the agendas of those who hold power and want easily fooled subject to maintain the status quo that they think benefits them the most.
They're likely even wrong about that - what good are slaves who can't reason or produce much value?
Didn't they make a documentary about all this a few years back? Oh yes, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk
Here is a much better one: https://youtu.be/YR5ApYxkU-U?t=2m22s
"Teach right and wrong." According to whose standard? Mine or yours? Mao's?
Government-run schools ALWAYS teach what the powers that be want taught. If you value freedom of thought, then keep your children as far away as possible.
If public education (in all countries that have it) would teach critical thinking and right vs wrong, the entire batch of issues would simply go away.
Sounds like a fine idea, but doomed to fail. Teach people to not listen to what they want to hear?
Slaves aren't expected to reason, just do what they're told.
Today's announcement is intended to send the message that Facebook is on top of the problem.
Er, yeah. From here, it looks like they take the ad payment, let the account run for a bit and then kill it and keep the pocket change. Sort of like paying someone to guard the open bar door and then fire them after the horses are long gone. Maybe they need to lock the door first instead of taking the cash and "not seeing the problem"????
Facebook will take advertising dollars from anyone and are completely shameless about it. If they were serious about cleaning up their platform they'd be stricter on advertisers. You can report an ad for being inappropriate with adult content or you can block the ad from your feed by marking it as a scam but not for other reasons. They are going to keep getting targeted until they clean up their advertising.
(Don't take any of the below as an apology for Facebook. They're not doing nearly enough, and they know that tackling this problem reduces their revenues, so they let it slide like the amoral pricks they are)
I don't use Facebook anymore (for reasons below) - I'm before the three million who dumped it after the Cambridge Analytica story, but the reasons were similar: as time went on, more and more of the feed was being filled with garbage political and marketing posts, blindly forwarded by a handful of people whom I was actually friends with, so didn't want to block.
But, if your spend any amount of time on Facebook, and you'll see that it most of the shite you see is in the form of forwarded articles, and when you dig into it, you notice that the person who forwarded it to you didn't get it from the original publishing account, but from someone they knew.
Seventeen accounts. If 100,000 people followed those original malicious accounts (it's not clear if the followers figure was aggregate, or per account), then that's 100,000 channels for the information to reach a like-minded idiot. It's not fair to say 100,000 like-minded idiots, because a common technique is to set up a page for a popular, broadly-supported social issue, gather followers that way, and then silently change the page name and content to fit the real agenda.
Those like-minded idiots then spam the hundred or so people who know them (the average size of a Facebook "friends" list is 100 - seach "Dunbar's Number" for a good theory of why this is so). Within that hundred, there'll be at least one more who'll inflict the same post on his or her friend-list either by commenting on it, liking it, or re-posting it. And so it goes on, until millions have at least seen the message. But the real reason why Facebook is the political activist's wet dream is that when you see the story they post, it's not labelled as "{Political pressure group} says:", but rather as "{Person you know} read this" - which many, many people blindly take as "{Person you know} believes:" Add to that Facebook's habit of auto-inserting stories from an account, simply because some friend of yours has read other stories from that account, or commented on them (even if that comment is "you are the scum of the earth"), and it's easy to see why it's the vehicle of choice for disinformation campaigns.
(It could be worse: Facebook-owned WhatsApp doesn't even label forwards as "Forwarded by", a practice that has caused a spate of murders in India, where WhatsApp is used as a de-facto social media platform, because a series of urban myths warning about child-abductors, when forwarded around rural villages, ended up being interpreted as "I saw two strangers here this morning in a green car, who were trying to steal young boys" rather than the correct "I was sent this story about two strangers somewhere ...")
What's second striking about these posts is that they come from a very small number of sources - few people have the spare time and inclination to write this kind of garbage. There are far more than seventeen, absolutely, but I'd say it's far less than a thousand.
So, seventeen isn't nearly enough, but it's a lot more than it looks like.
An organised bunch of people post divisive political opinions. Then some other people say the first lot shouldn't be allowed to comment on the politics because they are not of 'our' country... Does that mean we should not allow people to comment on the politics in Iran, North Korea, Nicaragua (etc ad nauseam) unless they can demonstrate that they live there? If so, Mr Trump should rein his neck in.
Yes, propaganda on social media is a problem. More effort should be put into completely destroying trust in it as a source of news - instead we get 'don't trust them, trust us'.
Why does anyone expect *any* news reporting to be unbiased? It costs money to do. Reporters, editors and the delivery medium (printing press, paper, web server, whatever) must be paid for. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Whoever is organising the lunch gets to choose the menu.
What you say is correct, but I wonder if people are trusting what they read in Social Media _because_ they have lost all trust in conventional news reporting. They have more trust in something that a random stranger says because they think it's a real person, not an organisation after commercial or political gain.
That stranger on Social Media is "us" in the "them and us" equation.
They're wrong of course; the most damaging use of Social Media is absolutely coming from organisations for commercial and political gain, but the Social Media platforms make it easy for those orgs to look like random strangers, and therefore "us". How can FB ever differentiate between "Joe Bloggs" and "Joe Bloggs posting what EvilCorp has paid him to post"? I don't have the answer.
Not one who downvoted you as I agree with your comment. However I dont think it is facebook who have decided to police this stuff, instead it is governments concerned that people are voting the 'wrong' way (not for them). The EU and US getting uppity that Trump was elected and people voted for brexit which of course couldnt possibly happen because the people wanted them, instead they must have been influenced by the freedom to communicate.
"Having been publicly embarrassed and then excoriated for its failure to identify a massive misinformation campaign last time around"
The article contained the above, and yet wasnt it shown that very little money (in comparison to the war-chests) had been spent and had little influence? I think FB should feel the embarrassment from doing the policing even if the governments are giving them little choice.
If I was running that campaign, I'd setup a lot of accounts with different configurations and the expectation that a number of them would be discovered so that I could observe what characteristics were giving the game away ... so will Facebook try harder now? Or will they declare that they have saved the nation and take the summer off?
17 accounts? I'd look at what were the common factors and eliminate them from all other accounts and start creating new accounts.
I wonder if the various countries where the Zuck Zervers are housed have any control over how they're used?
I actually think that there SHOULD be a mass re-registration. On October 1st, all accounts will be frozen, requiring an email verification and a bot-defeating CAPTCHA within 48 hours before permanent deletion... and this should happen at random intervals through the year.
Of course I'd also like to see a mandatory Twat Tax introduced, requiring you to deposit £100 to use FB, with a refund 6 months later... but then I'm not really sure who you'd pay it to..
Maybe Howard Beale wasn't talking about TV.
I've only had one Fakebook account. It's fake. There's no "me" there. It has no content. I use it to SSO multiple media sites, but if it goes away, I'll just stop going to the media sites.
Fakebook exists -- besides the obvious manipulations of US elections -- for the lonely and inconsequential to share their progress through life with all the other lonely and inconsequential people they knew in secondary school.
God only knows what we might accomplish if we just turned it off.
"We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that [Fakebook] is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever [Fakebook] tells you! You dress like [Fakebook], you eat like [Fakebook], you raise your children like [Fakebook], you even *think* like [Fakebook]! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! So turn off your [Fakebook accounts]. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF..."
~~ Howard Beale in a prophetic utterance from 1976.
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