The Guardian has more coverage in this article, which was published at the same time:<p>"How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account" - <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-...</a><p>It's interesting how Guy Rosen, a co-founder of the spyware company Onavo, is now Facebook's "vice-president of integrity":<p>> Facebook had “moved slower than we’d like because of prioritization” on the Honduras case, Rosen wrote. “It’s a bummer that it’s back and I’m excited to learn from this and better understand what we need to do systematically,” he added. But he also chastised her for making a public complaint, saying: “My concern is that threads like this can undermine the people that get up in the morning and do their absolute best to try to figure out how to spend the finite time and energy we all have and put their heart and soul into it.”<p>> Rosen had joined Facebook in 2013, when the company acquired his startup, Onavo, a mobile web analytics company that Facebook would go on to use to track usage of rival apps.<p>Details on Onavo: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo</a>
From the Guardian article <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-...</a>:<p>> "But it quickly became clear that no one was interested in taking responsibility for policing the abuses of the president of a poor nation with just 4.5m Facebook users. The message she received from all corners – including from threat intelligence, the small and elite team of investigators responsible for uncovering CIB campaigns – was that the abuses were bad, but resources were tight, and, absent any external pressure, Honduras was simply not a priority."<p>We can assume that hostile nations have known this for awhile, and they have also been exploiting this. This is tragic but true.<p>Sophie Zhang is a hero.
> The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.<p>Alternatively, Facebook itself is more interested in manipulating political outcomes in the US, Taiwan, South Korea, and Poland, and less so or not at all in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.
The quick summary here is that while a person is supposed to have only one Facebook account, that account can have an unlimited number of Facebook pages, which can all be set up to look like individual users, and can all comment, like, and post just like an individual user.<p>The article gives examples of these pages making hundreds of pro-government comments on various political posts.
There was never any point in facebook being any "force for good" or "revolution" as people might have hoped for. If you read investors reflections on early FB days strategic meetings, you see the picture much more clearly. Tech gets cheap, people are dumb, surveillance pays, what's not to like about this business?
This would have not be a problem if there was no algorithm to show you the top stories.<p>Just show the stories in chronological order - let the users think before subscribing to 1000 pages and having 800 friends.
What about more clearly identifying when a comment, like, etc is made by a page instead of an account, and include the account(s) managing the page in its transparency report?
Off topic.<p>Last week wife got an email that her Facebook was logged into. Told her to open app and change password immediately.<p>Too late.
Account email and phone number already changed. No way to use old ones to get control back.<p>15 year old account with a huge amount of memories gone.<p>Best possible was to indicate a problem, so account is disabled. But no way to use it anymore.<p>Apparently this has happened to around half of her cohorts.
It’s now part of life to just make new accounts periodically.<p>Utterly shocking that account email and phone can be changed in 20 minutes and no way to change them back.
I think we need a new journalism. One that can avoid the last 20 years of structured news. Though I think this is impossible now. Not without an outsized reaction by the population that doesn't even care.<p>Facebook exists because most people can accept those crimes committed against them. They really don't even understand them all. Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore
Facebook shouldn't moderate anything;<p>Facebook content should drop in value to where it belongs: personal updates from friends and funny videos;<p>People need to start voting on actual policies each politician/party proposes, not based on Facebook information from unknown accounts.<p>Will that be enough?
Facebook is power and control over several billion people and countries across the world. That is superpower level power.<p>Mark Zuckerberg will never give up that level of power because either he wields that power or someone else will.<p>Weak countries don’t matter in matters of power and this is an example of it.<p>Also, Facebook has no issues at all when it comes to manipulation when it is to its benefit. It has done so before.<p>If you believe that Facebook doesn’t have that power then you must also believe that people aren’t easily manipulated. Advertising is proof against that belief.
What's up with this articles that jump into "facebook is evil" so fast? Its obvious that a huge, worldwide company is slow to address manipulative ads in small communities.
We're suffering from this here as well (in Israel), we're already in the 4th consecutive election and it looks like there will be a fifth. Bibi's (and his family) use of social platforms has been in forms of - posts with blatant lies - fake profiles posting fake inciting content that is then used in their own campaigns to incite their base - fake likes - fake profiles that generate content It's got to the point that we just call any Bibi supporter as a "Bot" (once because they don't get our credit for critical thinking and second time because of the many fake profiles that generate content in his name)
I presume a firefox extension along the lines of Social Fixer would be able to filter all the likes/comments that come from pages rather than personal accounts. (But of course, a user needs to be aware of the issue in the first place, in order to want to install an extension to fix it)
Facebook is worse than state-controlled media in those countries, and they have a moral obligation to stop doing business in oppressive countries. People know that state-controlled media is biased, but oppressive leaders can demand censorship from facebook at whim and nobody knows about it.<p>And i would not be surprised if bribes inside facebook are involved , as some of those countries are known to run extensive bribery operations e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_laundromat" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_laundromat</a>
If we discovered any other type of product was this dangerous, it'd be pulled from the shelves. But in this case the ones that would do the pulling are probably benefiting the most from manipulation.
Leaders "deceiving their citizens" was <i>never</i> a problem until facebook came along! How unconscionable that they didnt anticipate and fix this problem!<p>People who want Facebook, or "someone" to be the arbiter of the One True Truth are doomed to fail, because nothing is true.
I'm inclined to feel like the political landscape is already FUBAR in lots of these corrupt countries, so any negative from Facebook doesn't really make a difference, but the good that can come from Facebook ("Facebook revolutions"[0]) exists, so it's a net positive.<p>0: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Revolution" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Revolution</a>
The Guardian, and a few other outfits in global media sold its readership very hard on the "Gadhafi killing his own people" fallacy to enable Islamist gangs to plunder and maim and kill and ruin the societal fabric of Libya (and a few southern neighbors). Since then, Libya is a wasteland, its inhabitants enslaved as a whole (as opposed to the few political (read Islamists) prisoners' under the Gadhafi dictatorship), deaths in the tens of thousands, prisoners are not accounted for under any authority.<p>Also the Guardian, just like most MSM holds a grudge against FB: how dare they eat their pie, all of it, and they let people escape from their 'single-eyed war-enabling worldview'?<p>Lay the FB 'hate' aside, will ya? For all its dehumanizing power (as much as the rest of 'social media' and technology in general) FB has not committed the 1/10000th of the harm these champions of virtue in the MSM have done for the last couple centuries (steamrolling their power on most wars, worldwide or not).
ITT: folks whose livelihood depends on that Facebook Ads campaign manager payout, vs. those of us who would rather live in a world free from this sort of manipulation.<p>DAE miss AOL?
Is it just me or are activist women in Bay Area tech disproportionately transgender? It seems like 20% or even more when you hear these “woman fighting corrupt behavior from the inside” stories.
I wonder if writers of articles like this are aware of the complexity of a problem like this, algorithmically, legally and ethically.<p>All 3 are insanely difficult.
Because of the sensational headline, I'm not even going to click on this. Is there even a real difference between The Guardian and the Daily Mail?