Slashdot Mirror
Ukraine Asks Zuckerberg to Discipline Kremlin Facebook Bots
mi writes "Ukrainian media is reporting (link in Ukrainian), that Facebook is getting increasingly heavy-handed blocking Ukrainian bloggers. The likely explanation for the observed phenomenon is that Facebook's Ukrainian office is located in Russia and is headed by a Russian citizen (Catherine Skorobogatov). For example, a post calling on Russian mothers to not let their sons go to war was blocked "Due to multiple complaints". Fed up, Ukrainian users are writing directly to Zukerberg to ask him to replace Catherine with someone, who would not be quite as swayed by the "complaints" generated by Russian bots.
Ah yes, only the most reliable sources at Slashdot...
But anyway, the more likely explanation is that like many social media platforms, Facebook uses automated systems to deal with thousands and thousands of content complaints every day. Usually, after a certain number of complaints, the system automatically blocks the content, and the original poster has to challenge the block. Keep in mind that due to the volume of content complaints that these types of services get, humans rarely get involved in the beginning, it is simply all automated.
It's possible and even probable that the complaints themselves are âoeorchestratedâ by people with political aims, perhaps even government employees. But that doesn't mean that Facebook is somehow âoecooperatingâ with the Russians because the head of their Russian office is, well, Russian.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Are you using Facebook... Stop using it and take the power from that twit.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...Facebook's Ukrainian office is located in Russia...
Whose brilliant idea was that?
As Ukraine is under military assault by Russia at the moment, they should abandon any complaint monitoring for the time being.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Who thinks that headline sounds really kinky?
If the head office for that part of FB is in Russia, wouldn't they just "explain" to the new person in charge how things work and the end result would be the same after a brief few hours where there was no one in place
Funny that the Ukrainians think Zuckerberg cares. He's the worst kind of anti-freedom, in-bed-with-the-government, limousine socialist there is. Mr. Open-All-The-Borders hides behind his armed guards at his gated mansion so he wont have to be burdened with the consequences of his actions. Appealing to Zuckerberg to stop blocking their social media efforts is going to have about as much effect as appealing directly to Putin to stop invading.
Some people might look at all the news reports, and not being used to propaganda, paint Ukraine in a worse light that reality. The reality is that the Kremlin is putting out propaganda just like the old Tass news days when Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev were running the show. The brinksmanship, the threats, the aggression, coercion, and rolling tanks, armoured personnel carriers, rockets, heavy field guns, anti-aircraft guns, and airbourne troops into another country is just like what they did in Czecheslovakia or Poland or Hungary or a dozen other countries over the last 50 years (lets be more recent and not forget the 20% of Georgia they stole in 2002 or the entire Crimea they stole just 6 months ago). This is naked Russian aggression. "We are armed to the teeth with nuclear bombs and if you dare do anything to stop us from shooting up whoever we want boy will we blow you to smithereens". But they had better be careful, because they aren't the only ones with nuclear bombs, and at some point enough is enough and in the world of high stakes poker "I call". They will have to test their weapons and see if they are as good as they say, and will be looking at lots of x-rays (and by God they sure have earned it).
What's the point of disciplining a bot? Since when do bots respond in any useful way to being disciplined?
Even if you put a bot to death, others just like it will spring up to fill the void.
Here's a tip, my Russian friend: if you want to pretend to be a neutral observer on the Ukrainian conflict in an internet forum, then you'd do better to proofread your post again and again until you manage to remove the little telltale signs that your native language is Russian. No informed reader of your post above is going to be convinced you don't have a significant dog in this fight.
lets dismiss all the logical points he made and just claim he's bias and Russian so his opinion isn't valid or discussed with a modicum of intelligence
Yes, because anyone who speaks Russian (or Ukrainian) obviously wouldn't know anything about the situation in Russia or Ukraine. Better listen to armchair pundits who never leave their easy chairs in New York.
Oh wait.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Seriously, setting up a social networking site is technically very simple. We have thousands of them. Why are the Ukrainians using an American system that has been compromised by crippling political correctness, is administered by Russians... aka the enemy, and all the other crap you could possibly windge on about facebook.
Why use it? Just set up your own social network, get people to join, and let the kids send profane selfies at each other.
Problem solved.
Happily ever after.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, because anyone who speaks Russian (or Ukrainian) obviously wouldn't know anything about the situation in Russia or Ukraine. Better listen to armchair pundits who never leave their easy chairs in New York. Oh wait.
In short, Russians are about as well informed today as the German people were in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. You got much more accurate information out of London and New York both in 1939 and today.
A person in New York would be so better informed than a person in Russian that it would be ridiculous. Russian media and nearly all discussion is Kremlin controlled. There is no free flow of information to make reasoned judgments upon unless you are in the west. So some of the nonsense coming out or Russia is not intentional, its all its people have been told. When they refer to the Ukrainians as Nazi's its not really a historical reference. They actually think a neo-Nazi coup has taken place in Kiev. They have never hear the truth that a corrupt President feared growing calls for investigation and prosecution, that his security services used deadly force about peaceful protesters to quiet these growing calls, took his money and fled, and was replaced in new elections called for after abandoning his post.
In the West we can watch the RT network (a Kremlin controlled network) and dozens of other networks with political biases ranging from the far left to the far right. We can compare and contrast. In Russia you get RT's perspective and only the information they provide.
And for those going to more modern news sources, to social networks, well you see what is happening on facebook. More heavy Kremlin influence in the Russia.
"...rolling tanks, armoured personnel carriers, rockets, heavy field guns, anti-aircraft guns, and airbourne troops into another country is just like what they did in Czecheslovakia or Poland or Hungary or a dozen other countries over the last 50 years..."
Sorry, that's utter rubbish. 1. If Russia had been "rolling tanks, armoured personnel carriers, rockets, heavy field guns, anti-aircraft guns, and airbourne [sic] troops" into Ukraine, it would have been subdued within a week at most - just as Czechoslovakia (sp) and Poland and Hungary were subdued, despite being far better organized than Ukraine today.
Your post is quite silly to put it gently. Russia has been rolling all those things into the Ukraine. What you naively fail to consider is that it is rolling them in numbers only necessary to reestablish control. None of the armed interventions in eastern europe during the soviet era were full scale invasions. They used only the forces they needed to. And so they do once again. Being far better equipped and organized means you can accomplish strategic goals with only 1,000.
You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?
Suck on this. I'm a native English speaker from the UK, I have never been to Russia, I have been reading Slashdot for about 14-15 years, posting for most of that time too. And the Anonymous Coward tells it like it is. Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already. He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross. In fact he asserted he'd shell said convoy, so the Red Cross chickened out, but the crazy Russians just drove right in there and delivered that aid anyway.
So as a native speaker, please heed my call - let's all stop abusing the English language shall we? We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq. It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building. It does not look like journalists scrabbling around presenting the testimony of a milkmaid in a farcical attempt to find an army, as the Guardian did only a few days ago. Now condemn Putin for militarily supporting the rebels if you like (though the proof of this is wafer thin as well), just be aware that this is something many countries do, including the ones that are currently being most shrill about Ukraine. So such an argument doesn't have much impact, unfortunately, though I wish we lived in a world where it did.
Seriously, who cares about Facebook postings anyway? Are these people a bunch of 12 year olds?
I don't need a FB account to know that I probably can't differentiate between official propaganda, astroturfers, shills and real eye-witness reports - on both sides.
Maybe Ukraine should buy more ads on FB - that usually helps...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
https://twitter.com/CanadaNATO...
100.000? I would suggest he send 200.000. Ukraine is not a small country like Georgia, a 100.000 is not enough if he wants to take all of it.
Still it would be a stupid thing to do. He needs to keep a soft hand approach to maintain whatever fig leafs that is his plausible denibilty and avoid reopening the iron curtain thereby completely destroying the modern Russian economy. When not only the US and Europe but also China and Japan strongly disapproves with your actions and are invoking sanctions, you are really setting yourself up for some serious isolation.
Funny, grandparent did not show me any "telltale signs" at all, and I am pretty sensitive to awkward phraseology one finds in non native speakers. Not that being a non native speaker is in any way naughty or evil. His post is actually well composed, thoughtful, highly cogent (unlike yours), and makes excellent points.
Perhaps you would be good enough to elaborate on these "telltale signs". You can regard that as calling bullshit if you so wish.
It is parent who strikes me as being very partisan. That's not a bad thing per se, except when you believe you are accomplished anything by spouting blather and no meaningful debate.
facebook is always going to be biased. always. so why do people even use it? oh yeah, that's right, infinite ego inflation. the minute facebook and all these newfangled services started cropping up, the internet has taken a huge turn for the worst. and yet people worship zuckerberg for creating it. only thing that he did was debase the value of the internet and make it more accessible to people with even more fragile egos than before. never thought it was possible, but mission accomplished.
"Ukrainian politicians, if they want to have a hope in hell of keeping control of their own country, should stop blaming others for the deep dark hole that they got their country into, for their own internal civil war, and sort it out amongst themselves, pronto. Otherwise, Ukraine will end up being parceled out between Russia, Romania, Hungary and Poland."
Which would be probably the best solution anyway.
The UK most certainly has a dog in this fight, Russian money is a significant factor in your economy.
It's not a coincidence that there also happens to be a lot of pro-Russian sentiment in England.
Wow! NSA-bots are really degraded, may be effect of cutting budget?
I really missed ColdFjord, at least, this bot have basic intelligence and can make some meaningful discussions.
Facebook King Zuckerberg is gay. Although married to a chinese woman, for strategic interests in China, he hates women.
Sorry for that.
Uh Oh. The Politburo of China know this fact.
If Kiev government does not stop soon the civil war against their own eastern region, the problem will be self solved, as nobody in Ukraine will be able to afford Internet access anymore.
... watching American lefties' discomfort in all this. Especially older American lefties.
"Can't ever say that Russia is the bad guy, but Russia clearly is the bad guy all too obviously ... head must explode now like a 1960's sci-fi robot caught in a contradiction ..."
Is there a *reliable* way to donate money to Ukraine and Ukraines army ?
I'm not GP, but the two tell-tale signs that I'm seeing are the spelling of "Abhasia" (direct transliteration of Russian "x" into "h" - it doesn't make sense for an English speaker, because the sounds are very different, which is why normal transliteration is "kh") and "08.08.08" (date format with dots and leading zeroes that is normally used in Russia, and it's also one of the few countries that refers to that conflict by the date alone, much like 9/11 in US).
But at the same time it is interesting how many shills leap out of the woodwork in any news article which is critical of Russia or Israel. Clearly these countries have teams of people who make concerted efforts to drown out, berate, brow beat or otherwise pooh pooh any story no matter how credible it is.
"You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?"
No, we don't think that, we just think you're naive and stupid. But those who clearly are Kremlin propagandists (maybe not paid, just naive native Russians) with their broken English and undisguised love of Putin should just as well be allowed to be called out on it.
I wouldn't pretend to defend everything the Ukrainian army has done, but I'm still siding with Ukraine on this because everything from shooting down of a civilian airliner to annexed Crimea's Tatar population having their houses marked with X's and the disappearance of those who protest that annexation are all kinds of evil created by Putin that simply cannot be defended.
What you don't do is help your case with arguments like this, which are trivially debunked:
"Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already."
So? Maybe that's because he is?
"He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross."
Why on Earth are you lying about this? The Red Cross themselves explicitly said they were only allowed to examine about 35 of 70 lorries that crossed the border and so could not support it, a bunch of journalists got a glimpse inside some they weren't supposed to see and they were basically empty. Why? What was going to be put in them at the border?
"We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq."
Oh I see, you're one of those people who in 2003 was, like many of us saying "The Iraq war is wrong!" but unlike the rest of us you're unable to let something go from 11 fucking years ago? That doesn't paint you as someone rational we should listen to. This has nothing to do with Iraq - that happened, it was an unacceptable fuckup, but it was a fuckup perpetrated by a regime who hasn't been in power for 6 years.
"It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building."
This is just stupid. Why do you feel an invasion has to be fully fledged? Are you saying that Israel didn't in fact recently invade Gaza because they only kept tanks on the outskirts, only sent troops into the streets, and didn't raise the Israeli flag over Gaza? Putin has done what he's done because plausible deniability allows him to cast doubt on whether Russia deserves full blown sanctions, he was hoping he could take over Eastern Ukraine and not have anyone able to hold him immediately responsible for it. Unfortunately for him due to a variety of fuckups such as Russian soldiers being captured in Ukraine, and tanks that are operated by no one in the world other than the Russian military (T-72BMs) now turning up it's pretty clear it's Russia in there and no one else:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
What's worse is that this is exactly what they did a few months ago in Crimea and now even admit it - why are you so adamant that they wouldn't do the same in Eastern Ukraine as they admitted to doing there? Something which is, for what it's worth, a war crime- dressing a professional army as civilians is a breach of international law, and unlike Bush who was simply arguably a war criminal, Putin is a self-admitted war criminal.
But you keep defending a war criminal based on half-assed information if it makes you feel like a cool counter-culture hipster or whatever you think you are.
Using the age old argument of "America fucked up once, so this isn't Putin and if it was it'd be justified anyway" makes you look like an exceptional kind of idiot. The world isn't that black and white, and two wrongs don't make a right.
So as a native speaker, please heed my call - let's all stop abusing the English language shall we? We know what an invasion looks like.
At least we thought we did. That's why Putin got away with it for so long.
Come on, Facebook is a billion-dollar company, and they can't afford a little tiny office in Ukraine?
forget the date proofs posted by another, the true easy to spot signs that cannot be fixed in some scripted bot or manual is the use of the wording.
"Funny, grandparent did not show" just sounds *wrong* to my ears, you wouldnt say that, you'd add a "the" or a "my" to quantify it. I read the lack of, as someone used to not using english as a first language. "It is parent who", again, no leading term "the parent", or they might be defining their parent's etc.
I'm not a grammar nazi, but its a easy spot for a native, even if your english is really good. It just feels wrong. And I speak more than one language and live in a non english country, so I get a feeling quickly when someones phraseology is off like this.
Slashdot knows its being trolled, some of them are better than others. I hope the more convincing ones get paid more to use all that western education .
FB is for pics of the grandchildren's birthday cake, for FBI agents acting like children, etc.
Politics doesn't sell.
Block them all and let God sort them out.
--
Kill them all and let God sort them out -- Massacre at Béziers, 22 July 1209
The United States will start to do to Russian Federation what it did to the Soviets. We will squeeze and wait. And after 30 years of being squeezed... Russia will probably fracture again. Probably in the far east... and then humbled again... we will offer Russia peace, friendship, and a place at the table. We'll see how small Russia needs to get before it is willing to behave itself.
Only problem w/ this theory. To split up Russia, there would need to be a large population which can be broken away from Russia on ethnic, religious or other lines. For the Soviet Union, there were those 14 other 'republics' that automatically gained independence once Boris Yeltsin pulled Russia out of the Soviet Union, making the latter a caricature of itself before it was dissolved.
But today's Russia is more or less a homogenous nation. What you're wishing for would have been possible had the Siberians, say, been a different ethnic people from the Russians. They're not. Granted, there are Mongoloid Shaman people in Krasnoyarsk going Eastwards, but not in the numbers that would constitute a viable nation. Fact remains that Russians are a homogenous majority from the Baltic to the Bering Straits.
Yeah, there are renegade groups like the Chechens & Tatars who would like independence. Guess what - unlike Ukraine, which has borders w/ several other countries, both a Chechnya & a Tatarstan would be landlocked countries within Russia - much like Lesotho - and would be at the mercy of Russia for all of their needs. Also, since Russians from other ex-Soviet republics, be it Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, et al are returning to Russia, it just bolsters Russian numbers even more.
I do think the Russians would do well to populate Siberia (not gulag style) so that they stop leaning heavily on Ukraine or Georgia or other such countries.
Well, having proofed various essays by Russian speakers, the grammar errors seem to be similar (mind you, other languages may also have errors of the same nature).
* about a 1000 Russian soldiers
* war of 08.08.08 in Abhasia and Georgia shown
* in not at all stupid
* 100,000 troops, full backing of the Russian tanks
Funny, grandparent did not show me any "telltale signs" at all, and I am pretty sensitive to awkward phraseology one finds in non native speakers. Not that being a non native speaker is in any way naughty or evil.
That's because your native tongue is one of the Slavic languages. For list of telltales, see some of the other replies.
His post is actually well composed, thoughtful, highly cogent (unlike yours), and makes excellent points.
A reply of a partisan for the other side of the argument. Otoh, I don't like it when it starts to devolve into ad hominems, either.
It is parent who strikes me as being very partisan.
And that, of course, is what makes an argument.
Vsevo Khoroshevo,
Sysrammer
Update: I reviewed your other posts, and the English is generally good. So, I presume 1) You let someone else use your account, 2) possibly because there was a shift change. Perhaps one of your staff of linguist/programmers is a bit weaker or is less experienced, and needs more training.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
* in not at all stupid
Good catch. Ignoring the "in", as I think that's just a typo, the phrase "not at all stupid" sounds Slavic to me. I can't pinpoint why, exactly. Perhaps it's a subtle pattern I picked up from my teachers long ago.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain