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."
Probably FB's.
Where's the problem? I mean, for FB. Why should FB care whether Ukraine or Russia is winning the media war? As long as people follow it on FB, FB is winning.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It *is* a military assault, and it is orchestrated by Russia... but it is still a game. For example, Russia is not attempting to gain control of the airspace over Ukraine (heaven forbid they try, there are NATO air resources all around the place and those might get involved, resulting in a far larger-scale war).
It is just that for politicians to play "chicken", thousands of soldiers have to die.
On this level of the game, Russia intensively re-supplies and re-mans rebel fighters, hoping that the Ukraininan government grows desperate and starts negotiations on very favourable terms. (It pays to remember that the Ukraininan government previously proposed negotiations, during a ceasefire, but rebels rejected this.) Meanwhile, the Ukraininan government is trying to solicit foreign financial and military aid, to outlast and push back the offensive and negotiate when very serious economic sanctions have been enacted against Russia.
For the soldiers who die, and the civilians who die from collateral damage, rest assured, this is not a game, and I (as an anarchist) would very much prefer if some helpful person would take out the trash that is called Vladimir Putin (and if it's necessary, then also Petro Poroshenko, though it must be said that he did't start this - he was hired when shit was alreadu spinning with the fan).
Get a perspective or something.
When the "local militias" chose to take over Donetsk International Airport in June, and were ousted by Ukrainian marines, the coffins were sent mostly to Russia and Chechnia. Yeah right, locals took up arms to defend themselves.
Yes, there are some locals fighting. They are not the most agressive, and their numbers are dropping. There is scarecely any equipment seized by locals left. Nearly all of the heavy equipment has been deliberately supplied by Russian state.
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.
2. Hello! This is Russia - which, in case you hadn't noticed, is different from the USSR
Not really. In the eyes of most of the world, the names may have changed, but you still act the same.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The freedom to speak is worthless if there is nobody to listen to you. In other words, nobody hears you scream on the internet, unless you're screaming where everyone is listening.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...Why should FB care whether Ukraine or Russia is winning the media war?...
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a little bit more than a media war.
.
Last I checked, Russia was invading eastern Ukraine.
I suspect that may bode poorly for a FB office in Russia to properly handle Ukrainian Facebook business.
It is more than a little bit more complicated then that and I would also suggest that the US where anything but very quick when it came to the break up of Yugoslavia.
Firstly as a general rule the existing countries are very very slow to recognise a break-away province as a country in its own right. This can be seen with the Basque in Spain for example. Even Catalan, an autonomous region in Spain is extremely unlikely to become a country in its own right despite being perhaps the most capable. As a whole the status quo holds.
Add into that the fact that countries like Ukraine were meant to be buffer states. States that didn't hold too closely to the west but weren't part of Russia to give Russia a sense of security. Historically Russia has seen pressure from two major geopolitical areas, Europe and China. It has become a relatively paranoid country.
When the coup occurred in Kiev it shifted the Ukraine heavily westward. Talks of become members of NATO were even brought up. To Russia this is seen as a huge threat (whether it is or not is a different argument). The perception is also that the only reason this happened was due to western agitation. As a result there is really no question that Russia began to agitate the heavily Russian parts of Ukraine to split away. It may not quite be the buffer thickness that Ukraine whole was but it is still better than nothing from their perspective.
What we are seeing here is a return to cold war mentality. This dispute is now being split along east / west lines. US good, Russia Bad or vice versa.
Unfortunately I think it is distracting the major powers from what really is posing the biggest threat and that is ISIS in the middle east. We are running the real risk of having a large militant religious state coming into existence in an already politically fragile area. And the worst thing is that Assad if the best option to stop it.
(heaven forbid they try, there are NATO air resources all around the place and those might get involved, resulting in a far larger-scale war).
NATO will not go to war with Russia over Ukraine. None of the members of NATO have that obligation since Ukraine is not a member, and moreover, none of them want to risk lives to defend Ukraine. It's a similar situation to Hungary in the 50s......did anyone help them? Of that situation, Krushkev said:
"In a newspaper interview in 1957, Khrushchev commented "support by United States ... is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No it doesn't, the separatist movement has never had popular support in east Ukraine, the argument for populist support was tenuous even in Crimea that is by far the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine.
"If you don't believe me, just look at the photos of the East Ukraine during March and April when citizens were blocking off roads to stop tanks, in some cases just like the Tiananmen Man."
If you think tens, at most hundreds of people, some of whom were themselves "rebels" aka Putin's agent provocateurs in regions of millions is a sign of popular support than I urge you to go and get a better grasp of millions of numbers. A counterpoint to yours would be the citizens of Mariupol who are currently helping the Ukrainian military dig trenches against the Russian invaders and who formed a many mile long chain of people to make the point that they don't want Putin's soldiers to take over their territory.
There are polls both before:
http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...
and after shit kicked off:
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05...
That show that the Russian made myth of support for joining Russia or being independent from Ukraine is just that, a myth.
Putin is trying to make Eastern Ukraine a buffer zone by injecting his own Russian puppet leadership there just as he did with Crimea, and just as he did with Ukraine (which is what led to this situation). It has nothing to do with what the people there want and everything to do with Putin's paranoia that Europe is somehow out to get him, rather than the actual reality - that Ukrainians would rather just join modern prosperous democratic Europe, than corrupt, poverty stricken, dictatorial Russia. That's why Putin has manufactured the myth you're parroting.
Stop propping up the propaganda of a brutal dictator, because that's what Putin is.
They were NOT staged.
Yes they WERE staged.
Do you even understand Russian or are you simply parroting the shit that the mass media blindly copies from Ukrainian media?
So, one has to speak russian to understand this conflict? Really?
I have been trying to follow the conflict reporting from both mainstream media as well as from Russia Today. The twists from RT is really mindblowing. They even broke the news that the seperatists had shot down *another* Ukrainian plane - only to pull it without any notice, update or trace whatsoever on the RT site once they found out that it was a civilian plane and that the official story was going to be to pin it on the Ukrainians.
Russia Today does not follow common practices for journalism designed to keep media outlets accountable. And Russia Today and Russian controlled media has lost every bit of trust.
Western media are not controlled by governments. Russian media are. Western governments do not crack down on dissidents and bloggers. Russian government does.
Which leads be to the reason for posting this:
Fascism
- is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism
- is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity
- abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion
All of the above fits Russia. Not Ukraine. I don't know if Putin is a fascist himself (I suspect so), but he is playing the ultranationalism card, he talk about Russia being humiliated and threatens nuclear retaliation, he talks about Russian superiority, he claims right to invade any country who (in his mind) humiliates russian citizens or ethnic/russian speaking minorities, he pursues dissidents of his regime and he disregards treaties and expands territory and annexes weaker states (see Georgia, Ossetia, Ukraine/Crimea).
Russia is now engulfed in neo-fascism, Russians taking pride in their new "superiority" and getting back at the world for laughing at them for so many years.
This time around there is no excuse for not knowing the truth. Last time you could claim you did not know because you were lied to. This time you have to actively put the fingers in your ears and shout LALALALA. And that's what you do.
You have shown once again that you will fall for a leader who promises to bully the world, steal and loot, break treaties, threaten nuclear strikes, lie and cheat and play fast and loose the peace of lives of people. For that you deserve despise.
We may not laugh at you any more. But we will never trust you again. You make me sick.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*