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Facebook Users Cry 'Censorship' After Being Told Which Russian Troll Pages They Liked (gizmodo.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cause-and-effect dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: As the FBI's investigation into Russian election interference reaches a fever pitch, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed alert Monday night. The bulletin told users who followed pages created by Russian trolls that those pages have been removed. And some of the affected users did not like this. A brief search revealed that numerous people believe that this is an act of censorship by Facebook. Some users argued that they should be allowed to decide what's "true, fake, or otherwise," a challenge that's bound to be a slippery slope in this era of algorithm-based confirmation bias. Others took on a more conspiratorial tone, claiming that Facebook failed to reveal which pages were removed (despite the alert containing a link listing the pages in question). Facebook first released the information in December, creating a help page that showed users if they liked or followed pages and accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, Russia's notorious troll farm, but today's alert seems to have inspired newfound alarm. The fact that Facebook explicitly stated which pages were deleted seems to have done little to reduce the anger over the allegedly clandestine silencing.

15 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. why fb users are dumb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    from the article:

    > Some users argued that they should be allowed to decide what’s “true, fake, or otherwise,”

    yes, your feelings affect the facts

    except they don't

    1. Re:why fb users are dumb by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except the "facts" are being distilled, filtered, and represented by a biased source.

      You literally have to choose who to believe in every case where you are not present to directly witness events.

      Why should anyone believe Facebook when they've been caught red-handed manipulating trending news stories?

    2. Re:why fb users are dumb by i286NiNJA · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why should anyone believe Facebook when they've been caught red-handed manipulating trending news stories?

      Because it's easy to not get your news from facebook. Besides this is all major egg on their face.

      Unless you believe that there are thousands of small business owners with childlike english and hours of spare time to shit up comments sections all over the internet.

    3. Re:why fb users are dumb by amicusNYCL · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Here's the real problem though: people say they want to decide for themselves what is true, but in the past when presented with obviously fake stories, these same people did not do the research to actually determine if it's true. Hell, a lot of the time they don't even read the article, just the headline, and just hit "share". This is how this shit spreads - it spreads specifically because the target audience is known for not doing the research to determine whether or not it's true. The people who make money on this stuff know and admit this fact - they know that they have to choose a target audience that will not do the research. And this target audience is pretty broad, it might include children of four-star generals, it might include sons of presidents, it might include presidents themselves, all kinds of people really.

      So, if the target audience for fake news and foreign propaganda will not do their own research, and they still don't want to be told whether or not they are reading foreign propaganda aimed at them, then what's the desired outcome? Do they just want to consume foreign propaganda while being willfully ignorant of it? Is it just stubbornness, or do they actually not care if the article they are reading was produced in a foreign intelligence agency and bears no truth in reality, as long it describes something which they feel might be true?

      Why should anyone believe Facebook when they've been caught red-handed manipulating trending news stories?

      See, but that's what's so great about this kind of thing, when done right. It's not a religion, it doesn't require faith and belief. You can look at the evidence and see where it points. It's like the people who are quick to dismiss anything from Wikipedia because "anyone can edit it" while conveniently forgetting about that giant list of citations at the end of the article. This isn't happening in a vacuum. If they remove a page and they tell you which page you don't have to blindly trust them, you can do your own research on that group to figure out what Facebook knows about them. In theory, anyway.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    4. Re:why fb users are dumb by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Here's the real problem though: people say they want to decide for themselves what is true, but in the past when presented with obviously fake stories, these same people did not do the research to actually determine if it's true.

      These are people who think that they can establish what's true based on faith and feelings, not research and facts. To them, preponderance of evidence means "what does your gut tell you".
      Trying to sway their opinion with mere facts is an exercise in futility. They believe they have the right to choose what the facts are.

      I really wish I lived in their world.

    5. Re:why fb users are dumb by nobuddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Worse, when shown, with detailed breakdown and actual facts, that it is fake- they declare the debunker to be part of the conspiracy. See any right wing response to snopes and other fact checker sites.

    6. Re:why fb users are dumb by mjm1231 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This makes me feel old. It seems like only yesterday that relativism was a sin the right accused the left of.

      --
      Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
    7. Re:why fb users are dumb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Could fake news turn out to be good news?

      I could wish Facebook would crash and burn and somehow the whole model would go with it, but it is not going to happen.

      We almost need some kind of education program to identify legitimate sources of news. Using Google to search for "Fact Check title" often works, though care is required there as with anything else.

      We as a country failed pretty much every way we could fail to take actions to prevent this crap from happening again. Trump just refused to enforce any sanctions beyond the tiny bit he couldn't avoid, yet again, and this was the final deadline.

      Ultimately the fact that the propaganda worked is because a great many people in our country are conditioned to listen to propaganda. The Herman Goering applies, and I fear it probably always will. He said,

      “Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

      In the last election we were given Mexicans, Muslims, Islam, EPA policies to protect the environment, Strong Women, Fake Scandals, Gay People (restroom thing/marriage), Others taking Jobs, etc, etc as the "enemies" that were "attacking, taking jobs, etc."

      Trump, with help, assembled a collection of enemies that generally weren't going to vote for him anyway. He promised to fight those enemies for his chosen people.

      It worked. Some of Trump's policies will probably accelerate the economy in the short term, but at the expense of the environment, debt, justice, fairness, freedom, etc. For Trump and the Republicans. It doesn't matter. They are achieving their goals and their donors are making money hand over fist. Mission Accomplished.

      They may even win in 2020. Remember you don't have to win the next war the same way the last was won. Lies work. You just need to recalibrate. Blame the other side for everything that is wrong and come up with some reasons for it. Accuse them of every fault you have. They don't have to be real. The seth rich crap still pops up everywhere. Keep repeating the lies, lather, rinse repeat. I'd expect help from Russia again, and maybe some other countries with a long term interest in weakening the united states. AI will improve. The ability for a few people to harness ever more sophisticated bots will increase. Telling fake from real news will be more difficult, with the only real hope is to use the more time tested sources. Heck we haven't even prepared for the last battle we had, let alone the battles to fight off foreign cyber manipulation on the scale we shall see in the future.

      We have the right to bear arms, but that is useless if your adversary is across an ocean and enough of your populace is clicking on their weaponized misinformation and liking it.

  2. Denial by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is what a post-truth world looks like. The truth is whatever you prefer it to be, and many people seem to prefer not to think of themselves as having been manipulated by Russian trolls. Or maybe they are just so far down the rabbit hole they can't climb back up yet.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    1. Re:Denial by Kiuas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is what a post-truth world looks like. The truth is whatever you prefer it to be,

      This is true unfortunately and it's not limited to politics by any means. I was having a discussion yesterday on FB about energy policies and there was a guy arguing for '100 % solar'/renewable approach. I went in explaining to him why this is not feasible and would in fact do a lot of damage to the environment and that we should favor a mix of renewables and nuclear as that's the best combo to go with if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and effectively. He then came back with the typical fear mongering arguments about how radiation is scary and so on, and we had a back and forth where I tried to the best of my ability to counter his points with actual facts and figures about energy production, emissions, deaths per kilowatt hour etc etc. He never contested any of my points even, he just threw in the next objection he had in mind. After a few comments of this he finally came back with, and this is a direct quote: "you are entitled to have your opinion but I am afraid this will not affect/change mine. Sorry" In other words: 'I'm free to ignore facts that don't fit with my ideology'.

      This is the fundamental issue with the net/social media in its current state. Since it's driven by algorithms that are geared to maximise time on site and engagement, those algorithms do 2 primary things: firstly the surround you with people and content that's in line with yours, because people like reading stuff they agree with, and secondly they drop in the occasional piece of information/news/opinion that's likely to make you angry, because angry people are more engaged and pay more attention, thereby improving the effectiveness of advertising.

      People are naturally inclined to be more accepting evidence supporting a claim they already believe in, and the algorithms online have pushed this to overdrive. People on one side of an issue, and people on another side of an issue, all equally convinced that no-one in their right mind could be on the other . This makes conversation, actual, fact-based conversation, almost impossible, and simultaneously makes utilising social media for political/ideological propaganda really easy, because it's build to divide people into groups of likeminded people What the guy was likely doing to me in the energy discussion was throwing talking points at me that he had heard/seen made before by other members of his bubble. He wasn't arguing so much as he was lobbing memes at me, and in the end, when none of those memes worked, he resorted to 'well, that's like just your opinion man.'

      The same phenomenon is going in globally with politics. People by and large don't discuss issues and facts, they take different kind of political memes and throw them at each other, with the end result being that the other side only usually gets angry and counters with their own memes. This is super effective in keeping people engaged on the site, it's precisely what the platforms aim to do and it's simultaneously toxic for any actual discussion about facts, because any fact-based arguments have a memetic counter to them.

      --
      "It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
    2. Re:Denial by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Every poll is adjusted by some kind of likely voter turnout model, and in state after state anomalously high rural turnout knocked those models into a cocked hat.

      The turnout was as expected. The discrepancy was that people likely to vote for Trump were unlikely to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump due to public shaming of Trump supporters by the media. That USC/LA Times poll was pretty much the only one to predict a Trump victory. They reached that conclusion when they noticed that Trump supporters reported they were very uncomfortable telling pollsters that they were Trump supporters. They tweaked their model to account for that (that more Trump supporters weren't telling pollsters who they were voting for, than Clinton supporters).

      The press broke the #1 rule of reporting news - do it in an unbiased manner so you don't affect the story with your presence. By not only participating in but apparently gleefully encouraging the shaming of Trump supporters, they caused said supporters to disappear from their own polls, creating the "surprise" Trump win in 2016.

  3. Stipulation is not truth. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When people say "I want the truth," what they really mean is "I want evidence that justifies my forgone conclusions."

    They want the beliefs they already have to turn out to be true. So they will like anything that reinforces it.

    They might reject this and say they want to learn what the real truth is. But the moment you start giving them evidence that they don't like, they pull out every irrational trick in the book to reject it. And they insist that they aren't doing this.

    It really is quite amazing how good people are at this.

    (of course, there are SOME people who have an honest interest in truth and the will to overcome their biases in the pursuit of it, but they are so rare as to be statistically insignificant)

  4. Allowed to decide... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Some users argued that they should be allowed to decide what's "true, fake, or otherwise," a challenge that's bound to be a slippery slope in this era of algorithm-based confirmation bias.

    One summer in college, I was fortunate enough to take a Chemistry course taught by Bassam Shakhashiri.

    One of the things he would do is ask, "How many people think it's A?" and a bunch of people would raise their hands.
    Then he would ask, "How many people think it's B?" and a bunch of other people would raise their hands.
    He would then say, "Science is not a democracy. The answer is ____."

    Truth is not a democracy either.

  5. No way to make them happy in this by imidan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People don't like to be shown for fools, and these messages are Facebook telling them they've been taken. Furthermore, they're already invested in whatever political side was favored by the Russian posts they liked, so it's easy to discount this as targeting their personal beliefs. It's like some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe a sunk cost fallacy situation. People seem more likely to double down on their position even when it's made clear that they were wrong.

  6. please give us elites by supernova87a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is why the utopia of a democratized internet of citizen reporters and transparency is a false hope. As much as you'd like to believe in such a future, we need *authorities* and institutions to do the work (yes, hard work) to determine what is truth and have some objective standards.

    Uninformed crowds voting for what they believe sounds correct or newsworthy (or worse, what's just trendy or fun, no intellectual effort required) leads to very damaging scams and fake news flying around like a virus on an unvaccinated population.

    Smart governments know that information is not just something that can be left to figure itself out at the whim of the crowd.