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Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign (nytimes.com)
Facebook is preparing to announce that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity ahead of November's midterm elections, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people briefed on the matter. From the report: In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week, the company told lawmakers that it detected the influence campaign as part of its investigations into election interference. It has been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two of the officials. Facebook is expected to announce its findings on Tuesday afternoon. The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity. Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues. Update: Facebook has confirmed the story, adding: Today we removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior. This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don't want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they're doing. We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts -- including who may be behind this. But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change. It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.
People are saying collusion isn't illegal because the entire premise of the Mueller Investigation is that it somehow is. The entire point of the witch hunt is to undermine the legitimacy of an elected president. Nobody was complaining when the Obama and Clinton campaigns spent tens of millions of dollars on artificial social media campaigns, in fact they were celebrated for it!
The problem is that the US population has no history of being subjected to false information and outright lies.
If you believe that then you have never been exposed to a church. In the words of George Carlin, "you have to stand in awe, in AWE of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest! Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told."
Maybe it is time that we teach our kids to be more critical.
To teach someone to think critically first requires being able to do it oneself.
Verifying information is hard.
Sometimes but not always. Much of the time it barely requires any real effort.
Simply believing what you're told, especially if it fits your personal point of view, is much easier.
That's hard for people who have been conditioned to believe what they are told from a young age. You know, like in a church...