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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.
Generally, most people agree that there is a huge difference between people eligible to vote in an election trying to influence each other, and foreigners who aren't supposed to be involved in the election doing it.
I wonder why it is you didn't know that?
Would be nice if we could collectively be intelligent enough to form our own opinions.
Would be nicer if we could collectively be intelligent enough to not use social media as a source of news and information.
Huh! That's odd, not one of those groups represent Trump or Republicans in any way.
That's because the goal is to split the Democratic vote. Much like one of the main goals in the 2016 efforts was to hurt Democratic turnout.
The people who are going to vote for Trump and allies are gonna vote. If they're still on board, they are REALLY on board. They are as excited as possible, so they do not need a program to boost their excitement. Fox News is sufficient to keep them going to the polls.
It's the opposition that is more fickle in going to the polls, so you apply your efforts there. Get Trump-regret people to just stay home instead of voting for a Democrat. Get Democrats to be so upset at some DLC-ish candidates that they continue to stay home or vote third party. Warn DLC-ish Democrats about the horrors of Socialism coming from these crazy Millennial candidates so that they don't vote for the Democrat in their race. And so on.