Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Removes Hundreds of Accounts Spamming Political Info (theverge.com)
Facebook is purging hundreds of accounts and pages in the U.S., many of which spread political misinformation, for breaking the company's terms against "inauthentic" content and spam. The Verge reports: The company said in a blog post that 559 pages and 251 accounts would be removed. While the accounts used "sensational political content," Facebook did not say that was the reason for the purge. Instead, the accounts and pages will be taken down after they had "consistently broken" the company's rules against gaming its platform. Facebook noted that many used strategies like posting on fake or multiple accounts to generate traffic, or to inflate their popularity. Still, Facebook noted the proximity to the U.S. midterm elections, and said that networks like the ones it removed today are "increasingly" promoting political content that is "often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate." The company said this was the reason it has turned to "behavior" instead of "content" when searching for bad actors.
Facebook does not appear to be having much trouble taking down and banning accounts that are guilty of wrongthink. But that's easy. On the other hand, trying to ban all the robo-posted spamcrap that's flooding the remaining pages is apparently too difficult for them.
I'm not kidding. I'm watching one thread after another thread that gets posted on some of their popular pages immediately get flooded with obviously robo-posted make-money-fast-work-from-home spam. The posting pattern is laughably easy to spot: first post a dummy "asdfasdf" comment, and five minutes later "Edit" it and replace it with canned boilerplate.
Apparently, the rocket scientists at Facebook are spam filtering only the initial comments that get posted in threads. So, the only thing that needs to be done to completely bypass Facebook crap spam filters is to robo-edit an existing comment.
I've been watching these spam floods turning Facebook pages to utter crap for several months now. Reporting them to Facebook does absolutely nothing. But, that's ok. Because Facebook just got rid of all the wrong-thinking fake-newsy (in Facebook's opinion, of course) pages.
Don't be a useful idiot - of course WashPo is going to highlight the sketchy pages and not not the anti-authoritarian pages. There were dozens of police accountability pages that were taken down - Copblock and the like. They had some opinion pieces, sure, and authority didn't like them, obviously, but most all of the content in the groups I saw disappeared was links to police brutality pieces. All gone, thanks for using Facebook.
The revolution will not be carried on corporate hosting platforms.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do you have any solid reason to believe Faceboot didn't censor US citizens on a partisan political basis? I don't know either way - but that claim is fully consistent with everything that's publicly known about how Faceboot operates.