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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.
Fuck the Zuck!
Way too late now. Damage is done. Most people already think those were real US citizens and will now cry "censorship."
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.
History has shown the more you racist liberal monsters suppress the people, the more they will rebel against you. Trying to suppress conservative voices just makes then vote in greater numbers...
I saw that as a dispassionate Libertarian who does not have a dog in that hunt, I just enjoy observing tactical mistakes both sides make.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
is now "sensational political content".
Talk about politics too much and thats tracked for violations.
No freedom after speech as the account is removed.
Wonder what happens online when a citizen attempts to petition the government using a computer?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Outside of your Jenny Mccarthy's et al, democrats aren't generally dumb enough to fall for FB spambot trolls, which is why you don't really see any.
Occurring so close to the midterms, will Facebook get called out for meddling in an election rather than allowing status quo and allowing existing groups to execute plans they may have made weeks or months ago?
There is a better and more complete article on The Washington Post that describes the type of crap Facebook purged. Spoiler: it's clickbait that leads to other profit driven sites. Don't assume it's all conservative media either because it's not. They got crazy shit for folks of all types.
Bottom line: this is good for all (even slightly) rational actors.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
democrats aren't generally dumb enough to fall for FB spambot trolls, which is why you don't really see any.
Actually, the reason Democrats don't troll is that, thanks to Poe's Law, they don't need to. Actual authentic right-wing posts already go far beyond any trolling or parody that the Democrats could come up with.
Have you seen what passes for news on Donald Trump? Did you watch the disconnect between the news and the actual Kavanaugh hearings?
The left just lost the midterms with their radicalism and denial of reality. At least one registered democrat can admit to it. The foot has been shot straight through and now our dinghy in a sea of red is sinking.
"often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate." - ie Legitimate political debate, but not what they agree with?
That's weird, it sounded like you just agreed with me.
That's funny, coming from the same people who claim that Citizens United means that the corporations own the government.
Nobody falls for facebook trolls beyond clicking a link that takes you to something other than was advertised. People will largely only believe what they want to believe and will congregate in their little social clusters and what Facebook does or does not do, has little bearing, beyond sucker retention.
What they are doing is most likely IP address matching for normal users, normal users not having a whole bunch of accounts going to the one IP address and 'liking' each others content. Getting rid of hundreds, a joke, when they start talking hundreds of thousands than they are getting close, probably more like tens of millions. Fake accounts created over the years.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I used to visit Facebook to catch up with what friends are doing and to see what events were in my area.
Once Facebook went IPO it opened the floodgates on political garbage and commercial spam to the point which diminished what it used to be and what attracted people to it in the first place.
Clearing out all the political garbage and sorting out their privacy and scam issues needs to be at the fore to fix their issues.
On the one hand people may say âoecensorshipâ, but on the other hand a line needs to be drawn to kick people out who pee in the pool at the pool party.
Facebook needs to go further and purge ALL the garbage that ruins the experience IMHO.
Use twitter for political chatter.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
It`s good decision..
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.
You say Democratic Trolls do not exist. Might I introduce you to Correct The Record?
https://www.factcheck.org/2016...
Facebook happily announced the influx of thousands of new users.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Putin-bankrolled Russotrolls seem to forget that private companies in the US are under no compulsion whatsoever to guarantee freedom of speech.
TFTFY.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
No solid evidence, but a number of anecdotal incidents that could be construed as such.
Anytime a popular website removes accounts and content and doesn't have clearly objective criteria for doing it, they are going to be accused of censorship by one side or the other. They will be accused of being subjective in their judgments and partisan in their actions regardless.
Facebook's problem is they have been subjective in their judgments in the past and have a sordid history of political activity that is not clearly bipartisan. For instance they had a internal dust up over one of their executives appearing behind Brett Kavanaugh during the now infamous and partisan Ford hearing. The guy had to apologize to his coworkers for this, even though he didn't represent Facebook but was there on his own time. Fair or not, Stories like these call into question Facebook's bias as they clearly show the bias of their employees and corporate culture.
Facebook needs to step back a bit here and start making clearly objective judgments in each individual case and saying what they are. They need to also have an objective process which allows the individual users to appeal Facebook's decisions. But that would be expensive and take time, so I'm guessing that won't happen any time soon.
At the very least, Facebook needs to have clearly objective criteria for taking action on any of its users. They also must clearly communicate to the community exactly what rules are being violated and what actions they are taking and how that is consistent with the objective policy. They will still be accused of being subjective by some, but at that point one could actually review Facebook's policy and decisions and actually decide if the rules are objective and if Facebook is actually following them.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Satire is political commentary too, right?
But it is their platform.
I'd rather they leave it up and tag it with "UNVERIFIED" or "VERIFIED FALSE". Then the jokes would really begin.
Caitlin Johnstone documents this was a coordinated attempt by Facebook and Twitter to remove content offensive to the corporate masters.
Alex Jones was the canary in the coalmine, now they will continue ensuring Sanders (and other upstarts) never gets a second chance.
She writes:
Regardless of where you’re at on the political spectrum, if you oppose the status quo then opposing internet censorship of any political speech is now a matter of simple self defense. If this wasn’t obvious to you when they shut down Alex Jones, it should damn well be obvious to you now. If you want to change the existing system in any way which takes power away from those currently in power, your voice is next on the chopping block. They’re locking all the doors down as fast as they can to keep us trapped in this Orwellian oligarchy until they get us all killed by war or ecocide. If they shut down the public’s ability to share dissident information, they’ll have locked the final door. Don’t let them.
"often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate."
So, often are in fact legitimate political debate, being indistinguishable.
For, if the syrup you pour on your cakes for breakfast is indistinguishable from real, natural, from-a-tree maple syrup, are you in any way not actually enjoying the taste of maple? And if so, are you not, in any way, diminished having been given a not natural, but indistinguishable syrup?
So these sources, while in Facebook's view being somehow illegitimate, are indistinguishable, and so are, for their users, the same thing as the so-called and left-alone 'legitimate' sources.
Bear in mind that these 'legitimate' sources may differ only in that they use links, postings, and dissemination in a way that is approved of. For the mainstream media, this is to engage each other with the identical language, quote one another exclusively, and reinforce their common points and opinions. All of which is link farming and much of which would be well defined as using "multiple accounts to generate traffic, or to inflate their popularity.", though perhaps merely among friends, and not the blatant 'fake accounts' that Facebook is alluding to.
For we know well that CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others would never stoop to using false premises to propagate their influence, of course, and neither would the smaller entities that they join with and refer to constantly. Of course not, they somehow are ethical, where their opposition is not, because political discourse is an unequal, asymmetrical game, where only a few philosophies are corrupt, and others are without redemption, and the difference is in the eye of the beholder. Oh, wait, I meant to write 'the difference is obvious and indelible'.
Sure.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.