Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Removes 82 Accounts Linked To Iranian Disinformation Campaign (usatoday.com)
Facebook said Friday that it removed 82 pages, groups, and accounts from Iran that tried to sow political discord in the U.S. and U.K. over the course of the last year. USA Today reports: The Facebook announcement, coming two weeks before the midterms, was a bracing reminder of the growing scale and frequency of disinformation operations threatening the United States on social media, some of it tied to foreign governments, even as Facebook adds thousands of new employees and strengthens technology to more quickly root out and take down disinformation campaigns.
The page administrators and account owners typically misrepresented themselves as U.S. citizens, or in a few cases U.K. citizens, to post on politically divisive subjects ripped from the headlines such as the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Last week Twitter disclosed more than 1 million tweets from the same operation. The Iranian government has no ties to the accounts, but the investigation is still ongoing.
The page administrators and account owners typically misrepresented themselves as U.S. citizens, or in a few cases U.K. citizens, to post on politically divisive subjects ripped from the headlines such as the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Last week Twitter disclosed more than 1 million tweets from the same operation. The Iranian government has no ties to the accounts, but the investigation is still ongoing.
Will the same standard of scrutiny and censorship be applied to publicity campaigns on behalf of governments the United States has friendlier relations with?
It should be clear by now that the growing divide in the US over the last decade has been caused by disinformation agents and bots from foreign countries on social media, and their collaborators in the US. If only people would get their news exclusively from the US corporate media like they did in the old days, everything would be fine.
Of course, conservatives will claim that only conservative iranian accounts were removed...
Can anyone point me to any information that FB has meted similar action to any pages from the left?
BTW, I long for the day we'll get a viable FB alternative. Available ones are g r a s s i n g the last time I checked.
of muckraking. I keep saying this but we lost a lot when guys like Gawker went away. Sure, they did a lot of awful tabloid journalism, but they also did a fair bit of the investigative stuff that the tabloids paid for.
Somewhat hilariously one of the hardest hitting journalistic outlets today is Teen Vogue. It helps that they're a bit like the court jester in that nobody takes 'em that seriously so they can get away with stories that anywhere else would have the mega corps come down like a ton of bricks.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When they remove anything linked to an Israeli misinformation campaign.
Nobody in Washington fears "Russian trolls and bots".
Everyone fears AIPAC.
Why don't you tell us who you're talking about? "The left" isn't a group really except in your AM radio feedback loop, sleepy traitor.
In other news, a man on the beach in Angola pissed into the ocean and has been implicated in millions of cases of poisoning from contaminated water.
It's easy.
"Pursuing business in an illegal fashion is unacceptable, and since _________ has done so, accountability must be maintained and the force of law brought to bear in consequence."
If you get confused on how to react depending on whether I say the blank is filled in with "immigrants" or "Trump", you're the Left.
You're welcome.
Iran? That is unpossible! All disinformation campaigns are done by Russia. The Democrats and Mueller said so.
With inauthentic behavior found and someone sure they are really detecting an effort to spread discord.
What is next?
No memes at all because of domestic political considerations? No blasphemy because ads? No funny art work? No links to funny political art work sites?
No freedom of speech online to enjoy funny political art due to investigation and the demands of US and UK government officials?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No, more muck & yellow journalism is not what we need.
We need the kind of journalism that gives verifiable sources and actual information, even when it's against their political interests to do so. Not more blowhard opinions that don't bother to cite sources and spend most of the article blowing smoke, rather than talking about what's actually known and how we know it.
In other words, something more like this.
> The Iranian government has no ties to the accounts
Without the investigation being complete, HOW can they possibly already CLEAR
the Iranian Government SO ABSOLUTELY?
E
This discussion isn't about Israel, Jews, or AIPAC. It's about Facebook removing 82 Iranian disinformation linked accounts.
If you have to take it all the way down to your racist base you should find a forum more welcoming to that.
Like a Trump arena. Or a Florida van full of stickers.
M
Your coming was foretold, well done fulfilling the prophecy.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
but you have to make your agenda clear. If the gov't of Iran wants to campaign against Trump that's their prerogative. But if they want to lie and pretend they're Americans campaigning against Trump that's when they've crossed the line. The same is true for the Russians when they campaign for Trump.
I'm clever enough to know that information is useless if you don't know it's source. But there's enough that aren't to swing elections. Democracy and Capitalism both only work when there's enough information to go around.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
US citizen are an easy target because they are poorly educated: only to become data curbing servants.
The solution is to educate them not only by cramming data in their brains but by also teaching them how that brain works, emotions included.
Any form of manipulation would then become weakened.
It's clear that you didn't even look at the article. Look at the examples of posts made by the pages that were taken down and you'll have your answer.
No, more muck & yellow journalism is not what we need.
We need the kind of journalism that gives verifiable sources and actual information, even when it's against their political interests to do so. Not more blowhard opinions that don't bother to cite sources and spend most of the article blowing smoke, rather than talking about what's actually known and how we know it.
In other words, something more like this.
Checked that link out of morbid curiousity. It's the same info in every other news report, but with added tinfoil hat stuff about how this guys social media accounts weren't "wiped by the FBI", and complaining that the bombs weren't explosive enough. And a comment section full of dumbasses saying it's all a setup, it's a conspiracy, the guy is getting paid by Soros.
So, uh.. no. That site is pretty much crap, and is full of idiots. And you want "something more like this", LOL.
this is what American propaganda machinery and media outlets do today, remove any differing opinion and inconvenient truth, and call the people who shared their opinion a russian troll, or iranian hacker, or north korean terrorist.
The U.S. is trying to turn the whole internet into a pro-american echo chamber, and you should realize that this is a bad thing, whether you are an american or not.
The world is out to get you America, everyone is hacking your social medias, everyone except the Israeli's, because they're your best buddies ...
What imaginary line are you speaking off? who decided it couldn't be crossed? Who smacks Americans across tje hand when they try the same tricks against the Iranian state?
Anonymous sources familiar with rsilvergun's thinking tell me she should now be referred to she, having completed severing her former genitals.
Yeah.
This is exactly the sort of bullshit we don't need more of. And it's why I laugh every time I hear about Donald Drumpf threatening 'journalists'.
What fucking journalists? We don't have journalism in the US. Once, but no longer.
Oh, look, it's bogaboga the vatnik retard posting Russian talking points yet again.
Mine. And my life has been much better ever since. God, Facebook sucks. At some point, hopefully soon, people will realize the monstrosity that it is and close their accounts too. (I did delete everything first, for what little that's worth, and happily, I never gave Facebook REAL information about me... opting to use a fake name, fake birth date, etc., because I never did really trust them, and in retrospect, I was right not to trust them.) They're on my list of companies that I can't wait for the day they go out of business.
I still hope this is intended as over the top parody but these days I don't know anymore.
'corporate media' is usually not indented as praise though.
He never said the word group, d-bag, shouldn't you be getting triggered someplace more productive for your kind: