[HN Gopher] May 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report
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May 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report
Author : rainhacker
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-06-12 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.fb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.fb.com)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| "Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior"
|
| Guess this sounds better than saying you've got a Fake News
| problem.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Props to whatever group is getting paid to remove 4 accounts from
| the platform a day.
| neilv wrote:
| I'd like a clarification on the two tiers...
|
| > _We view CIB as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate
| for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the
| operation. There are two tiers of these activities that we work
| to stop: 1) coordinated inauthentic behavior in the context of
| domestic, non-government campaigns and 2) coordinated inauthentic
| behavior on behalf of a foreign or government actor._
|
| Is this "foreign" and "domestic" relative to the US?
|
| Or relative to the affiliations of those who are the direct
| audience of the CIB?
|
| Or relative to the nations/affiliations of those who are the
| target to affect through the perceptions of the direct audience
| of the CIB?
|
| Or...?
|
| Understanding this top level clearly might help understand
| everything that follows.
| tchalla wrote:
| I almost always assume "foreign" and "domestic" is relative to
| the US unless stated otherwise. There's typically very little
| attempt to be inclusive.
| baybal2 wrote:
| 1. The matter behind the first item on the report:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/sudan-general-military-...
| inigojonesguy wrote:
| Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior, good name for a band.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior. Lol! From the title I thought
| it was about some online flashmob where people look at unusual
| stuff for a day to pollute Facebook's targeting data.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| Why? From the title, I thought it was a report on a specific
| event of semi-state action intended to manipulate public
| opinion for private benefit. It seems CIB is actually for non-
| state actors, with state actors called Foreign/Government
| Interference, and this was just a regular monthly report rather
| than a report triggered by an event.
|
| "Looking at unusual stuff for a day" sounds like authentic
| action to me. People often do weird things. "Inauthentic
| action" is a pretty common term to refer to times when people
| use tools to make something look more popular than it is by
| faking action - it's inauthentic because an event which should
| reflect an action (i.e. computer activity which should be
| triggered by direct human action) doesn't (i.e. it is computer
| activity which wasn't triggered by direct human action, so it's
| not an authentic action).
| MaysonL wrote:
| I wonder, have Facebook ever removed Ben Shapiro's inauthentic
| accounts?[0]
|
| [0] https://popular.info/p/facebook-admits-ben-shapiro-is-
| breaki...
| zanethomas wrote:
| fakebook, who cares?
| jjulius wrote:
| Perhaps I'm speaking from a place of ignorance, but 123 accounts
| seems like a surprisingly low number.
| sp332 wrote:
| It says the accounts have to be central to the operation to be
| counted here. Accounts that just repeat
| disinformation/misinformation from other places, or inflate
| like counts, aren't included.
| jjulius wrote:
| >It says the accounts have to be central to the operation to
| be counted here.
|
| Ah ha, I missed that nugget. That said, I'm still surprised
| that, globally, that number is so low.
|
| >Accounts that just repeat disinformation/misinformation from
| other places, or inflate like counts, aren't included
|
| Does FB ever make such information available publicly?
| varjag wrote:
| The number have to be limited because even most state
| actors have limited manpower to operate trendsetting
| accounts.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I wouldn't expect so, they have nothing to gain form it.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I'm not surprised the number is so low. Isn't it the case
| that only 1% of people cause 99% of the content or
| something? It'd be only a small number of core
| intentionally malicious actors could cause other people to
| follow along in good faith, especially in today's social
| media pressure to speak on controversies.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Which to me sounds like they remove the malfunctioning alarm
| after it's been rebroadcast to a huge audience. FB is
| addressing a distribution problem by purposely treating it as
| a sourcing problem. They're preapred to remove dozens of
| accounts but not reduce the millions of shares.
| na85 wrote:
| It is imperative for Facebook to make their platform seem
| trustworthy.
|
| Do you trust that Facebook is reporting these numbers in good
| faith?
|
| This is the same company that ran unethical psychological
| experiments on its users, without their consent, in attempts to
| cause depression-like-symptoms.
| jjulius wrote:
| I unequivocally do not trust them, hence my bringing it up.
| :)
| alisonkisk wrote:
| That's a misrepresentation.
| spoonjim wrote:
| What part of it is a misrepresentation? Just because it
| sounds beyond the pale doesn't mean it's a
| misrepresentation; the action it describes could be (is)
| beyond the pale.
| [deleted]
| rhizome wrote:
| An image of trustworthiness is much more important to them
| than actually being trustworthy. For them to be actual-
| trustworthy to the maximum number of people/accounts would
| involve a level of imagination and remodeling that I don't
| think they're capable of. Because it's a hard problem made
| worse by scale.
| na85 wrote:
| Indeed that's why I wrote that it's imperative for Facebook
| to make their platform _seem_ trustworthy.
| [deleted]
| wyldfire wrote:
| It does, but is the interval that they did that work only
| during May 2021?
|
| I think this summary page is pretty pithy but then I read the
| report and it's not too detailed either.
|
| I was optimistic to see such a report being published by FB but
| now I wonder if this effort is adequately resourced.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I think it's more harmful to keep insisting that a public forum
| where ANYONE can make an account and start posting is a place to
| find truth. It just legitimizes the misinformation campaigns
| which manage to slip through. Plus there aren't enough bodies at
| facebook to actually moderate the amount of data they receive.
|
| Conversely, Wikipedia, despite all its bureacracy, policies and
| mechanisms still publishes a general disclaimer: "WIKIPEDIA MAKES
| NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY."
|
| I really think the management at Facebook should give up on
| trying to become a source of truth, because they don't have the
| resources to publish accurate information and doing so is
| ultimately incompatible with their business model.
| the-dude wrote:
| > they don't have the resources to publish accurate information
| and doing so is ultimately incompatible with their business
| model.
|
| Advertisers will demand not be shown alongside info which is
| 'inaccurate'.
| geofft wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Consider that Facebook has entire teams of people dedicated
| to figuring out what behavior is compatible with their
| business model, and they also have more direct data about
| where revenue comes from than any of us here do (at least
| those of us not bound by a Facebook NDA!). There's probably a
| PM whose entire job is just putting together _these reports_
| and they 're getting a Facebook salary for doing so. It's
| definitely possible they're all misguided, but they're a very
| successful company and they've probably considered the
| tradeoffs of investing in these efforts versus not.
|
| Also, consider that e.g. 4chan is making nowhere near as much
| revenue as Facebook, despite also providing a forum for
| people to post things and selling ads next to those posts.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| It's just a game. Someone at Facebook is trying to min/max
| the numbers to get as much money as possible. It's just
| plain to see that one of the consequences of winning this
| dumb game is that they are completely destroying the
| concept of truth with one hand while insisting with the
| other that they are publishing the truth. That's the
| optimal strategy to make the most money, but all the money
| in the world isn't worth destroying trust in information.
| geofft wrote:
| Sure - "stop doing this because, despite being
| profitable, it's bad for society" is an entirely
| reasonable take. (Though perhaps one should figure out
| how to incentivize that action.) "Stop doing this because
| it's not profitable," from an outsider, doesn't make
| sense.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I checked out other "free speech" sites which regularly
| publish misinformation and lies (yet still insist that they
| are publishing the truth) and they still have ads. Breitbart,
| Newsmax. Alex Jones infowars platform primarily exists to
| sell supplements. Even Coast to Coast AM, the ghosts and
| goblins show, still runs ads.
|
| Plus you have to consider that there is big money to be made
| lying to the public. For instance the Koch brothers spend a
| pretty penny funding climate denial.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Advertisers will demand not be shown alongside info which
| is 'inaccurate'.
|
| I find that unlikely: Facebook has an enormous amount of dis-
| and mis-information, and an enormous amount of advertising.
| Have you noticed that Facebook pages with inaccurate
| information lack advertising?
|
| In regard to immediate revenue, advertisers just don't want
| to be embarrassed.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I agree that FB is trying to sweep back the tide, here. But
| they probably think they have to at least pretend to be making
| efforts to sweep back the tide. They don't want to go the way
| of Yelp, where the reviews were not only inaccurate and gamed,
| but so obviously and widely known to be inaccurate and gamed
| that the average internet user avoided them. A pretense of
| authenticity is what they're shooting for.
|
| Now, whether even that is in the long run tenable is an open
| question, but at least they think it might be.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Why is yelp still around?
| kortilla wrote:
| Integration into Apple Maps.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| In the United States, success is typically measured
| quarterly, thus it is pretty easy for someone or a group of
| someones to try and create a very quick sort of growth which
| is simultaneously impressive and unsustainable. Just keep
| pumping the pig until it explodes, then move on to the next
| job. It happens all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if it
| was happening at Facebook too.
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(page generated 2021-06-12 23:02 UTC)