DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus "I Have Blood on My Hands": A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:


It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.


In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.


Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”


In Feb. 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that he’d identified Russian inauthentic activity related to a “high-profile US political figure.” Facebook had failed to identify the activity and scrambled to react before the researcher briefed Congress the next day. Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.


In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the pro-European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. Current president “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said.


Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts — in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.


After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts acting “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.


In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence the” local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

What good comes from Facebook and similar platforms?
When are people going to realize that it is like drugs? Feels good to get that dopamine hit when you get a like, but it comes with a ton of baggage, stemming from the fact that people can be psychologically detached from reality.

Just to recap the pros and cons of Facebook:
Pros:
1. Feels good when someone likes your content
Cons:
1. Increased depression and suicide among teens, particularly girls
2. Algorithms learn to feed us things that upset us, because outrage generates the most clicks, creating a distorted view of reality, and leading to a country that hasn't been so divided since the Civil War
3. Unknown and untraceable sources use the platform to psychologically manipulate your political views.

At this point, I don't think the best thing is to fix Facebook, but to educate people, especially young children, on the issues with trusting social media and allowing too much of your life to get wrapped up in it. as a user, it does not exist for your benefit. You are not the customer, you are the product.

It's still great as long as you don't have "Donkey" friends ruining it. If you do it's your fault for not dropping those so called friends.

Funny. I’ve unfriended pretty much all the trump supporters in my feed. Friend and family alike. A couple that are actually willing to have discussions have been kept. The ones that claim Michelle Obama is a man, or regurgitate Qanon rhetoric, or just simply deny/defend the words that come out of trump’s word hole have been cut loose. My FB world is much more peaceful and filled with much less ignorance.

Older people have a serious problem with confirmation bias as it pertains to FB.

It was really great for a while. It needs to go the way of Myspace. It's time has gone.

Agree'd....It started out as a cool way to keep in contact with friends and relatives over distance, groups or clubs, etc.

“For militia organizations and those encouraging riots, including some who may identify as Antifa, we’ve initially removed over 980 groups, 520 Pages and 160 ads from Facebook. We’ve also restricted over 1,400 hashtags related to these groups and organizations on Instagram,” Facebook reported.

“We already remove content calling for or advocating violence and we ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission. However, we have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior,” Facebook announced in a statement Wednesday.

“So today we are expanding our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy to address organizations and movements that have demonstrated significant risks to public safety but do not meet the rigorous criteria to be designated as a dangerous organization and banned from having any presence on our platform,” the social media company added. “While we will allow people to post content that supports these movements and groups, so long as they do not otherwise violate our content policies, we will restrict their ability to organize on our platform.”

“For militia organizations and those encouraging riots, including some who may identify as Antifa, we’ve initially removed over 980 groups, 520 Pages and 160 ads from Facebook. We’ve also restricted over 1,400 hashtags related to these groups and organizations on Instagram,” Facebook reported.

Under the new policy, Facebook will “impose restrictions to limit the spread of content from Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts.” The company will also “remove Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts where we identify discussions of potential violence, including when they use veiled language and symbols particular to the movement to do so.”

Yeah, they can no longer use facebook groups to organize violent acts. Isn't that sort of the point of facebook taking their crap down?

How tolerant of you.

I'm super cool with that though, and so is ANTIFA. You do realize they are as organized as a neighborhood book club right?