from Hacker News

Facebook takes down thousands of posts, obscuring Russian disinformation

by bentaber on 10/12/17, 8:59 PM with 7 comments

• by ilaksh on 10/13/17, 7:49 AM

  The problem is that they are portraying things as if propaganda is something that only Russians or some "other" group uses, and that there is somehow an authority that knows what is the "real" truth, which we must count on to save us from the fake news -- by removing it.

  In other words, they are trying to make censorship something that only happens to fake information. So by censoring something, they automatically can qualify it as false.

  This is the main problem. Not Russia or some other country's propaganda. It is the domestic propaganda, and censorship, which is most harmful.

  I know most people do not believe that their country (especially in the US) has propaganda, but unfortunately, there is quite a lot of propaganda in normal news outlets here.

  Do some googling for things like 'Edward Bernays' or 'The Fourth Estate' before you dismiss this. Also, after your research, you may come to the conclusion that this has only happened at some distant point in the past, and has stopped in 'modern' times. Which would be a break from the entire history of civilization.. so just maybe its still going on, and you are in denial.

• by hourislate on 10/13/17, 1:39 AM

  Mark Zuckerburg for whatever reason has always supported Russian disinformation in the past.

  Saw this on reddit today...

  http://radiolemberg.com/ua-articles/ua-allarticles/weaponizi...

  > At the same time Russian information warriors were posting voluminous fake news, such as the infamous “crucified boy” false report that was first put out by Russian propaganda TV on 12 July 2014. Using huge numbers of “sock puppet” accounts, the Russians amplified fake news to put it at the top of “most viewed right now” lists on social media and news aggregators. The Russian troll army also worked in large numbers to suppress or ban pro-Ukrainian accounts. En masse, they would report to Facebook any posting critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as being either “nudity/pornography” or “hate speech” against an identifiable group. It turns out the category of the complaint didn’t matter, as the algorithm used by Facebook responded to the volume of complaints, not the substance of them. Ukrainian accounts accurately reporting the war were punished with banishment, and Russian accounts spreading fake news were rewarded with prominence.

• by pasbesoin on 10/13/17, 5:06 AM

  The Internet is not a library. It's not an archive. You have no guarantee of content's continued existence -- less so that with respect to old piles of newspaper in your garage.

  This concerns me. Absent ensured storage and access (that can't e.g. be retroactively 404-ed via robots.txt), our very history is at risk.

  And with walled gardens like Facebook taking over more and more traffic, delivery, viewership... We may never know what happened. Even absent a deliberate, concerted plan to eliminate the evidence.

  Such privacy is fine, for private, personal conversations. Is it, for a paid advertising campaign reaching millions?

• by Nomentatus on 10/13/17, 5:15 AM

  Title false, the posts and shares had already been taken down; but cached copies were still available, by error of omission, to its analysis tool. That part of the cache has now been removed.

  Back when I was employed in a newspaper office, you were given mere seconds or maybe a couple of minutes to title articles; it wasn't expected that you read the whole article first, there wasn't time. Most staff were involved in the advertising department, news was the filler, the afterthought. Could be that hasn't changed much.

• by FellowTraveler on 10/15/17, 9:19 PM

  They should publicly post all of these "Russian propaganda" items in a single place, so we can all see them.