Automated propaganda
Facebook. Russia. Ad buys. Bot accounts. Business Insider:
Facebook on Wednesday said it has found evidence that fake accounts “likely operated out of Russia” bought thousands of ads during the US presidential election that were designed to amplify divisive political messages.
Facebook said the ads were part of elaborate “information operations” in which “organized actors,” including governments, use social media to deceive the public and distort political sentiment.
The social network discovered roughly $100,000 in ad buys between June 2015 and May 2017 “associated with roughly 3,000 ads” and connected to nearly 500 affiliated fake accounts.
“Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia,” Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos wrote in a post published on Facebook’s company blog, which also noted that the company has shared its findings with US authorities investigating Russia’s interference in the election.
The “vast majority” of ads related to the fake Russian accounts didn’t target a political candidate and instead focused on “amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum,” according to Stamos.
Meaning…what, Breitbart types on the one hand and Black bloc types on the other? Probably something like that.
Wednesday’s announcement by Facebook, titled “An update on Information Operations on Facebook,” represents a sharp turnaround from the company’s previous remarks on its role in the spread of fake news during the election.
For example, Facebook said in July that it had found “no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with the election.”
The social network was widely criticized in the wake of the election for its role in the proliferation of so-called fake news, which many believe helped Donald Trump win the election. CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially called that notion “pretty crazy,” but Facebook has since made significant strides to eradicate fake news stories from its platform.
In a research published earlier this year, Facebook detailed its attempts to thwart organized “information operations” that are increasingly used to sway political leanings through the spread of fake news and propaganda on its platform.
You know, when you think about it, Trump is kind of a bot. He doesn’t really give a shit about anything except himself; all his blathering is just for effect, just in aid of winning. He doesn’t care what or how he wins as long as he wins. Very bot.
Re Trump as a bot: I find this very insightful.
I get on and off epistemology like it’s some kinda anxiety or something, I know, but: Trump, I figure, represents a very peculiar extreme, in that regard. We have people in the world who believe they can know by various ‘transcendent’ means, against others regarding those entirely as ways to smuggle in assumptions _useful_ to persons or institutions making such claims, and arguing that, in contrary, somewhere at the end of the chain of inferences and referenes there must be something empirical. And within this, you find varying degrees of guardedness about what you’ll allow as evidence, _through_ such chains to the empirical…
Trump, I figure he’s really hardly anywhere _on_ this spectrum, at least insofar as he spends like 99 percent of his life in a mode in which these aren’t even concerns. He doesn’t think about what is true. He thinks only: ‘what can I say that will get me what I want’. Outside using them for such practical, day to day considerations as determining where, physically, is his smartphone, he’s probably about as divorced from his actual senses and deductive and inductive faculties as anyone you’re likely to meet.
What’s frightening, here, is: how powerful modern networking technologies have proven to be at projecting the power of people like him and those who paid for those bots, who live on deception. It’s odd… There have been various bits of speculative fiction over decades who’ve imagined human civilization becoming dangerously detached from reality through various technological means that ultimately proved toxic in this regard, halllucinogens through virtual reality… And how authoritarians and demagogues could manipulate a population through controlling their media is a well-established theme…
Still, and it might just be that I’m living in it, but right now I have to say the reality feels a few steps more horrific than anything anyone imagined. It’s not that you _can’t_ know the truth, or that no one does. But confusion raining in, lies duplicated and disseminated at close enough to the speed of light and copied and pasted and spreading at rates that put mere biological plagues to shame, it seems to make this irrelevant. And cold comfort that you can work out what happened half a year later, if someone can spread nonsense about the basement of a pizza parlour, and gain charge of a nuclear arsenal, a vast economy, and potential to gut what remains of centuries old democratic institutions.
I have a faint hope, still, that it’s just the chaos following rapid change, the wild west left behind this rapid expansion of capabilities, our social structures not yet evolved to manage it. But when you’re on the crest of the wave, it’s so hard to know.