Facebook admits: governments exploited us to spread propaganda by Olivia Solon.
From the post:
Facebook has publicly acknowledged that its platform has been exploited by governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries – including during the presidential elections in the US and France – and pledged to clamp down on such “information operations”.
In a white paper authored by the company’s security team and published on Thursday, the company detailed well-funded and subtle techniques used by nations and other organizations to spread misleading information and falsehoods for geopolitical goals. These efforts go well beyond “fake news”, the company said, and include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts that are used to amplify one particular view, sow distrust in political institutions and spread confusion.
“We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people,” said the company.
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It’s a good white paper and you can intuit a lot from it, but leaks on the details of Facebook counter-measures have commercial value.
Careful media advisers will start farming Facebook users now for the US mid-term elections in 2018. One of the “tells” (a behavior that discloses, unintentionally, a player’s intent) of a “fake” account is recent establishment with many similar accounts.
Such accounts need to be managed so that their “identity” fits the statistical average for similar accounts. They should not all suddenly like a particular post or account, for example.
The doctrines of subject identity in topic maps, can be used to avoid subject recognition as well as to insure it. Just the other side of the same coin.