Thanks for digging and piecing together bits of items that have gotten out, while Facebook is still only giving details to the investigations. There was one more item yesterday in the daily beast that I would ad, per a real group, that was not currently active, that had it’s name hijacked and a webpage on facebook that became very active on facebook during the election. In highly inflammatory (pro trump/anti clinton) ways.
Esme’s on it… keep after em’!
Thanks guys ,From last year to the present as I have subscribed to many government sites and and world news .Some of the players not mentioned in the debacle is Disqus,and Yahoo .If your an avid reader of commenter’s to feel the pulse of world events and politics ,You can see an obvious pattern on where and how they operate …One style is a moderate comment followed by a blitzkrieg attack ,(the more racist article the better).They come in clusters of 2- 9 at a time using programs to comment on multiple pages (See Firefox extensions). On foreign sites in the Baltic’s and Eastern Europe the same comments ,slight difference in semantics they appear a few hours to a day or so earlier .The heaviest traffic is from Macedonia,and Hungary .Several excellent articles published on this at ein newsdesk…Amazing that the US government is dragging it’s feet,and trying in dark alleys to kill net neutrality .The 100,000 comment hack at the FCC is a scary example
Sick of too many Russian trolls on Facebook? Go with Fakeblock. Much more entertaining…and it’s got a good beat.
How were these ads targeted?
People keep pointing at Cambridge Analytica. Not entirely true. It was also the RNC’s contractor Deep Root Analytics.
The RNC Files: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak
In what is the largest known data exposure of its kind, UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Team can now confirm that a misconfigured database containing the sensitive personal details of over 198 million American voters was left exposed to the internet by a firm working on behalf of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in their efforts to elect Donald Trump. The data, which was stored in a publicly accessible cloud server owned by Republican data firm Deep Root Analytics, included 1.1 terabytes of entirely unsecured personal information compiled by DRA and at least two other Republican contractors, TargetPoint Consulting, Inc. and Data Trust. In total, the personal information of potentially near all of America’s 200 million registered voters was exposed, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as data described as “modeled” voter ethnicities and religions.
Personally, I don’t think the ads were what really mattered. The real influence came from the non-stop barrage of comments from concerned “friends” (and friends of friends) about Hillary’s corruption, her war mongering, her imminent indictment, etc…
It was impossible to know at the time who was a misinformed true believer and who was just a troll deliberately spreading the misinformation either. The fact was that anti-Hillary propaganda was saturating all avenues of social media. Facebook, twitter, Quora, Reddit… all of them were inundated daily with this vomit.
People automatically tune out ads most of the time but these concerned commentaries from (seemingly) ordinary people were far more insidious and effective. It gave the impression that most people on the left really had good reasons to not trust Hillary. I think that’s the real story of how social media was weaponized against us.
Do you understand this was the main goal of the troll army? The troll army could not possibly saturate social media singlehandedly. They relied on targeted groups to multiply their propaganda.
I recall reading how the troll farms first started experimenting to see if this method would work. Someone traced early fake news attempts, they’d target small communities with fake celebrity news like “Jennifer Lopez Moving from LA to Bentonville, Arkansas” and they’d see if Bentonville Facebook users would take the bait and carry the message for them. This was how the Russians learned to microtarget Facebook groups. With the leak of microtargeting data from Deep Root Analytics and collaboration by Cambridge Analytica, the Russians were able to microtarget specific voting precincts that could swing an election. Remember that Trump only won his electoral college majority by a few thousand votes in states with a few swing precincts. They only needed to swing a few people to change a purple precinct to red if they knew where to target swing voters.
And it is not clear to me that there is a single member of the Senate Intelligence Committee with sufficient grasp of what Facebook is and how it works to understand the point you’re making.
The ads are tangential. The real question is how many Facebook accounts did the Russian troll farms set up, who they friended, who friended and where they commented and where those people lived. And, of course, how they knew to target their pages.
(Of course, it’s possible that they do understand this but are using MSM shiny object fixation it to sidetrack what they should actually be investigating.)
It’s also clear that Disqus was lousy with Russian trolls and that they didn’t totally ignore places like TPM (indeed, investing considerable time in building identity and comment history), but they didn’t need any U.S. help to do that.
The one thing we do know is that Facebook’s lack of transparency, and it’s obsession with minimizing the PR damage, the invitation to government scrutiny by continually retreating to dogmatic “Facebook’s business model is an inherent good!” platitudes is infuriating. By this point, there should be a detailed analysis of the accounts used by the Russians, the kind of content they pushed by postings on their pages and comments on other people’s pages and the social networking of those accounts. That’s what is critical, not this lousy 100K’s worth of ads people probably mind-blocked.
If that’s been done and is being kept under wraps at Mueller’s request, fine. But I suspect that Facebook’s primary objective is, at all costs, preventing exactly that kind of analysis from being done and resisting or deflecting all efforts to do it. And that’s because that kind of analysis represents a real threat to the business model. If they do it for Mueller, or give them the kind of access they’d need to have a contractor do it, they’ll have to do it again and again. For the CIA tracking ISIS infulence campaigns and Russian interference in the Baltics or Ukraine. For European internal security agencies galore tracking Russian and Islamic radical influence. And those analyses are inevitably going to lead to government intervention and regulation in their business, particularly in Europe where the fact that Facebook is huge and American will make it all the more likely. And that regulation will lead to a blandification of content and the need to hire a shitton of new people to monitor content which, in turn, will turn off and turn away more and more users.
And, to acknowledge a rather less self-serving motivation it won’t just be the western democracies demanding this kind of information. If they do it for us, Russia and China and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuala, Egypt and Israel–all of them will demand it too.
You can see how, in the minds of Zuckerburg and the rest of his senior people, this thing could look like an existential threat to their business model and the more cooperative they are, the more damage is done and the faster it happens.
It’s ironic that we have FB’s complete surveillance state to thank for any data at all. Except for the belief in the power of big data, there’s not much reason to keep hugely detailed records of every ad once it’s been shown and paid for…
I would love to see the microtargeting labels for these ads.
Yes, in fact that was one of my main points. It’s the reason the campaign was so effective and insidious.
I think all of that is being investigated. The media is running with the ad purchase story right now probably because it’s so blatant and undeniable. $100,000 of political ads bought by the Russians in rubles? It’s impossible for even Facebook to deny that there’s something going on there.
Well that wasn’t terribly clear to me. This is sort of a variant of Poe’s Law, let me make it a corollary:
“Fake-extremist trolls are indistinguishable from real extremists. That is their sole intent.”
This may be overly simplistic, but I think the most fundamental problem is that anybody in their right mind would go to FB for “news” in the first place, or would automatically trust anything they read there, or on the internet in general.
We’re a nation of guileless rubes, endlessly taken in by patent medicine quacks, pigeon drops, Nigerian princes, and real estate scammers. Why? Because millions of us are desperate to believe in that one thing that will make us rich, make us happy, give us five-hour erections, and defeat the terrorists with one weird trick.
Agreed, Dave. Plus, I think it’s just so much easier to explain ad buying vs Russian bots and troll farms. And we know the media typically chooses easy.
That’s the American Story conservatives (politicians and their media cohorts) have sold this country since at least Ronald Reagan, that the lone cowboy can stroll in, heel spurs a-clankin’ to announce his arrival, and single-handidly succeed in any given situation. It’s also the complete opposite of what liberal communities have pushed, that it takes a union or a village to succeed. We’ve been force fed this “lone hero” story for decades to the point it’s what most people believe is the American success story, that people do this on their own. Obama was derided when he told business owners they didn’t build that business on their own, and he was telling the TRUTH, until everyone understands what Obama was saying, very little will change in this country.
It is a little interesting that no one is talking about the NSA in all of this discussion. One would think that something of this nature (structure, contents, and origins of cyber war, etc.) would be in their wheelhouse. It is tough to believe that their efforts are solely limited to hacking and signals interception (albeit, huge fields in themselves).
There’s another question lurking here, and that’s whether Stein and Sanders knew that unidentified parties were purchasing ads in favor of their candidacies. And whether they had any obligation to determine who was doing this and to do anything about it. Election law lawyers, let’s hear from you.
mueller is running a super-tight ship. i bet he scares the shit out of potential leakers. i also think zuck doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of a lot of the public and the MSM. this same shit is happening in europe. when this all shakes out, some group retaliation is needed.