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Facebook Pledges To Crack Down on Government-led Misinformation Campaigns
Facebook is pressing its enforcement against what it calls "information operations" -- bad actors who use the platform to spread fake news and false propaganda. From a report:
The company, which published a report on the subject today, defines these operations as government-led campaigns -- or those from organized "non-state actors" -- to promote lies, sow confusion and chaos among opposing political groups, and destabilize movements in other countries. The goal of these operations, the report says, is to manipulate public opinion and serve geopolitical ends. The actions go beyond the posting of fake news stories. The 13-page report specifies that fake news can be motivated by a number of incentives, but that it becomes part of a larger information operation when its coupled with other tactics and end goals. Facebook says these include friend requests sent under false names to glean more information about the personal networks of spying targets and hacking targets, the boosting of false or misleading stories through mass "liking" campaigns, and the creation propaganda groups. The company defines these actions as "targeted data collection," "false amplification," and "content creation." Facebook plans to target these accounts by monitoring for suspicious activity, like bursts of automated actions on the site, to enact mass banning of accounts. |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| Robert Irvine |
When you first get into television it is a big deal, then you realize you are no better than anyone else, we just have a platform to use, to help other people. I use that platform for the work I do in the military, the work I do with cancer because I was fortunate enough to get that platform. |
| Fredrik Bajer |
Nevertheless, this type of propaganda has a special value, for it serves to convince those who sign the appeal, of the necessity for carrying on propaganda; so a corps of propagandists, if I may use the term, is thus trained. |
| Edward Abbey |
That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding. |
| Steve Martin |
Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is. |
| Anne Campbell |
There is still a lot of misinformation being spread about higher education funding arrangements under the new Act. The students page on my website sets out the main points in the Act. |
| Taissa Farmiga |
If you don't have a Facebook, like, you're nobody. There's all of these sort of requirements now, and if you don't have all of these things - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - you're made fun of. And Twitter for celebrities... everything is just getting so personal. Pictures of yourself, of what you're eating for breakfast. |
| Fredrik Bajer |
To read the report of a discussion in which arguments for and against are presented, in which a subject has been covered from different points of view, with new ideas advanced - this is far more instructive than to read a brief account of the resolution passed on the matter. |
| Sai Baba |
Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world. |
| Thomas Sowell |
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly. |
| Frederick Douglass |
America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. |
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Lawsuit Reveals How Facebook Profited Off Confused Children: Report
Documents outlining how Facebook profited off children are expected to be made public soon, according to Reveal News of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), who requested the documents. From a report:
In a report about the trove of previously-sealed documents, Reveal News explains that Facebook has previously faced lawsuits for failing to refund charges made by children playing games on Facebook. According to Reveal, the children did not know that their parent's credit card was stored on the platform when they cli...
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CIA, FBI launch manhunt for leaker who gave top-secret documents to WikiLeaks
Last Updated Apr 20, 2017 1:38 PM EDT
WASHINGTON -- CBS News has learned that a manhunt is underway for a traitor inside the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA and FBI are conducting a joint investigation into one of the worst security breaches in CIA history, which exposed thousands of top-secret documents that de...
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How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met
"I deleted Facebook after it recommended as People You May Know a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email," an attorney told Gizmodo. Kashmir Hill, a reporter at the news outlet, who recently documented how Facebook figured out a connection between her and a family member she did not know existed, shares several more instances others have reported and explains how Facebook gathers information. She reports:
Behind the Facebook profile you've built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile,...
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Hackers Claim They Possess Details of 120 Million Facebook Accounts, Publish Private Messages From 81,000 of Them (bbc.com)
Hackers appear to have compromised and published private messages from at least 81,000 Facebook users' accounts. The perpetrators told the BBC Russian Service that they had details from a total of 120 million accounts, which they were attempting to sell, although there are reasons to be sceptical about that figure. Facebook said its security had not been compromised. And the data had probably been obtained through malicious browser extensions.
Facebook added it had tak...
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Of course, you can’t stick electrodes on every person watching TV and browsing Facebook. But you don’t need to. The results from experiments on small neuro-focus groups can be used to influence voters who aren’t being sampled themselves. If, for example, biodata reveals that liberal women over 50 are fearful when they see an ad about illegal immigration, campaigns that want to stoke such fear can broadcast that same message to millions of people with similar demographic and social profiles.
This post is a comment.
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1 In 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked To Commit Scientific Fraud (acsh.org)
As the saying goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." We know that's true because statisticians themselves just said so. From a report:
A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often ask statisticians to make "inappropriate requests." And by "inappropriate," the authors aren't referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they're referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud....
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Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals
In the so-called "post-truth era," science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? From a report:
Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences. In the course of the investigation, which was chronicled in the documentary "Inside the Fake Science Factory," the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading in...
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Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information
Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by targeting him in a way Facebook had previously told me wouldn't work. I directed the ad to display to a Facebook account connected to the landline number for Alan Mislove's office, a number Mislove has never provided to Facebook. He saw the ad within hours.
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I had a dream that the spiral staircase in the BBB was in the middle of that giant open space instead of the corner and that the University of Michigan would hire well known actors to stand at the bottom of various staircases in the building and make fun of students that walk by.
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Researcher Turns HDD Into Rudimentary Microphone
Speaking at a security conference, researcher Alfredo Ortega has revealed that you can use your hard disk drive (HDD) as a rudimentary microphone to pick up nearby sounds. This is possible because of how hard drives are designed to work. Sounds or nearby vibrations are nothing more than mechanical waves that cause HDD platters to vibrate. By design, a hard drive cannot read or write information to an HDD platter that moves under vibrations, so the hard drive must wait for the oscillation to stop before carrying out any actions. Because modern operating systems come with utilities that measure HDD operations up to nanosecond accuracy, Ortega realized that he could use these tools to measure delays in HDD operations. The longer the delay, t...
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