Tag: disinformation

Trolling and disinformation is actively keeping us from fighting climate change

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As inhabitants of the planet Earth, we desperately need to address climate change in order to ensure the health of our global ecosystem. The first step just might be dealing with the toxic waste getting dumped into our social media feeds. According to a new study published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in the journal Ambio, disinformation and trolling across social platforms is making the effort to educate the public about the very real threats of climate change even more difficult.

The paper, which will be presented as part of the first-ever Nobel Prize Summitnext month, found that the same conditions of social media that have poisoned discourse and sowed doubt about democratic institutions and elections has similarly eroded trust in science. “Isolationism stimulated by social media-boosted discontent may hamper global cooperation needed to curb global warming, biodiversity loss, wealth concentration, and other trends,” the researchers wrote. They warn that “targeted attacks” on social media, including trolling campaigns, bot farms, and algorithm-generated content can all be used to alter and influence human behavior.

This type of disinformation is dangerous because of how quickly it can spread, entirely unchecked and unregulated. Systems designed to catch misinformation, like the types of fact-checks applied by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, often don’t act fast enough to stop the spread of misinformation. Research has found that intervening early is essential to stopping bad information before it can gain traction. Continue reading.

Facebook’s Decisions Were ‘Setbacks for Civil Rights,’ Audit Finds

New York Times logoAn independent audit faulted the social network for allowing hate speech and disinformation to thrive — potentially posing a threat to the November elections.

SAN FRANCISCO — Auditors handpicked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”

The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: That it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.

Now Facebook has to decide whether its approach to hateful speech and noxious content — which was to leave it alone in the name of free expression — remains tenable. And that decision puts pressure on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who has repeatedly said that his company was not an arbiter of truth and that it would not police politicians’ posts. Continue reading.

Sprawling Iranian influence operation globalizes tech’s war on disinformation

The following article by Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Tony Romm and Ellen Nakashima was posted on the Washington Post website August 21, 2018:

Credit: Matt Rourke, AP

Iran was behind a sprawling disinformation operation on Facebook that targeted hundreds of thousands of people around the world, the social media company said Tuesday night, underscoring Silicon Valley’s increasingly global war on disinformation.

The Iranian effort dated to 2011 and had ties to state media operations in that country, Facebook said, involving hundreds of accounts on both Facebook and its sister site, Instagram. The effort also spread to Twitter and YouTube, with accounts that both companies said they also removed. The fake Iranian accounts bought ads on Facebook and used it to organize events.

Facebook also deleted some unrelated fake accounts originating in Russia, which has been the main focus of reporting on disinformation operations targeting the United States. Tuesday night’s revelations were unusual, because the disinformation targeted people in many countries — in the Middle East and Latin America, as well as Britain and the United States, Facebook said — and involved a nation-state actor other than Russia.

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