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| December 6 · Issue #41 · View online |
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Here’s a report from the University of Oxford about what the authors call “computational propaganda”: “automated social media bots, organized networks of fake online identities, and coordinated trolling campaigns that have become increasingly prevalent and are rapidly being established as an important aspect of contemporary digital politics.” The authors are interested in Poland, which was formerly considered a postwar democratic success story and has lately lurched rightward. This has happened during a time when most of the population has finally gotten online — and, as you might expect, gotten on Facebook. This has led to the creation of a new Polish industry devoted to the creation of fake online citizens who can be deployed in the service of misinformation Forgive the long excerpt, but this is wild. Over the past ten years, his firm (which we’ll refer to here as “The Firm”) created more than 40 thousand unique identities, each with multiple accounts on various social media platforms and portals, a unique IP address, and even its own personality, forming a universe of several hundred thousand specific fake accounts that have been used in Polish politics and multiple elections (Daedalus, personal correspondence, 14/01/17). The process begins with a client: a company in the private sector (pharmaceuticals, natural resources), or a political party/campaign. A strategic objective is outlined and a contract that includes “word of mouth” or “guerrilla” marketing services is written up. An employee of The Firm then starts by creating an email address via a large provider (such as Gmail). Using this email and an invented name, they create accounts on multiple platforms and portals. A suitable profile photo is found via an image search and modified in Photoshop so that it will not appear in a Google image search, and the employee begins posting on various platforms and building a comment history. Each employee manages up to 15 identities at a time, with each having a coherent writing style, interests, and personality. They use a modified VPN to spoof IP addresses so that their accounts will have a series of associated addresses, allowing them to post from multiple locations in a predictable way (as would befit a normal user using a mobile phone and travelling around a city, or using their laptop from home/work/elsewhere). When these accounts are ready to begin posting on comment sections and Facebook groups or pages, the employee uses only unique content (each account never copies or repopulates posts) as to make it unsearchable and difficult to link to other accounts. All steps are taken so that these accounts are very difficult (in the words of the research subject, “completely impossible”) to conclusively identify as fake. This all provides a level of deniability for the client, who may not even know exactly (and probably does not want to know) what techniques are being used by their marketing consultants. Furthermore, this is a low risk endeavor: while these processes violate the terms of service for platforms, they exist in a legal grey area. If a firm takes the basic precautions described above, it is highly unlikely that this activity will ever be exposed, and if it is, it is not clear how either the firm or their clients would legally be held accountable. It’s a vexing problem. Inauthentic accounts backed by motivated human beings, often with the support of the state, may be nimble enough to evade detection of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And while Facebook in particular invests in removing these accounts, the cat-and-mouse is growing ever more sophisticated. A question I had reading this study was the extent to which they are already being used in America. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on as we head into 2018.
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Conservative Weekly Standard to aid in Facebook fact-checks, prompting outcry
Welcome Weekly Standard to Facebook’s phalanx of fact-checkers! Calling the magazine a “serial misinformer”, Media Matters cited the Weekly Standard’s role in pushing false and misleading claims about Obamacare, Hillary Clinton and other political stories. In recent years, the magazine also faced backlash for giving a platform to a contrarian climate scientist and for sending an anti-gay marketing email warning of the “homosexual lobby” and its “perverted vision for a homosexual America”. Recently, the Weekly Standard has also repeatedly attacked the fact-checkers who are already working with Facebook. The Standard’s editor is here to reassure us: Hayes praised Facebook for working with rightwing journalists: “I think it’s a good move for [Facebook] to partner with conservative outlets that do real reporting and emphasize facts. Our fact-checking isn’t going to seek conservative facts because we don’t believe there are ‘conservative facts’. Facts are facts.”
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Entering the Facebook ecosystem at age 6
NPR’s Marketplace tries to calm us all down about Messenger Kids: Wood: I mean, this is, to some extent, Facebook saying, please don’t go to Snap or musical.ly or any of the other platforms that kids might be exploring right now. Lenhart: It is. But on the other hand, this is something where kids are fickle, right? Adolescents regularly move from platform to platform, following their own network of friends and interests. So you can set yourself up to have a whole cohort of kids who are comfortable on your platform, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll retain them into adolescence.
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Facebook’s Algorithm Hijacked This $8 Billion Company to Sell Cat Blindfolds
The online advertising market is decadent and depraved: Wish currently has over 170 million unique products for sale, with over 9 million new products uploaded every week. When it made the transition to dynamic Facebook ads it gave Facebook access to every last one of them. Theoretically, Facebook should have plucked out shoes on Wish and served them to shoe lovers, or pushed perfume on perfume lovers. But since Wish’s catalog is so massive and Facebook’s audience is so broad, some strange products bubbled their way to the surface. Unlike the shoe or perfume ads, curious users actually clicked Wish’s ads for things like plastic nostril holders or profane cuff links. According to Wish, Facebook registered this click as a positive metric and, in turn, showed the bizarre ads to more users, who were shocked, clicked and, in rare cases, actually bought them.
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Inside Oracle’s cloak-and-dagger political war with Google
Behind the scenes of every public battle there’s a black-ops public-relations firm planting stories about the opposition. Here’s a great Tony Romm piece on the practice, which is both common and too little discussed.
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Glassdoor: Facebook is consistently the best tech company to work for in the U.S.
People like working at Facebook: Career website Glassdoor today released its 10th annual Employees’ Choice Awards, a list of the 100 best companies to work for in the coming year. Facebook was crowned as not just the number one tech company to work for in 2018, but the best company to work for, period. This isn’t the first time Facebook has topped the list. It was the top tech company in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017, and now 2018. Five out of 10 is no coincidence: If you’re a Facebook employee, you can safely say your employer is the best there is in tech.
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HQ Trivia is raising money in a round that could value its company at $100M
Quiz Daddy and co. are about to get some new money with which to purchase Sweetgreen and cash prizes for their players: Multiple VC sources we spoke with said the company is seeking a post-money valuation somewhere in the $80 million to $100 million range, though that doesn’t necessarily mean it will get it. It’s unclear how much money HQ will raise, though these same sources believe it could be somewhere between $15 million and $20 million.
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The forthcoming Vine sequel has a name and a logo: V2
Cute, from Dom Hofmann, who got more than 115,000 retweets on this one one by press time! Retweets ain’t downloads, but they’re a start.
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News Corp CEO: "YouTube Is a Toxic Waste Dump"
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson has some self-serving things to say about the big tech platforms — though sadly, the most interesting quote here is in the headline. These media acquisition and ownership laws, he said, “were clearly crafted long before the age of Facebook and Google,” two companies that dominate the digital advertising world. (News Corp has announced a new digital advertising platform intended to compete with these two companies.)
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I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor
Everyone loves this story about the TripAdvisor scammer who took his scam way too far: Once upon a time, long before I began selling my face by the acre for features on VICE dot com, I worked other jobs. There was one in particular that really had an impact on me: writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor. Restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I’d write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there. Over time, I became obsessed with monitoring the ratings of these businesses. Their fortunes would genuinely turn, and I was the catalyst. Suddenly, inspiration strikes: And then, one day, sitting in the shed I live in, I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation, and society’s willingness to believe absolute bullshit, maybe a fake restaurant is possible? Maybe it’s exactly the kind of place that could be a hit? Friends: this is Interface territory. The misinformation works, and everything goes topsy-turvy. First, companies start using the estimated location of The Shed on Google Maps to get their free samples to me. Then people who want to work at The Shed get in touch, in significant numbers. Then I get an email from the council, which wants to relocate us to a site in Bromley they’re developing. Then an Australian production company gets in touch, saying they want to exhibit us across the world in an aircraft company’s inflight videos. Read and enjoy.
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Questions? Comments? Fake TripAdvisor reviews? casey@theverge.com
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