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posted by janrinok on Friday February 23 2018, @03:38PM   Printer-friendly

The Columbia Journalism Review has some analysis of the problem of disinformation and propaganda being actively spread over social control media. As the situation is studied more, albeit belatedly, the nature of social control's business model gets more daylight.

"That fundamental goal is to get the user to stay as long as possible," Ghosh said in an interview. "Their motivations are different—for platforms, it is to maximize ad space, to collect more information about the individual, and to rake in more dollars; and for the disinformation operator, the motive is the political persuasion of the individual to make a certain decision. But until we change that alignment, we are not going to solve the problem of disinformation on these platforms."

After Mueller released his indictments, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted on Twitter that the indictment "shows [Russia] used social media just like any other advertiser/influencer. They used the platforms as they were designed to be used."

The phrase surveillance capitalism gets more traction as it becomes acknowledged that while social control media do not actively spread disinformation and propaganda it is a side effect of collecting as much personal information as legally (and somtimes illegally) allowed. That information is aggregated from multiple sources both internal and external to social control media itself. As a result it is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between disinformation and authentic political speech.

Automated attacks make that differentiation that much harder. Faecebook gets the most attention, but the others, including YouTube work the same way and can thus be manipulated just as easily. (Ed: Speaking of YouTube, to single out one topic as an example, as seen recently with FCC comments on Net Neutrality, only 17%of the comments the FCC received were legitimate with the rest filled in by clumsy bots.)

Source : Fake news is part of a bigger problem: automated propaganda


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Friday February 23 2018, @05:03PM (1 child)

    by donkeyhotay (2540) on Friday February 23 2018, @05:03PM (#642461)

    It's kind of what I've been thinking for awhile now. These networks were designed to do things like sell more Coke, which seems pretty benign. But passing along the idea that you should drink more Coke is no different than passing along the idea that you should do something else, like vote a certain way. So, why is there any surprise when they are used this way?

    When Obama won in 2008, much was made about how his team savvily used social media to spread his message and sway voters. Looks like there were some people taking note of that.

    In 2008, most of the people who were on social media were under 30. However, very quickly those demographics started to change as more middle-aged and older people got on social media. There were people who noted that too.

    So the two ideas were put together: create outlandish stories that sound true that will go viral with people over 30 and, voila! voters get swayed.

    It's shrewd, it's clever, depending on who you are it might be brilliant or frustrating, but is it criminal? Is it really that different from swaying people to drink more Coke?

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Friday February 23 2018, @06:37PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 23 2018, @06:37PM (#642536) Journal

    For a citizen of the US to do that is unethical, but not criminal. But taking money from a foreign national or nation to do the same thing is, I believe, illegal.

    I'm no lawyer, and there may well be loopholes, but that's my understanding of the basics of the law.
    OTOH, there would be nothing baring a foreign company hosted on a foreign site from doing the exact same thing. It might not even be quite as unethical, though I'd need to think rather hard about that one.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.