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US Uncut reports:
Some of the biggest pro-Bernie Sanders groups on Facebook were briefly taken down Monday evening in a targeted attack by Hillary Clinton supporters.
The groups Bernie Sanders Activists, Bernie Believers, BERNIE OR BUST, Bernie Sanders Revolutionaries, Bay Area for Bernie, Bernie Sanders 2016 — Ideas Welcome, Bernie Sanders is my HERO, and Bernie Sanders for President 2016 were all taken down in the attack. The pages in question were reported to be down for about three hours, from 9 p.m. to midnight Monday night.
Collectively, these groups are home to more than a quarter million Bernie Sanders supporters, and some have been in existence for nearly a year, having been launched shortly after the Vermont senator declared his intent to run for president in 2015.
The groups were targeted by online trolls, who posted pornographic images and reported the groups to Facebook admins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:30PM
At what point does this kind of activity become criminal? If "online trolls" targeted business websites and effectively shut them down during the Super Bowl (rendering their very expensive advertising less effective), I suspect they would be calculating damages and suing in civil court.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 27 2016, @12:43PM
and suing in civil court
There probably would also be FBI involvement. If the punishment for committing a crime is getting sued in civil court, then IMHO it's not really a crime no matter what the laws on the book say it is.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 27 2016, @01:03PM
I don't know the details, but I seriously doubt that the coordinated attack was done cleanly, with everybody involved covering their digital tracks or operating out of a non-extradition country.
Fun related movie just came to Netflix: "1971" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOy3RNyWME [youtube.com] (ok ok, a better parallel for this event would be Watergate, but it's amazing how many things "flash back" on a 30-50 year cycle)
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:28PM
a better parallel for this event would be Watergate,
SJWs silencing other opinions online? Sounds more like #Gamergate to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @11:09PM
a better parallel for this event would be Watergate,
SJWs silencing other opinions online? Sounds more like #Gamergate to me.
Shut up, Donnie! You're out of your league!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by snick on Wednesday April 27 2016, @01:56PM
If, as it was reported, this involved the posting of child pornography, then this is unquestionably criminal.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:58PM
I think it was actually the mass false reporting of child pornography, in other words 3000 people telling Facebook that the pro-Sanders groups were passing around kiddie porn until either: (A) an automated system tripped and assumed that the accusations were true, or (B) a human moderator who wasn't paying close attention (or just hates Bernie Sanders) just blocked the group. In other words, no actual kiddie porn involved, more like the thoroughly dangerous prank of "SWATing" innocent people.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @04:12PM
Similar crap happened happened to a Facebook group a friend started for a certain fandom in anime. She had made me an admin in case something happened to her status as admin, so I got to see it go down.
We know who was behind it, too. Let's call him Mr. Pink. I get to be Mr. Black (!). The friend is Ms. Green. So Mr. Pink sends Mr. Orange and Ms. Blond into the group. Mr. Orange starts posting pornography (in this case, hentai). Mr. Tan, who's been in the group since Ms. Green started it a few weeks back, begins flagging these images. Ok, that's all well and good. We had every intention of following MyFace's terms of service to the letter. (When the incident started, I reviewed them to make sure I understood what was acceptable even in a closed group that was clearly for a mature audience and what wasn't.)
So, we throw Mr. Orange out, but now our group is on Failbook's radar. Ms. Blond begins posting a series of increasingly risky pictures. I give Ms. Blond a stern warning about f4c3:b00c's terms of service. Mr. Tan flags one of her more risque posts, and it gets deleted. So, we throw Ms. Blond out (amid cries of "Get her out of here! Get her out of here! Build a wall!").
Problem solved, right? Well, this is the clever part. Now, Mr. Tan begins reporting posts that in no way, shape, or form possibly violate the terms of service. Facebook promptly takes them all down. Many members, including Ms. Green, need to click through some kind of terms-of-service education to continue using their accounts. Some accounts get suspended for multiple days over this. Finally, we figure out that it was Mr. Tan and throw him out.
There was more drama when Mr. Pink finally went on the offensive, but that's not really relevant here. The group is still there, but what happened was devastating to its membership.
I guess the only other thing I wanted to add is that we moved to Discord [discordapp.com], which Ms. Green was able to get set up on our own cloud and running. So, the group effectively moved to our cloud and the Failface group really only exists as a pointer to our private Discord server in the clouds. Ms. Green said it was essentially an IRC and XMPP replacement, even with XMPP's capability to have a distributed identity. (I quizzed her a little on items I like XMPP for, and it seems to be what XMPP could have/should have been. I just haven't looked at personally it in detail yet.)
I suppose the only problem that does not solve is that MyFace is where people are at. If one wants to reach out to people, one has to be where they are. Perhaps these politically active groups should consider seriously using Failbook only as an outreach tool, and use something like IRC or Discord that one can host in one's own cloud as the tool for members to organize actions/protests/etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @04:35PM
Mr. Black here. Addendum: I did some poking around, and it looks like Discord itself is closed source. I'll check with Ms. Green when I get home, but it looks like there's an active community out there creating open source implementations of a Discord server. Assuming I didn't misunderstand her, that must be what she installed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @05:51PM
five tons of flax