
Removing Bad Actors on Facebook - runesoerensen
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/07/removing-bad-actors-on-facebook/
======
gfodor
It sure would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that these
bad actors are clearly non-partisan, and are simply trying to cause civil
unrest in the US by agitating both sides of the political spectrum.

I'm sure these state actors are thrilled that their plan has gone so well --
not only are their agitations seemingly driving the population apart, but the
wider politicization of the issue itself, fueled by the media, where people
think the bad guys are acting to tip the scales in the favor of the opposition
just plays further into the hands of these actors and does more to fracture
our society than any of these stupid Facebook ad campaigns they're concocting
ever could.

~~~
weiming
Could someone ELI5 why FB is in the business of policing any non-illegal
speech at all? Political, partisan, foreign-made, domestic-made, poor taste
humor, memes, etc. -- why not just keep all of it? It seems like a slippery
slope if they turn to active moderation, and they have everything to lose by
selectively choosing one or other side of some debate.

~~~
themagician
It's not a slippery slope at all. It's Facebook. The slope is made of rough
grit sandpaper.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al. should go on outright banfests. There is no
free speech argument to be made. None. Zero. These aren't government
enterprises and getting banned from these sites for any reason really
shouldn't matter. Facebook already enforces some weird moral code where a
nipple gets you instantly banned, but when it comes to politics somehow it's a
"free speech" argument and they don't want to take sides. It's 100% bullshit.

These companies need to grow up. If people don't like that they have been
banned then they can start an alternative site or, you know, use the
decentralized Internet the way it was designed. If we were talking about ICANN
policing domains that would be a legitimate "slippery slope", but we aren't.

The only thing they really stand to lose by banning blatant conspiracy theory
whack jobs and divisive hate speech is some ad revenue associated with that
stuff, most of which is predatory anyway. Nipples? Not acceptable, banned.
Fair use of media owned by a large company? Copyright strike, banned. Divisive
conspiracy theories that promote hate? Free Speech! Selling literally snake
oil? Free speech!

Americans LOVE to pretend like they are morally superior, but the moral code
and values built into todays companies are completely bonkers. Free speech is
constantly invoked when it doesn't even apply, and it's applied so
inconsistently it doesn't even make sense.

Mark Zuckerberg should travel to Nidavellir and have the Dwarf King Eitri
forge him a ban hammer the likes of which the Facebook has never seen.

~~~
nilkn
I think this is a more nuanced topic than you're giving it credit for. While
free speech does not classically apply to corporate enterprises like Facebook,
as society shifts into the digital world the nature of communication itself
shifts as well.

The 1700s and 1800s version of Twitter was standing in the street square,
handing out pamphlets, and screaming your message. You were protected to say
what you wanted to say via free speech. The 2018 version of that is online
through tools like Twitter. By refusing to acknowledge this, we're actually
experiencing a dramatic practical reduction in free speech rights without ever
technically violating the Constitution.

It's really the ultimate loophole to the ultimate problem. Want to limit free
speech? Simply remold society so that communication patterns across the entire
nation change and become controlled by private corporations. Done.

A particularly dystopian and extreme imagining of this would involve the CEO
of a company like Facebook running for President and controlling speech and
news to an unprecedented extent in favor of his/her candidacy.

~~~
caf
Hold up.

Somewhere between _" handing out pamphlets in Hyde Park"_ and Twitter there
were plenty of _other_ shifts in communication patterns as well. There was a
good 100 years or so where if you wanted to be heard you had to get your
message into a newspaper, and then another 50 years where you also had the
alternatives of TV and radio. All of these were controlled by corporate
interests, and it's not like there was ever a right to have your Letter To The
Editor published.

~~~
nilkn
Pretty interesting point. One thing that pops out to me is scale, not just of
output from these systems but also input into them.

For instance, newspaper, radio, and TV all reached unprecedented numbers of
people, but they didn't bring the same scale to the number of folks
contributing content. To use your Letter to the Editor example, a newspaper
only has so much space, of which only a certain portion is allocated to
displaying such letters. This means the vast majority of the country could
never have their letter published just due to space limitations alone.

Modern social media like Twitter is notably different because it has scaled
the input just as much as the output. Every consumer can now be a producer as
well. The idea that _anyone_ can be a producer is very powerful and is what
makes it feel more like a public space than, say, a newspaper.

------
thecomments
Once again, we are seeing very skilled PR from Facebook.

Problem: Media have painted Facebook as an enabler of propaganda

Reality: There is so much activity on Facebook it is impossible to manage,
even with the best AI tools available. There is likely next to nothing they
can actually do to stop coordinated exploitation by highly skilled and
intelligent state actors.

Solution: Make a hollow yet visible action to take steps in the right
direction and use it as cover to make a public statement of values knowing
that this action is fundamentally inconsequential and that the media and
public will be temporarily fooled since most people don’t understand the real
situation.

~~~
cm2012
They're hiring 10,000 full time moderators this year to help police this
stuff. It's a serious attempt, and the cost of this on their projected
earnings is why the stock crashed.

~~~
casefields
That is not why their stock crashed. You’re spreading even more Facebook PR
propaganda.

~~~
cm2012
I'm pretty sure that's what analysts are saying. The biggest cause was the
drop in earnings and projected earnings due to increasing spend on security.
It's not all the moderators but it's all part of the same push.

~~~
jermaustin1
And on features that have lower potential for monetization, but higher user
engagement like stories.

------
zjaffee
I have to say that this is essentially insignificant, they have only removed
32 pages where there are likely 100s of thousands of pages that are run by
scammers. This is not something that can be solved without requiring every
page that could be verified to have this be done.

Maybe a year back, I was contacted by a fraudster claiming to be affiliated
with the FBI, they had a facebook page ([https://www.facebook.com/pages/FBI-
of-Cambridge/161182553906...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/FBI-of-
Cambridge/161182553906717)), which has still not been taken down even after my
report saying what exactly this was.

Their response was "Thanks for your report - you did the right thing by
letting us know about this. We looked over the Page you reported, and though
it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, we understand
that the Page or something shared on it may still be offensive to you. We want
to help you avoid things you don't want to see on Facebook."

~~~
merpnderp
Going after political subversion groups first seems like a great priority. If
they are just now starting for real, they’re starting in the right place.

~~~
zjaffee
Absolutely, but I think with the case of political subversion, it has a much
less clear practical impact on their every day users. I could easily see an
older person who isn't as technically inclined seeing that this FBI location
has a facebook page and just assuming they are legitimate.

------
rossdavidh
So, I know it's easy to slam FB, and I'm no fan of the company, BUT...this is
a really hard problem. Whether they are just making an attempt for the sake of
looking like they are making an attempt, or actually trying to solve the
problem, the fact is, preventing an institution the size of a major nation
government from manipulating the discourse on their platform, is difficult
bordering on impossible. Like spam, we should try, but like spam, don't expect
it to get solved any time soon.

~~~
antpls
> Like spam, we should try, but like spam, don't expect it to get solved any
> time soon.

I don't understand. To me, spam was solved decades ago by Gmail with a simple
Bayesian filter. I can still read the spam I receive if I look into the spam
folder, so there is no censorship or moderation taking place. I can chose what
is spam or not and it reduces noise in my inbox. Why not do the same on just
everything else?

~~~
pjc50
It's not about you. It's about messages other people are receiving about you.

For example, Alex Jones insisting that the parents of some murdered children
are fakes has resulted in them receiving death threats offline:
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/09/sandy-
hook-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/09/sandy-hook-
conspiracy-theorist-death-threats-prison)

------
j-c-hewitt
Coordinated attempts to influence elections? Are you sure you didn't mean to
write "political campaigns"? Are you also implying that politicians aren't
always authentic and honest when they go on campaign? Heavens to Betsy.

~~~
vuln
Those same people have zero issue with gerrymandering.

~~~
j-c-hewitt
Is that making 10 million fake accounts that have the first name 'gerry'? I
was born yesterday so a lot of these figures of speech are confusing to me.

~~~
machiavelli1024
Google is your friend.

In short: gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing voting district
boundaries to ensure your victory in as many districts as possible.

~~~
ithilglin909
You might consider looking up the word "sarcasm", while you're at it.

~~~
machiavelli1024
Thanks, I've checked it! If I understand it correctly, your comment is a poor
attempt at it.

------
mooneater
If they publish every time they remove "32 Pages and accounts":

1) that will be a lot of blog posts

2) it will take a rather long time to chew through the vast quantities of fake
accounts and bad actors

~~~
lloydde
> In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these Pages,
> the earliest of which was created in March 2017. The latest was created in
> May 2018.

~~~
soared
So 0.1% of Americans were affected by these updates? Seems like fb needs to
take broader strokes.

------
jakelarkin
"inauthentic behavior" is an strange way to put it. propaganda, information
warfare, disinformation, incitement, false flags, fake news ;)

~~~
crispyambulance
Yeah, there exists perfectly good vocabulary words for naming this stuff.

Yet for some reason facebook has chosen to neutralize their language. I wonder
why?

BTW Infowars is still up on facebook, right?

~~~
admax88q
Maybe because inauthentic behaviour accurately describes all those different
words in a single two work statement?

~~~
crispyambulance
"Inauthentic behavior" is not intrinsically offensive by itself and could mean
almost anything or nothing at all.

"Disinformation campaigns to induce people to vote against their own
interests", that's more precise, much better. What? Are we trying to conserve
words here?

------
bengotow
Wait they published an entire blog post and held a press call to announce they
"removed 32 Pages and accounts"? Seriously? 32? It's a start (and I'm glad to
see they're laying down some precedent) but who needs fancy algorithms and
machine learning to find 32 bad accounts? You could find that many by hand by
spending a few hours on Facebook.

------
buchanae
My entire life, I've seen ad campaigns (TV, radio, web, etc) from American
politicians; ads which are projected to a wide audience, and which are neither
shy nor subtle about bashing their opponents.

I'm curious, how would others describe the line between acceptable influence
(American political ads) and unacceptable influence (Russian political ads).

To be clear, I'm not saying there is no line, I'm just curious to read
peoples' description of the difference.

------
samschooler
This statement terrifies me:

> It’s an arms race and we need to constantly improve too. It’s why we’re
> investing heavily in more people and better technology to prevent bad actors
> misusing Facebook

To me this sounds like "We need to make sure who is real, so we need more
information for our AI algorithm; lets gather more data."

------
monksy
> "coordinated inauthentic behavior"

Shouldn't they come out and say propaganda campaigns.

I still have questions about what they deem as acceptable and where they place
hte line.

~~~
andrewla
People can reasonably disagree on what constitutes propaganda, which is why I
like the language that they are using here.

Coordinated inauthentic behavior -- multiple account purporting to be
unrelated acting in tandem. Regardless of where you land on the magnitude of
election interference vs. information warfare, and state actors vs. trolls vs.
hacker collectives, this behavior, using sock puppets to create the impression
that information is coming from multiple independent sources, is worth
exposing.

~~~
monksy
> People can reasonably disagree on what constitutes propaganda, which is why
> I like the language that they are using here.

However in this case they're using alternative language to manipulate the
reader that their judgement is correct.

~~~
andrewla
I'm way more willing to accept this policy than I would a policy, say, of 32
accounts that have been "issuing propaganda" or "spreading lies" or "failing
fact checks" or "interfering with an election" or "saying offensive things".

Each of those other heuristics sound horrifyingly Orwellian.

The judgments involved in enforcing this policy seem way easier to apply
without excluding individuals with genuine opinions that they wish to voice to
their friends or followers on the platform.

------
kingkawn
Amusing that the organizing principles of our society are so waekend as to be
broken by bad-intentioned memes

------
cm2012
This is awesome. I'm glad Facebook is getting more involved in moderating
astroturfed stuff.

------
throw2016
The problem here is personalized political advertising. This is dangerous.
Political advertising should be general so every citizen has the same
messaging.

So rather than look for bad actors a cleaner solution is to disable
personalized political ads, but that will affect revenue.

There is no way you can ban or even demonize activism and dissent without
back-pedalling on nearly every democratic ideal. It's not a matter of slippery
slopes, its bad actors manufacturing crisis to demonize dissent.

------
jlarocco
TBH, I don't think Facebook can prevent "coordinated inauthentic behavior," as
they're calling it.

The only solution is for users to be more aware of who they're online
"friends" are, and to be aware that they can't trust everything they read
online.

In a way it's funny this problem snuck up on them like this. They make money
by social engineering people to buy stuff. It should be a no-brainer that the
exact same techniques can be used for other purposes.

------
dillondoyle
I wonder if Facebook will move towards even more 'real world ID' \- not only
to prevent these types of attacks from fake people - but because it might
provide additional revenue lift. Or maybe wouldn't add much revenue value,
their real human targeting is pretty great already.

------
booleandilemma
Any evidence of bad actors on HN comment threads? Why would attacks be limited
to FB?

~~~
vertexFarm
Return on investment I'd guess. HN is hardly a pipeline into the hearts and
minds of the average US citizen. Facebook is practically the collective
unconscious of our country, as disgusting as that sounds.

------
dawhizkid
What is the recall of these efforts, that is, what % of the "true bad actors"
are they actually catching? My gut is that it's a whack-a-mole problem and
it's not getting better.

------
gammateam
the federal government should send real intelligence officials to police this
effort at this point. isn't this literally what the national security letters
were for?

and don't get started on that slippery slope stuff, we are deeeeep in the
mariana's trench with regard to NSL and what the intelligence community does
to private companies.

~~~
dionian
The Federal Government should not be in the business of censorship.

~~~
gammateam
if thats the line for you, then they don't need to do that, they need to be
there in real time helping Facebook investigate where these users are coming
from, instead of getting reports later after the Facebook security team says
they're behind 7 proxies.

------
equalunique
All flagged comments here should be unflagged.

------
rrauenza
If you're skimming this, as I was, and seem confused -- IRA in this article is
not the Irish Replubican Army...

> Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)

~~~
Timpy
"But security is not something that’s ever done." I initially read this as
"Security is something that nobody ever does."

Not to be pedantic, but "finished" would have been less ambiguous.

------
Rjevski
Facebook themselves are a bad actor.

~~~
iamdave
This is something that's been in the noggin for a while, kind of like a bottle
of some spice that sits in the back of your kitchen cabinet; you know it's
there, but never really use it or even touch it-but you always remind yourself
to seek out recipes where it may have some flavor value but otherwise you
never use it.

"Facebook themselves are a bad actor" is the comment that jiggled the mind-
cabinet enough for that spice bottle to fall off the rack and into full view.

That's the head space I'm in when I ask this question. So with that Caveat
Lector out of the way:

Am I out of line in thinking Facebook kind of opened the doors for this by
aggressively "graphing" social connections and going full speed at turning
relationships into algorithms and then giving everyone and their mama the
tools to sculpt all of this data however they please? And that they're
probably getting off way too easy?

Last night I said to a friend with much sincerity: I miss the days of MySpace
and LiveJournal where I could collect all of my friends into one online space,
my own little corner of the internet and interact with them on _my_ terms. No
nudges to participate in a post, no prompts to go look at what someone else is
doing, no suggestions I go buy what my friend just bought and shared simply
because "it's my friend". It existed, we were there, and we didn't need
MySpace's help to interact with each other. Of course, that was a different
Internet where everyone wasn't trying to analyze and monetize your every click
and keystroke.

Just kind of thinking out loud. But curious what others think.

~~~
abawany
The book "Trust me, I'm Lying" was eye opening to me - it described intrinsic
human behaviors that has made FB into such a devastating agent (genocides in
Burma, attacks on democracy, etc.) Helped me kill my FB account quickly.

~~~
iamdave
Thanks for the recommendation, I will look it up.

------
YinglingLight
"On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they
believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who
thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were
smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work
in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very
wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the
scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The
wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense,
with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there
are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king.
Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when
Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events."

Facebook is a convenient collateral damage victim the Traditional Media is
willing to make to further their narrative. It continues to fuel the cognitive
dissonance for 50% of the country.

~~~
sctb
We detached this generic political tangent from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654791).

~~~
thetrumanshow
Cornfielding good discussion looks terrible on you HN. Please stop.

------
peter_retief
Lets get over this bad app called facebook, its actually not that relevant

~~~
praneshp
Relevant enough for you to type 10 words....

~~~
peter_retief
hmmm...I guess so, 13 words?

------
HuckFackerNews
If they control content, they are publishers, not platforms, and that changes
how they are taxed and how they are regulated.

If they want to be treated like platforms with the power of publishers, that's
not going to fly.

------
megaman22
I wonder what FB would do if they had bought more than $11000 measly dollars
in ads?

All of these examples are identical in form to content that is otherwise
plastered all over Facebook and Instagram. Especially Instagram; that's
basically all shitposting and memes still over there, like Facebook was in its
youth.

~~~
vuln
They would have gladly accepted the money and turned the other way. 11k is
rookie numbers. I'm sure they'll spend more tomorrow on the new page they spin
up.

------
nikolay
Why is Zuck's account still active then?

------
ng12
So the Russian bots are posting left-wing content? How does that work?

EDIT: Looking for clarification, here. Not sure why I'm being downvoted.

~~~
skrebbel
If the sources I read were itself not fake, the idea is that they simply try
to increase the gap between left and right. Decrease mutual understanding,
prevent dialog between sides, increase mistrust.

I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though. But
hey, I have no idea what their end game is. I'm sure someone here has ideas.

~~~
nrhk
Foundations of Geopolitics by Durgin lays out the groundwork for Russia's
current western strategy. Putin's been implementing it word for word.

~~~
theNJR
Interesting to note that Amazon seems to have removed this book
[https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-
Geopolitical-...](https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-
English-Translation/dp/1521994269)

------
creaghpatr
Pointlessness of banning a mere 32 pages aside, their stock is up 1% today so
they'll box it up as a win internally.

------
zapt02
This is interesting, but it's not clear from the article what the groups in
question were actually doing - they don't seem to be directly connected to the
republican party or Russia.

~~~
vuln
Obviously Facebook wasn't making enough revenue from these accounts / page(s)
to turn a blind eye.

Give Facebook $100k and they'll allow you to upend a democracy.

~~~
cm2012
The thing is, the ad spend of the bad actors during the election was basically
inconsequential. But the organic reach was huge since inflammatory fake stuff
spreads easily, especially if you pay 100s of people controlling individual
accounts to boost it.

~~~
vuln
$100k versus 5 billion dollars spent by the presidential campaigns. Why are
these people working for the IRA? Wouldn't they make billions in marketing
anything other than political division?

[https://www.economist.com/graphic-
detail/2016/03/07/the-2016...](https://www.economist.com/graphic-
detail/2016/03/07/the-2016-presidential-money-race)

~~~
cm2012
Like I just said, it's specifically not about the ads. It's about the farm of
fake content creators. They don't work for anyone else because it's state
supported and also not particularly skilled, just no real companies would do
that kind of astroturfing.

------
cs702
A quick thought: There is one actor on Facebook that Facebook can never --
indeed, will never -- consider removing... regardless of how bad or horrendous
the community considers the behavior of that actor. That actor is of course
Facebook itself.

------
asdfman123
If I removed bad actors on Facebook I would lose half of the friends I met
doing improv comedy.

~~~
huhtenberg
Are you here until Friday?

~~~
asdfman123
No, but I have a show every Tuesday. For the love of God, please come out.
Admission is $2.

~~~
nasredin
One annoying thing about the people who run and use this site: they don't like
comedy and especially, good puns.

Try SlashDot.

~~~
asdfman123
My services are very highly valued on reddit and I have the comment karma to
prove it.

------
mankypro
We are witnessing very dangerous times. Groupthink is real now. If you
disagree with a new story you can simply claim it’s “fake news”. Getting
doxxed is a real possibility. The 4th estate is no longer to be trusted. “May
you live in interesting times” is no longer just a fortune in a cookie...

~~~
iamdave
_If you disagree with a new story you can simply claim it’s “fake news”._

Wonder if this is an entirely new phenomenon, or if with Trump we just got
some new, and easy to prescribe nomenclature for this phenomenon you describe.

Edit: is there something objectionable about what either myself or the person
I replied to said, if so I welcome a discussion on it. There's a LOT of
downvote activity happening in this thread over completely reasonable
arguments that are worth _discussing_ here.

~~~
mankypro
It’s funny, the downvote wars going on, I’ve lost karma for a comment that’s
innocuous. Just comes to show the world we live in where solipsism is
pandemic.

------
tomc1985
All this sounds great until legitimate political orgs get blacklisted because
someone at FB thinks they're astroturfing

Regardless of who actually created the event, I can imagine that posting a
removal notice of a political event is going to trigger the conspiracy nuts
and aggravate distrust against FB

