
Facebook removes Indian page, says it spread Iranian propaganda - kushti
https://qz.com/india/1629840/facebook-removes-indian-page-says-it-spread-iranian-propaganda/
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jnaddef
What bothers me is that there are very few things that are not propaganda.

All Fox News article are propaganda, all CNN articles are propaganda, but yet
they are accepted? Clearly a distinction is made between 'acceptable
propaganda' and 'unacceptable propaganda', and this distinction is made by
Facebook, an American company.

How acceptable is that?

~~~
sonnyblarney
I don't believe that Fox and CNN have political propaganda in the sense you
might imply.

Bias, narrative creating ... it's propaganda-like, but it's not the right
word.

Interestingly - almost all US outlets have a pretty strong 'nationalist bias'.
We don't think of CNN or MSBC like that, but if you watch the press from
outside the US (especially during a war) it becomes quite evident.

When push comes to shove, the mainstream press in the US do work with
government on some narrative issues of national security, which I think falls
into the category of propaganda.

Zuck has painted himself into an impossible corner.

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jnaddef
I 100% agree with you, so let me clarify what I was trying to say in my first
comment.

US will label as propaganda any article coming from RT - for Russia, or that
Iranian journal - for Iran, and now FB starts simply censoring those contents.

At the same time in Russia or Iran, news coming from US are labelled as
propaganda as well.

Depending on where you live, you get fed either one of these "propaganda" and
you feel you are on the "good" side and that others are on the "bad" side.

My point is the world is not divided between "good" and "bad", everything is
not black or white, and the fact that a website with billions of users has the
power to decide what is good or bad (or has the obligation to follow
directives from a government) is a very bad idea imho.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Please don't put CNN/MSNBC/Fox in the same camp as RT, or Chinese state
sponsored news. That's not fair.

This is not a situation of moral relativity.

CNN, even Fox, are actually very independent news outlets. Their news is news.
(Especially the non-editorial stuff, is usually above bar)

On some, mainly political issues, they are biased.

On some national issues, they 'close ranks'.

But they are not propaganda outlets.

RT is absolutely _propaganda_ outlet. RT is an organ of the Russian state,
created specifically to promote Russian interest abroad, and to serve as a
mouthpiece for the government, specifically Putin.

Trump has friends in Fox News, but quite a number of haters; many popular
folks there disagree with him quite loudly, a lot. Trump has _no friends_ in
most of the rest of the press, and there's no opportunity for him to set the
agenda directly for example.

RT was designed so that Putin could create the narrative he chooses, and to
oppress any opposition to his regime, or the state.

Even the BBC/CBC etc. have quite a degree of independence from state organs.
They have obvious political leanings in many situations, and surely will work
with the state on some issues, but they are in many ways 'more independant'
because they don't have to survive on click-bait.

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warp_factor
Welcome to Facebook Co. Where a clique of Silicon Valley exec yuppies now
decide what is right and what is wrong for us to see.

It's a very slippery slope. Cannot wait for the next elections where any
candidates with politically "wrong" ideas will see their pages silently being
discarded or randomly hidden from timelines without warnings.

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stjohnswarts
They are free to exclude whatever they like, they're a private company and not
beholden to what you think they should be doing. If they do the wrong thing
they will go on the trash-heap of bad ideas in history, so far they're doing
okay as far as being a business goes.

~~~
warp_factor
They should be seen as a public utility.

I dislike Facebook but for a lot of people it became part of their life and
some information is now only available on Facebook.

As a public utility they should be regulated on what they are allow to
restrict from their users.

~~~
root_axis
> _a lot of people it became part of their life_

So what? World of Warcraft became a part of a lot of people's lives, does that
mean WoW should be a utility?

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Udik
This is an Israeli propaganda page with 500k likes:

[https://m.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/](https://m.facebook.com/DailyCupOfJane/)

The "about" section presents it as:

"Sugar, spice, and everything nice.Changing the world, one mug at a time.
We're your daily girl power pick-me-up.

Cup of Jane is a community launched by TIP’s Future Media Project in DC. We
love our communities!"

The discreet acronym TIP stands for "The Israel Project":

[https://www.theisraelproject.org/](https://www.theisraelproject.org/)

The page mixes feminist and feel-good messages with subtle propaganda for
Israel. When is Facebook going to take it down?

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Waterluvian
Not sure if this is too far off topic or if I'll get roasted for this. "Cup of
Jane" is the kind of title that's so awfully on the nose that I'd mistake it
for satire.

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qrbLPHiKpiux
Their opinion is that it spread propaganda.

Everything written is propaganda depending on what side of the opinion you
were on.

Although I don’t like it, what is happening today is incredibly fascinating,
watching it unfold since I have been using computers since 1990.

~~~
mwfunk
It all comes down to what specific definitions people are using, but I draw a
strong distinction between propaganda and opposing opinions about things.
Propaganda is basically marketing copy for politics. It's unreliable in the
same way TV ads for pharmaceuticals are unreliable compared to actual advice
from actual doctors.

People with opposing political opinions might accuse each other of parroting
their side's propaganda, but that's just a way to try to discredit what the
person is saying. Like advertising, the only constant with propaganda is that
it's bullshit: it might be true, it might not be. The person telling it to you
might believe it, or they might not. They may not even know whether or not
it's true, and they may not care. The purpose of propaganda, like advertising,
is not to convey facts to people, but to convey emotions disguised as facts,
and they know ahead of time how they want you to feel about what they're
saying. It's not an honest effort to communicate facts, it's often meant to
discredit the very notion of facts, so they can conveniently dismiss opposing
views as just someone else's opinion.

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rchaud
This is the risk you take when you are a sharecropper on someone else's land.
Probably won't be long until FB takes an Adblock Plus/Yelp gatekeeper approach
where they'll ban something, and then allow them back if they purchase a
certain amount of advertising.

They won't do it in the West as it would be picked up on the news, but bad
actors in places like India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar (those are the ones I know of)
would pay to have that "feature".

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zecg
“Coordinated inauthentic behaviour", what a refreshingly honestly dystopian
syntagm.

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duxup
I don't know if there is any way to really decide what is inauthentic outside
of say only allowing individuals who are verified to post....and nothing else.

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Aeolun
What is up with any of the big corporations making these kinds of decisions
‘without appeal or comment’. It borders on criminal to conduct business that
way.

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duxup
Science fiction generally seemed to assume some evil AI or robots would take
over the world and make arbitrary / unappealable decisions ....but naw we
humans are happy to do it to each other.

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saravana85
reading regular news like these. Guess FB is using Algorithms to ban than
using human effort..

Facebook is a perfect example of how a monopoly will treat people

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dsl
tl;dr: They were unwitting accomplices. The propaganda from well known Iranian
government outlets was being shared frequently enough, with very little other
content, that they were unwittingly part of the machine itself.

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opportune
That still doesn't really explain why Iranian propaganda is unacceptable when
the American, Russian, and Israeli propaganda go unpunished

