
Hundreds of Propaganda Accounts Targeting Iran and Qatar Removed from Facebook - pulisse
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/uae-propaganda
======
panpanna
The article points out PR firms in Nigeria, Egypt and UAE.

> Increasingly, we're seeing more PR firms or strategic communication firms
> offer computational propaganda as a service for all sorts of clients,
> including governments.

Now consider this, if this happens at this scale for the small cost of
$150.000 how many pr-firms are engaging in propaganda against some commercial
target right now without your ever noticing?

~~~
bilbo0s
I think everyone has taken notice. The propaganda right now is too all
encompassing so we can't help but to take notice.

Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments has
gone up and up and up. Continues to increase right now.

What can people do though? Other people have the right to free speech. You
just have to try to tune out all of the Anti-Tech, Anti-China, Anti-US, Anti-
Amazon, Anti-Iran, Anti-Trump, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Obama, Anti-minority,
Anti-etc etc etc blather.

~~~
dang
> _Even on HN the past few years the number of propaganda posts and comments
> has gone up and up and up. Continues to increase right now._

How do you know this? What do you use to decide? As far as I can tell, the way
most people decide this is: if I don't like it, it's propaganda. Nobody thinks
that consciously, of course, but it matches what people say surprisingly
closely. That has no evidentiary value, except as an indication of what
someone dislikes. You learn this very quickly if you're responsible for the
community as a whole, because people have such different likes and dislikes
that basically everything contentious gets dismissed as 'propaganda' or some
such abuse.

Two things seem clear: (1) propaganda exists; (2) "I don't like it" is no way
to identify it. There needs to be something more objective. When people are
worried about abuse on HN and we look into it, our bar is that we have to see
at least _some_ evidence, somewhere, of something amiss. That's as low as the
bar can get, yet even that is enough to reveal that way over 90%, probably
over 99%, of perceptions of propaganda have no basis beyond the feelings of
the perceiver.

~~~
reaperducer
_As far as I can tell, the way most people decide this is: if I don 't like
it, it's propaganda_

I don't think that "most" is accurate.

It is not hard to recognize propaganda, even when it coincides with one's
established views.

In elementary school we had many quizzes and drills on this sort of stuff as
part of our civics courses. The problem is, I doubt schools teach this stuff
anymore, even though this kind of very basic critical thinking is very
important for a functioning society.

~~~
dang
I'm talking about the things people say on internet forums like HN about
propaganda and related terms (astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign
agents). At least on HN I can tell you that "most" is an understatement.
That's plain from the comments and even more plain in the voting data. (I
should make that more precise, though. Obviously I'm not reading people's
minds to know why they say 'propaganda', etc.; it's rather that what people
say about this is overwhelmingly correlated with whatever their view on the
underlying issue happens to be.)

Elementary school is a pretty different context. Schoolchildren may be more
reliable on this, actually. Although they tend to imbibe the views of their
parents, they haven't yet had time to build up the same fixed emotional habits
around them.

------
josefresco
So propaganda is not allowed, by political ads that contain lies are allowed.
Aren't lies in political ads by the ruling party or candidate ... propaganda?

~~~
vkou
It's about as consistent as people complaining about the Kremlin lying on
Facebook, but not some billionaire lying on Facebook.

Bonus points when you don't even know who he is, because his money has been
laundered through a PAC. Oh, and we get to subsidize his speech, because it's
tax-deductible for him.

Double bonus points if, in a slightly different situation, that billionaire
has been borrowing money for his various business ventures from friends of the
Kremlin, and happens to look a wee bit orange...

~~~
toast0
You also missed the other subsidy. TV ad spots for political ads have their
prices frozen at the beginning of the election season. When the season heats
up, other advertisers get pushed out as their prices increase, but politicians
keep the frozen price.

~~~
reaperducer
You are correct. The reason this happens made sense at the time it was done,
but doesn't anymore.

At the time these rules were enacted, TV stations didn't want to carry
political ads, and hardly any would accept them. The enforced rate structure
was devised not only to encourage TV stations to carry political ads, but to
ensure that a party with deeper pockets didn't drown out less-well-funded
opinions.

When I worked in TV, the sales department hated political season because their
bonuses got slashed.

A couple of economic crises later, and TV stations look forward to political
ads because they it turns out they are more stable, reliable, and often pay in
advance. The old standby for TV ads, car dealers, turned out to be not-so-
reliable after all, especially with the automaker bankruptcies and people
keeping cars longer.

With a bird in the hand worth two in the bush, we now have political ads out
the wazoo.

------
aritmo
In the military, this is also called PSYOPS.

------
throwaway672
The problems on Twitter are worse. There are networks of verified accounts
pumping out orchestrated propaganda on this topic, and others. A blue check
mark seems to be a license to generate money with impunity. There are networks
operating out of first world countries with verified accounts, that have
third-world minions that amplify their messages through retweets and likes. It
is surprising that corporations continue to associate with the open sewer of
propaganda, hate and harassment that Twitter is. Has the time come for a clean
clone of Twitter for business to interact with their customers?

------
zarro
"The censor was a magistrate in ancient Rome who was responsible for
maintaining the census, supervising public morality, and overseeing certain
aspects of the government's finances.

The power of the censors was absolute: no magistrate could oppose their
decisions, only another censor who succeeded them could cancel it.

The censors' regulation of public morality is the origin of the modern meaning
of the words censor and censorship."

------
zachguo
Is it really appropriate to let platforms determine what is propaganda or not?

~~~
sharkjacobs
Maybe not to determine what "propaganda" is, but I think it's reasonable, and
necessary for them to determine what real accounts are.

> The accounts, which have now been taken down, appear to have been
> professionally run by PR firms

These aren't real users and presumably violate the terms of service.

~~~
zachguo
I'm not talking about this specific case. As to what you bring up, how
platforms determine what real accounts are is a black box, we don't know how
biased their machine learning algorithms and human reviewers are.

~~~
sharkjacobs
An internet forum which doesn't ban spam bot accounts is less than worthless,
this feels of a kind to me.

------
pooya13
It’s odd that in the entire article they don’t mention anything about the
actual content of this propaganda against Iran. I wonder for example, was the
current news about Iran attacking oil tankers part of this campaign?

~~~
ianai
You can probably assume it’s whatever Russia and Putin would want it to be.

~~~
klingonopera
Aren't Russia and Iran more allies than enemies? I mean, yes, I'd agree, but
rather because Putin would welcome _any_ type disinformation, not just ones
targeted at Iran.

~~~
Udik
These were propaganda pages _against_ Iran and Qatar. The article says they
originate from UAE and Egypt, but not necessarily from their governments. It
also says some of the messages are supportive of Saudi Arabia. Currently, the
US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are subjecting Iran to an economic blockade and/or
pushing for a military attack. Russia instead is at least partially on Iran's
side and, therefore, opposed to US and Saudi Arabia.

And your first reaction is "this could be/ must be Russia"? Do you realize
Russia running a propaganda campaign _for_ Saudi Arabia doesn't make any
sense? How could you even think of something so counter-intuitive and
inconsequential?

------
ilaksh
Does Facebook take down the propaganda accounts linked to the US? Or we are
all still supposed to believe that the "good guys" stopped using propaganda
after WWII?

~~~
klingonopera
Taking down anti-Iran propaganda would be something that does _not_ align with
US goals. I find it quite surprising that Facebook's doing this, to be honest.

~~~
Faark
FB is certainly free to clean up once they get inquiries from media. Inaction
would make attribution to the US more easy, thus any NSL forcing FB to
cooperate is likely limited in scope to internal measures like scanning for
fake accounts.

------
throwaway122378
Individuals posting propaganda is far less concerning to me than a private
company deciding what propaganda is.

------
ianai
Wake me up when it’s the hundred of thousands that are on there.

------
markdown
And WEST PAPUA!!! Frustrating to see the Indonesian genocide of the West
Papuan people is ignored.

There is far far worse going on in West Papua then is going on in Iran or
Qatar, but Buzzfeed chooses to write about them instead.

The FB press release clearly mentions Indonesia and West Papua but it's
ignored yet again by the western press.

[https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/removing-coordinated-
in...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/removing-coordinated-inauthentic-
behavior-in-uae-nigeria-indonesia-and-egypt/amp/)

------
jin7
I did nothing, but my account has been deleted. Of course, I rarely use
Facebook.

~~~
aritmo
Did you post anything political?

~~~
jin7
No. I post nothing.

~~~
andreigheorghe
So then you just created this account to tell us that Facebook banned you for
no reason even though you posted nothing? Interesting, why did you do that?

~~~
zakki
Maybe he used the account for stalking.

~~~
jin7
Don't use your maliciousness to rate others.

------
benkarst
Buzzfeed eliminating the competition.

------
ru999gol
and whats the difference to this: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2019/may/31/us-cuts-fund...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2019/may/31/us-cuts-funds-for-anti-propaganda-group-that-trolled-
activists)

in truth of course the US government is doing exactly the same thing all the
time, standard practice.

