The role of new media

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Welcome to the wonderful world of authoritarian regimes, new social media and US right-wingers..

The Saudi Arabian government enlisted a Twitter army to silence its critics online. It groomed a Twitter employee in the United States to try to get him to spy on certain accounts. And an American-based consultancy company helped the government identify and target dissidents on Twitter who were later punished and silenced. Katie Benner, Mark Mazzetti, Ben Hubbard, and Mike Isaac at the New York Times on Saturday detailed the efforts of the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to quiet dissenters in the country and around the world. The report lands amid increased scrutiny on the Saudis and MBS over the disappearance and murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went missing after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. The report reveals the dangers for American tech companies, which have until recently single-mindedly focused on growth. Like Facebook, Twitter is beginning to see the downsides of a completely open platform — particularly when it intersects with authoritarian regimes.

According to the Times, Saudi operatives have “mobilized to harass critics on Twitter” to keep them from speaking out. They’ve employed a number of tactics, including swarming critics with memes, creating distractions from relevant conversations, and reporting content they don’t want seen to Twitter as “sensitive.” The government has created its Twitter army by paying young men about 10,000 Saudi riyals, or $3,000, a month to tweet. One of the most disturbing parts of the Times’ story is its account of how the Saudis identified and groomed a Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, to spy on accounts from within. He joined Twitter in 2013, during which time he obtained an engineering position that allowed him to access users’ phone numbers and IP addresses. Twitter executives became aware of what was going on in 2015 after intelligence officials told them Alzabarah had “grown closer” to Saudi intelligence operatives who has “persuaded him to peer into several user accounts.” He was eventually ousted and went back to Saudi Arabia.. 

An especially disturbing anecdote at the end of the Times story revealed a McKinsey & Company study measured the public reception of economic austerity measures introduced in Saudi Arabia in 2015. The report found that the measures got twice as much coverage on Twitter as they did in more traditional news outlets, and the Twitter reaction was much more negative than positive. Three accounts were driving the conversation on Twitter, McKinsey found. After the report came out, the man behind one of the accounts was arrested, and another man behind one of the accounts had his phone hacked and said two of his brothers were arrested. The third account, which was anonymous, was shut down.

Twitter, McKinsey were complicit in helping Saudi Arabia silence critics, NYT report shows - Vox

And as always, hand in hand with US right-wingers:

As most right-wing conspiracies do, the Khashoggi smears gained momentum in the bowels of the MAGA Internet (with an assist from a Saudi botnet). Though Khashoggi’s disappearance didn’t initially rattle the Republican Party, which is trying to remain laser-focused on midterms—Khashoggi’s name did not come up “at all” during the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting, said one conservative activist who attended—the conspiracy machine leapt into action as soon as the White House started getting blowback in the media. Fueled by a sense, as CRTV’s Mark Levin put it, that the media had embarked on another “insane” quest to get Trump, his supporters painted Khashoggi as a rabid Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer opposed to Mohammed bin Salman’s attempts to “reform” the Kingdom. “DON’T MOURN FOR KHASHOGGI,” tweeted David Horowitz, a prominent conservative reactionary. “He was a Muslim Brotherhood operative, a pro-jihad, pro-Iranian, pro–[Tayyip] Erdoğan Jew-hater. 

A supporter of Iran. Basically he died as a warrior on the wrong side of the war on terror.” “He’s just a democrat reformer journalist holding a RPG with jihadists,” wrote PJ Media’s Patrick Poole, tweeting a photo of a 1988 article written by Khashoggi, which included a photo of him with al-Qaeda leaders. (The tweet quickly spread and was eventually picked up by Donald Trump Jr.) Fox News’s Harris Faulkner echoed the claims on Thursday’s Outnumbered, insisting, “some things have come out, and we’re just reporting the facts . . . throughout his career, he was a government spokesperson for the royal family, he worked for Prince Turki [bin Faisal Al Saud] when he was in Washington, D.C., and, at times, had written and worked with some Muslim Brother[hood] members in Saudi Arabia.” (When Twitter began cracking down on bots tweeting Khashoggi smears, the right’s suspicions of a grand left-wing conspiracy seemed confirmed: “Remember, deposed Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns major shares of Twitter, and Alwaleed opposes current Crown Prince’s government,” one far-right account wrote in a tweet quickly picked up by Instapundit.)

“Don’t Mourn for Khashoggi”: Inside the Feverish Cesspool of the Pro-Saudi Right | Vanity Fair

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Whether you know it or not, you’re probably living in a bubble. As far as the internet is concerned, at least.
Your internet search results may look very different depending based on your political views and other cultural interests. Searching for hot button political topics like “gun control,” “immigration,” and “vaccination” bring up very different results depending on your search history, according to a study from privacy company and Google rival DuckDuckGo released Tuesday..

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Journalists working as factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat misinformation. Current and former Facebook factcheckers told the Guardian that the tech platform’s collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they’ve lost trust in Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the impacts of their work. Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda factcheckers regularly debunk – should be a deal-breaker. “They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a factchecking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years.

'They don't care': Facebook factchecking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties | Technology | The Guardian

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Deceptively edited videos altered to make Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appear to be drunkenly slurring her words are spreading across social media despite attempts by platforms to halt their dissemination, according to The Washington Post. The videos alter the audio of Pelosi’s speech at a Center for American Progress event Wednesday in which she accuses President Trump of a “cover-up,” editing the clip to make it appear as though she is slurring her words. The video has been viewed through the Facebook page Politics WatchDog more than 1.3 million times and been shared more than 32,000 times, according to the Post.

Fake videos edited to make Pelosi appear drunk spread on social media | TheHill

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Facebook removed 2.2 billion fake accounts from its platform during the first quarter of the year — nearly double the number it took action on in the prior quarter. The company says the increase is due to an uptick in automated attacks that create many accounts at once.

It’s a huge jump. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Facebook took down 1.2 billion fake accounts, and the quarter before, 750,000. During the first quarter of 2018, Facebook took down fewer than 600,000 fake accounts.
The company emphasized that most of the fake accounts it’s addressing have been taken down within minutes of being created, and those accounts therefore aren’t included in the metrics it reports, such as monthly active users. It claims that it flags 99.8 percent of fake accounts on its own, before they’re reported.

Facebook said the amount of accounts it took action on this quarter increased because of “automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time.” But it admitted that because so many automated accounts are being created, more are inevitably making it past their detection.

Facebook’s fake accounts problems seems bad - Vox

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But the reality has been quite different: Instead of democratizing the world, the internet has destabilized it, creating new cleavages and reinforcing the power structure at the same time. This is the story sociologist Jen Schradie tells in her new book The Revolution That Wasn’t. Schradie argues that technology is not only failing to level the playing field for activists, it’s actually making things worse by “creating a digital activism gap.” The differences in power and organization, she says, have undercut working-class movements and bolstered authoritarian groups.

The Revolution That Wasn’t: why conservatives are winning the internet - Vox

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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) dominated buzz surrounding the first Democratic presidential debate Thursday night after battling rivals on stage, but as the debate played out, a series of Twitter bots worked to amplify a far-right conspiracy about her online. During the debate in Miami, apparent bots online amplified conspiracy theories on social media falsely claiming that the California Democrat, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent, is not black and is not a U.S. citizen. “Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican.  I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting,” Ali Alexander, a Trump-world personality, tweeted... 

The tweet was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., who ultimately removed the message from his page. However, Alexander’s tweet was soon copied word for word by a network of bot accounts researcher Josh Russell had previously identified.

Twitter bots amplify far-right conspiracy about Kamala Harris during debate | TheHill

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The success of Fox News in harnessing that energy can’t be overstated. On Facebook, Fox News is the top English-language publisher by engagement. Fox had 146,472,384 engagements between 1 January and 10 March 2019. NBC.com was next, with 127,845,355 “engagements”, with the BBC a distant third. Over the past three years, Vice found that Fox News’ page had accumulated 80% more reactions, comments and shares than CNN – despite CNN’s page having almost double the number of followers. Fox News’ engagement rate was five times that of the New York Times. So how does Fox do it?

How Fox News conquered Facebook | Media | The Guardian

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Zuckerberg refuses to halt even the most obvious lies from popping up in political ads on Facebook. “I think we are in the right place on this,” he told The Washington Post last week. “In general, in a democracy, I think that people should be able to hear for themselves what politicians are saying.” That’s great news for the Russians and President Trump. The Russians continue to use social media, principally Facebook, to stir political division, racial division and hatred, according to the FBI, the CIA, the Mueller Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Meanwhile, Trump’s team is acting on its own to swamp Facebook with lies about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter — and there are no consequences. Facebook allowed a manipulated video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to go viral even though Pelosi pointed out that it was fake and asked for it to be taken down. Now Warren is campaigning on a promise to break up big tech companies. They are so powerful and so wealthy that they are able to ignore questions about how they are enabling propaganda.

By selling politicians the chance to twist the truth and deceive voters, Facebook profits at the expense of the public good. Warren put it bluntly: Facebook is guilty of taking "money to promote lies.” “A handful of monopolists” should not “dominate our economy and our democracy,” she said. Zuckerberg could largely solve this problem by simply refusing to accept political advertising. It is not a significant source of income for his company, which is worth upwards of $500 billion. Another solution is for Facebook to set its own rules to stop political lies and propaganda. That is what newspapers and cable television companies do. In both cases, Zuckerberg refuses to act.

Juan Williams: Facebook's shameful lies | TheHill

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Twitter removed nearly over 88,000 accounts that it says were tied to a disinformation campaign backed by the Saudi Arabian government, the company announced Friday. The company published data on nearly 6,000 of those accounts, but is keeping the rest of the accounts confidential because they may represent compromised accounts repurposed for the spam campaign.

Twitter removes 88,000 accounts tied to Saudi Arabia disinformation - Business Insider

• 88k fake accounts, and that's only the ones they found, and from one state actor..