Social Media Prepares for a Season of Propaganda and Abuse: The Political Season.
Propagandists and content abusers are ramping up their malicious activity as the political season heats up. Can a more proactive approach stop fake news and disinformation? This Week in Fraud News, October 25, 2019.
Is there something in the air? Some kind of strange wind blowing? If you’re sensing an unusual shift in the atmosphere, you’re correct if you’re thinking a season change is upon us. But no, we don’t mean Fall. It’s a different kind of season we’re thinking of:
Politics.
Yes, the political season is hitting full stride, and that means high alert for fraud teams working to defend social platforms. Propagandists and fake news creators are rubbing their hands in glee as they gear up for a busy political season, and platform by platform, teams are rolling out initiatives to stem the tide.
As we learned from The Verge this week, Facebook is on the offensive:
“Facebook came out of the gate this week with a suite of updates designed to bolster the company’s defenses against election interference. The updates include new products, such as Facebook Protect, a set of enhanced security measures for the accounts of candidates and their campaign workers. It includes new labels for false content and for publishers whose governments have editorial control over them, such as Russia Today. And it includes new tools for understanding candidate ad spending, including a dedicated tracker for US presidential candidates and some new APIs for researchers.”
The folks over at Instagram are busy as well, as reported by Mashable this week:
“The update comes less than two weeks after the Senate Intelligence Committee released the second volume of its report on interference in the 2016 election, which called Instagram “the most effective tool” used by the Internet Research Campaign.”
Tik Tok, one of the newest players on the social media scene, is taking a proactive stance as well. We learned this week from The Next Web about their efforts to combat propaganda on their platform:
“TikTok, the song-and-dance social media app that’s spiked in popularity this year, is allegedly the site of the latest attempt by the Islamic State terrorist organization (ISIS) to spread propaganda. While the site is banning the problematic accounts, it’s still a worrying trend.”
While the political season provides fertile ground for fraudsters and content abusers, these kinds of malicious behaviors are certainly non constrained to political cycles — the challenges are ongoing, something Twitter knows all too well. Fortunately, the team under the big blue bird are making significant headway in their fight against content abuse, as we learned from Digital Trends this week:
“Twitter now removes half of tweets containing abusive content automatically without relying on content moderators or users reporting them. The social media platform’s 2019 third quarter report revealed that 50% of those tweets that were removed due to abusive content were done so through improvements in machine learning.”
If there’s a theme running through all these stories (and there is!), it’s this: proactivity matters.
We simply cannot risk waiting for attacks to happen, on the assumption that we can minimize damage in the aftermath. Either we get out in front of fraud, or we give up, and as the latter isn’t an option, the only solution is to embrace proactivity. We live in a big data age, and the majority of our most important activity — banking, healthcare, insurance — now happens online. If we aren’t proactively protecting our data, we are not safe.
DataVisor Co-Founder and CEO and Yingian Xie will be speaking at this year’s Forbes Under 30 Summit, addressing these very issues. The panel is called “Cloud & CyberSecurity: Do You Know Where Your Data Is?” and Yingilan will be joined by, Lisa Falzone, Co-Founder & CEO, Athena Security; Adam Ghetti Founder & Chief Evangelist, Ionic Security; and Dug Song, Cofounder & General Manager, Duo Security.
Please join us next week as we tune in to the conference to hear Yinglian, as well as innovators and leaders like entrepreneur and athlete Serena Williams, Waymo CEO John Krafcik, and Graphika CIO Camille Francois.
And don’t miss next week’s edition of This Week in Fraud News!
