~pt: $¯\_(ツ)_/¯$
The Opposite of Post-truth is a weekly newsletter covering online political discourse and its manipulation.
Top lawyers for Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared three times before congressional committees investigating Russian interference in the U.S. election this week.
All three expressed deep concerns about the issue, talked up the steps they were taking, and generally deflected or ignored questions about their previous actions and the overall structure of their platforms and business models.
One detail clarified in the testimony was the relationship between ad spending — which seems to have been relatively low — organic posts — of which there were many that spread very widely. Facebook’s lawyer said Russian operators primarily used ad buys as a way of gaining “likes” for their pages. That created a large, built-in audience for organic clickbait posts, which legitimate users then spread around their own networks.
The companies released new info on the extent of the campaign. Facebook said Russian propaganda reached about 146 million Americans, if you include Instagram. That’s up from the 126 million and 10 million it previously reported. Twitter found over 36,000 Russia-linked accounts, most of them automated, up from their first report of 201. Those generated 1.4 million tweets and gained 288 million impressions in the ten weeks between Sept. 1 and Nov. 15 2016.
Independent researchers say even these higher estimates are undercounts.
Congress didn’t release all 3,000 of the Russian ads Facebook handed over, as promised, but they put out a smattering. They embody the characteristics that were previously reported: subtle, divisive, often targeted at niche communities. A few:
For years, Twitter’s bosses decided against securing their platform against bots and disinformation networks in a systematic way, carrying on in the face of pressure from inside and outside the company, according to Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager of product safety and security at the company.
Why?
“Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team. They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts.”
They rejected the idea of adding a bot icon to automated or partly automated accounts, which I think is a grand idea, and the idea of requiring a phone number to cut down on mass creation of accounts.
“For many years, Twitter has fought a high volume of spam and spam accounts originating from Russia and Ukraine. The numbers of suspensions and other enforcement actions on such accounts number in the millions per week,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
AP had an in-depth tic-toc on the hacking of the DNC by the Russian-linked Fancy Bear hacker team, based on data from from the online security firm SecureWorks, who tracks the group.
It includes the revelation that one of the documents released by Guccifer had been modified, with a “CONFIDENTIAL” banner added. It’s not a huge change, and it’s the only one so far that anyone has found after quite a lot of effort, but it seems to definitively refute the idea that Guccifer was doing good-faith public information.
AP also reported on a list of thousands of people around the world who were targeted for spearphising by Fancy Bear, also based on SecureWorks data.
Alt-right fellow traveler Johnny Rotten (Photo by Dennis Morris in 1977)
Hedge fund billionaire and nationalism bankroller Robert Mercer announced he was stepping down as co-CEO of his company, selling his stake in Breitbart to his daughter Rebekah, and cutting ties with tool-of-white-supremacists Milo Yiannopoulos. Mercer also expressed his differences with Steve Bannon and offered a general apologia for his political activity.
Speaking of Milo, The Daily Caller asked him to write a weekly column. Then, it canceled the column after one post and fired the editor who gave it to him.
Philip DeFranco, one of YouTube’s most popular creators. Note what his team knows about headline writing.
Michael Flynn was especially susceptible to being duped by Russian social media trolls.
Recode identified 2,804 news stories that cited Russian troll accounts, many featuring the latest major uncovered account, @jenn_abrams.
Political bots and trolls on social media are still active. Of the 15 Twitter accounts tweeting most heavily about an ill-conceived Latino Victory Fund ad, 13 were bots or cyborgs, according to an analysis outfit called Discourse Intelligence.
Russian-controlled pages organized a pro-Muslim rally and an anti-Muslim counter-rally in the same Texas town on the same day. People came:
Google banned an outlet from Google News identified by RBK as being operated out of the Internet Research Agency, called the Federal News Agency (FAN). Then, the company reversed the ban under pressure from Russia’s media regulators.
Fake news is easy money, according to a practitioner who gave an identity-shrouded video interview to Mic-dot-com.
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