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Facebook reveals Russian troll content, shuts down 135 IRA accounts
- wohlergehen 8y agoIRA = Internet Research Agency for those confused by the title, i.e. the russian "troll" company.
- petepete 8y agoThanks for this. Reusing already-prominent acronyms gets really confusing although I know often it's unintentional. Many Americans won't know who the IRA were/are, but in the UK (and probably the rest of Europe) it's common knowledge and burnt in.
- PHGamer 8y agoid say middle age and older people would. they were shown in various movies during the 90s but yea. younger people probably think of the IRA savings account.
- apotheothesomai 8y agoWe middle-aged folks also remember some big bombing incidents executed by the IRA. The IRA is still referenced in the news now and then.
- delerio 8y agoI'm american and remember some high profile movies that featured them. Then again, I'm almost 30. I thought it was common knowledge among many who the IRA were, even among americans.
- cirgue 8y agoI think IRA is common knowledge in the US, at least it's well-known by anyone over ~40.
- keyle 8y agoI find amusing the "troll" label applied to it. Trolling in my books is someone taking the piss out of someone else or a situation. We're talking about far greater reach here with devastating impacts.
- subcosmos 8y agoWe need some kind of TrollTrace program to keep tabs on this situation
- ZeroGravitas 8y agoThere's certainly some moments that fit this label perfectly, like when Trump announced that he was going to form a joint taskforce with Russia to secure American elections from hackers.
- gabept 8y ago> Facebook has removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by the Russian government-connected troll farm and election interference squad the Internet Research Agency This looks like a fairly small amount of accounts.
- cryptoz 8y agoYes, it is likely there are hundreds of thousands of accounts, not just a few dozen. Over time, we'll see. Twitter and all the rest have also come out with "it was just a few accounts, see, we've even gone and deleted them". But it's not that few. Edit: Also, those few accounts pack a punch. > 1.08 million users followed at least one of the Facebook Pages, and 493,000 users followed at least one of the Instagram accounts. The accounts had spent a combined $167,000 on ads since the start of 2015 That's a lot of influence and a fair bit of money spent on so few accounts. And across the whole Internet Research Agency as discussed by Facebook, > 126 million people had seen the propaganda group’s Facebook posts and another 20 million had seen its Instagram posts. Wow - that is a lot of people!
- baursak 8y agoIs there any specific reason you said hundreds of thousands of accounts, and not tens of thousands, millions, or dozens?
- cryptoz 8y agoJust an order of magnitude guess. It could be tens of thousands, it could be millions, I'm just an outsider looking in. But it seems clear that it is at least a couple orders of magnitude more than just the 70 they found and publicized so far.
- patrickaljord 8y agoThis is not how it works. The goal of these accounts was to build a following to be able to influence more people. A page with a couple of hundreds likes or followers will have much more impact than a million accounts with no followers. Building audiences to influence people is hard and takes time. It is much more probable that there are around 70 accounts than millions. Sorry to be that blunt but do you know anything about this matter?
- moltar 8y agoFrom the provided sample content it appears to be rather harmless. Reminds me of buzz feed style posts.
- cryptoz 8y agoNone of that looks harmless to me. And also, buzzfeed-style posts are hardly harmless - I think you'd find a number of people who honestly believe that buzzfeed-style posts are a harbinger of the downfall of humanity. Regardless of any hyperbole, I do think "buzzfeed-style posts" are very harmful, and I while do think that these posts by Russian operatives can vaguely resemble buzzfeed-style posts, I think they are far more harmful.
- piracykills 8y agoMuch of it seems to more be designed to sew discord between the parties than to directly influence the election. Mission accomplished I guess.
- moltar 8y agoI don’t know if you looked at the samples or not, but out of 6 samples only 2 can be considered remotely political. Sure, one uses a photo of Putin with a toast “let’s drink for politics”. At the stretch we could consider every “thanks Obama” meme a political one. I think this is a distraction maneuver by Facebook to direct away attention from the latest events.
- piracykills 8y agoI suppose you're right, not necessarily between the two parties but between US citizens and each other, for which the parties are sometimes used as a proxy - you see lots of promotion of black rights groups with fringe views and far-right groups with thinly or completely unveiled racist views. Just little tricks that will hook a small number of people, but make the overall picture you see on TV look much worse than it is on average.
- 8y ago
- cyberferret 8y agoHmm, I guess I come from an older generation where mention of the "IRA" was a whole different genre of terrorism...
- delerio 8y agoYeah, I always thought IRA was the main acronym for the "Irish Republican Army". Weird that they used IRA in this article to mean something else. Has the main association changed?
- cyberferret 8y agoCurrently, the association is for the "Internet Research Agency", which is the formal company name for a purported Russian based professional trolling firm.
- meric 8y agoWe've always been at war with IRA.
- lostmsu 8y agoDo you mean the individual retirement accounts? /s
- cyberferret 8y agoGood point. Similar age group I am guessing, but this is also a US-centric interpretation. The Irish Republican Army was probably more recognisable by their TLA worldwide back in the 70's and 80's.
- digi_owl 8y agoWell into the 90s i would say.
- Dowwie 8y agoWhat's a retirement plan got to do with this?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ProAm 8y agoThis is too little too late for Facebook. They are just trying to save as much face as possible now.
- timkpaine 8y agoIt remains to be seen whether these scandals will have any real effect in the long run. Facebook grew to be a behemoth, now it seems almost "too big to fail".
- stephenitis 8y agoWhat would happen if it failed?
- mistermann 8y agoI disagree.....considering the political and "news" climate we live in today, "finding" and "shutting down" "Russian trolls" seems to me like an absolutely brilliant strategy to get the public and especially the media back on your side. Excitement drives clicks, and Russia is the US's biggest boogey-man du jour (what happened to the pesky North Koreans and Muslims by the way, why don't we hear anything from them anymore?) that we need to government to protect us from, so this campaign should be a big winner I'd think.
- jerkstate 8y agoAre we ever going to see any of the controversial posts and ads that supposedly influenced the US election? I don't see anything US politics or election related in the samples they showed.
- d0mine 8y ago> "We removed this latest set of Pages and accounts solely because they were controlled by the IRA — not based on the content.”
- mturmon 8y agoThis is readily searchable, but here is an example: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/01/media/russian-facebook-ads-release-house-intelligence-committee/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/01/media/russian-facebook-ads-r...
- blitmap 8y agoSeems like a fairly small number for removing propaganda/state influence.. https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9233-uncovering_british_spies_web_of_sockpuppet_social_media_personas https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9233-uncovering_british_spies_we...
- bitumen 8y agoPeople can exert a lot of influence with just one account, and in this case it’s about 270 so far. You’d be surprised at how effective Sybil attacks are with far fewer than a dozen accounts, never mind hundreds. When those accounts build reputation, often assisted by more accounts, it’s even more powerful. Still, the biggest advantage is that you get to probe your audience multiple ways, then just go with what gains traction. The reputation of any one account doesn’t matter, it’s a “team” effort. So while you or I might care about what we say, try to build a reputation, and in general say things in accordance with what we believe, they don’t have to. It’s a radically different proposition, and devastating when done well. Even being discovered can be its own kind of “win” if it creates distrust and instability within the network itself. You can undermine faith in said network by exposing it as essentially corrupted, albeit by you.
- nym 8y agoIs Facebook notifying the affected people that they had viewed fabricated news, or just releasing press releases?
- jerkstate 8y agoDoes any of this content qualify as "fabricated news" ? Can you point out what you mean by that?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- crummy 8y ago95% of 135 accounts operated in Russian-speaking countries? So this means little in the context of alleged US election interference?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dilyevsky 8y agoThere were dozens of them! DOZENS!
- tomc1985 8y agoI love how we're all falling for this Russian troll BS and not attacking Facebook's business model of micro-targeting advertising