Were you a victim of Russian propaganda? Facebook will help you find out (nytimes.com).
“Facebook said on Wednesday that it planned to roll out a new tool later this year to help figure out if that new page you followed on Facebook or account you added on Instagram was secretly being run by Russia’s troll army.”
Being the Russian “troll army” that helped convinced deplorable Americans that an orange tycoon in a dodgy syrup gives two orange shits about their problems rather than his own “birther” fail (vox.com) insecrurity and some real rather than fake TIME magazine covers to hang (theguardian.com) at his swanky golf courses that go-large basket full of deplorables who voted for him won’t ever get an invite to.
“The social network is trying to assuage critics who said Facebook did not do enough to stop Russian propaganda from spreading on its platform ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”
F’book along with Twitter and Google being “grilled”—or more put on a hot plate to embarrassingly gurgle and grumble they should have done something—on Capital Hill “about their role in the election”—which was mainly taking a lot of ad revenue cash—and “the unintended consequences of their technology”, presumably being those consequences that don’t directly involve them tracking what you bought and where you bought it so they can serve you targeted adverts to buy more like it.
So how’s this going to work, how’s it gonna help you find out besides educating that you need to read more than the headline and perhaps be suspicious of stories that only ever seem to say exactly what you expect to read or hear with those conspiracy dungarees on?
“The tool, which you will find through a newly created portal on your Facebook or Instagram page, is part of an effort to ‘protect our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to undermine our democracy,’ Facebook said in a blog post.”
Seemingly suggesting all that “my name’s John Smith, honest” real-name policy (Wikipedia) malarkey wasn’t really even worth the virtual paper most trollin’ “bad actors” used to wipe their virtual arse with before throwing it at you regardless of whether they were Russian “troll army” or not.
But, peeking at what said “portal” is said to be aiming to do seemingly gives not much more than the “hiring 10,000 people including ad reviewers”, “fighting false news” and “reducing clickbait” similar in tone to the resolutions we all write on New Years Eve to forget by the 2nd January.
And the talk of “removing fake accounts” I imagine may distress—as you may recall it did on Twitter, especially for those that paid for them (cnet.com, Mar. 2015)—those that have built up marvelously large following of “friends” who suddenly find they only now have half that number, with the half left obviously being real “friends”—or at least real people—actually paying attention and noticing—or more likely not—that they were not as popular as they thought.
Recent/related stories
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- Facebook testing photo match technology to fight revenge porn (Blog 8th November 2017)
- “Newsworthy” abuse okay with Twitter (Latest Picks 5th October 2017)
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