<story><title>Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>decebalus1</author><text>Remember this? &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=15790687&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=15790687&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;To some extent it&amp;#x27;s still going on. Protests are still happening (and it&amp;#x27;s really bad) so lately I&amp;#x27;ve been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about:&lt;p&gt;- anti-protests&lt;p&gt;- anti-EU and basically nationalistic bullshit&lt;p&gt;- religion and how that will solve everything&lt;p&gt;- government does nothing wrong and protesters are a bunch of thugs&lt;p&gt;- links to well-known fake news websites&lt;p&gt;- inciting violence while appearing to be pro-protest&lt;p&gt;Groups of accounts such as these are brigading some popular news postings and I don&amp;#x27;t really find them inside the anti-protester echo rooms.&lt;p&gt;the accounts look and feel similarly to the spam profiles which were prevalent a few years back having supermodel headshots as profile pictures.&lt;p&gt;I reported about 12 such profiles and the response from Facebook was that I should block these accounts as a resolution, as they aren&amp;#x27;t doing anything wrong per Facebook community guidelines and they are legit accounts.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &amp;#x27;famous&amp;#x27; people who are famously anti-government (and trolls, that&amp;#x27;s true, like this guy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.facebook.com&amp;#x2F;macacaur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.facebook.com&amp;#x2F;macacaur&lt;/a&gt;) are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>narrator</author><text>How do you know what goes on outside of your direct perception anyway?  It used to be conventional media channels and they would print what was arguably propaganda, but there wouldn&amp;#x27;t be any Russian trolls to poke holes in it.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if the Iraq WMD story broke now.  All those Russian trolls spamming Facebook running around saying it was bullshit.  That would be total chaos!  Why don&amp;#x27;t people trust the mainstream?&lt;p&gt;The reality is that propaganda works.  You think you know what fake news is and what&amp;#x27;s reality, but we never did and most people follow the time-honored tradition of letting our chosen authority figures tell us who is conspiring with the bad guys.  This frees us from the cognitive pain of considering their arguments and evidence because they are puppets of some nebulous evil forces and therefore safe to ignore.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>decebalus1</author><text>Remember this? &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=15790687&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=15790687&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;To some extent it&amp;#x27;s still going on. Protests are still happening (and it&amp;#x27;s really bad) so lately I&amp;#x27;ve been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about:&lt;p&gt;- anti-protests&lt;p&gt;- anti-EU and basically nationalistic bullshit&lt;p&gt;- religion and how that will solve everything&lt;p&gt;- government does nothing wrong and protesters are a bunch of thugs&lt;p&gt;- links to well-known fake news websites&lt;p&gt;- inciting violence while appearing to be pro-protest&lt;p&gt;Groups of accounts such as these are brigading some popular news postings and I don&amp;#x27;t really find them inside the anti-protester echo rooms.&lt;p&gt;the accounts look and feel similarly to the spam profiles which were prevalent a few years back having supermodel headshots as profile pictures.&lt;p&gt;I reported about 12 such profiles and the response from Facebook was that I should block these accounts as a resolution, as they aren&amp;#x27;t doing anything wrong per Facebook community guidelines and they are legit accounts.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, &amp;#x27;famous&amp;#x27; people who are famously anti-government (and trolls, that&amp;#x27;s true, like this guy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.facebook.com&amp;#x2F;macacaur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.facebook.com&amp;#x2F;macacaur&lt;/a&gt;) are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trhway</author><text>&amp;gt;
are getting their accounts disabled every couple of weeks and require photo ID proof to re-enable.&lt;p&gt;Sounds like hi tech version if voter ID and serving basically the same purpose.</text></comment>