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Steve Bannon Caught Running a Network of Misinformation Pages On Facebook (gizmodo.com) 184

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Steve Bannon has been outed for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook. Who could have possibly seen this coming. Facebook has talked a big game about monitoring election misinformation, and yet the independent activist network Avaaz said it had to alert the company to the pages before it removed them for coordinated inauthentic behavior. The group didn't need an army of 35,000 moderators to figure this out, and yet Facebook consistently fails to spot the troublemakers that journalists and researchers with less funding and staff seem to keep spotting. As they say: makes you think. Avaaz said that it alerted Facebook to the pages on Friday night. By that time, in aggregate, Avaaz says the top seven pages -- Brian Kolfage, Conservative Values, The Undefeated, We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic, American Joe, and Trump at War -- had collectively gained over 2.45 million followers. In some cases, Bannon and Brian Kolfage, co-conspirator in the "We Build the Wall, Inc." fundraiser/alleged scam, were co-admins.

Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran told Gizmodo that its team identified the Bannon ring by running an "influencer analysis," keeping tabs on frequent guests on Bannon's podcasts and pages affiliated with Bannon's former "We Build the Wall" grift. Avaaz, which is comprised of 40 investigators and data analysts, has kept tabs on habitual misinformers and their coordinated sharing through custom software. They noticed that the Bannon-related pages tended to publish content at the same time and linked to the Populist Press, an even more right-wing Drudge Report copycat trafficking in disproven election fraud claims. The pages avoided warning labels by laundering links through the Populist Press domain rather post the original URLs for stories Facebook had already flagged as misinformation. Avaaz says they'd previously alerted Facebook to a network of 180 Bannon-connected pages and groups which have been sharing misinformation.
"We're a small team run with small donations," Quran told Gizmodo. "If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them."

Quran added that Avaaz has been alerting Facebook to its problems all year. "If 2016 was an accident," Quran added, "2020 has been negligence."
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Steve Bannon Caught Running a Network of Misinformation Pages On Facebook

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Slashdot and the Gawker network complaining about misinformation campaigns is the most 2020 thing to behold.

  • ...but why is any Facebook user under any obligation, what-so-ever, to provide factual information on that platform?
    • It's not. However being a cesspool of shit is not very conducive to keeping your customers ...err... products happy. Hell the reason I never use Facebook for anything more than messenger is precisely because the feed turned into a never ending torrent of bile over the years.

      • The $64,000 question is "Does it do any good?"

        Groups of people with personal and views deemed offensive on a platform have proven time and again that they are willing to relocate to another social media site, perhaps less in the light than the Facebook, yet accessible all the same.

        It may (or may not) ultimately benefit Facebook and the like to pejoratively dismiss unpopular viewpoints. I just dislike the trend toward removing opinions outside of a particular belief set. The better part of coming to a reaso

        • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

          The better part of coming to a reasonable conclusion is to consider information from all sources,

          Tell me, what reasonable conclusion can I draw if I consider information from NASA and the Flat Earth Society?

          Some information is just shit and does not deserve consideration.

        • That depends on the majority view of your platform. Are there more insane nutjobs out there, or are there more normal people who'd rather not deal with insane nutjobs. The most popular platforms in the world seem to have universally agreed on the latter and I'm sure their users would shed no tears to see a minority of the user base piss off and take their verbal diarrhea to Voat or 4chan.

    • I dont agree with how they run Facebook but it is private property. I dont agree with censorship. So what if he had a bunch of pages. But Facebook neither has a duty to ensure it only has "accurate" information nor is it restricted from censorship. There is a need for a free speech platform, even for speech we disagree with. This is the proper response. People need to make alternative to Facebook, not take the bait and expose web platforms to huge liabilities. The law mainly just codifies what is common sen

      • So you'll have no problem when I find your real life identity and get on a bunch of QAnon sites and declare that you are a "deep state pedophile" and add your name and home address.

        So free speech is an absolute right, and it's OK to yell "fire" in a crowded place. Or so you claim.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Advertisers don't like being associated with the attacks on you democracies.

      I'm sure Facebook would claim they care about their users too, but it's the advertising thing.

      • What triggered the YouTube "adocalypse" was a bunch of brand adverts for stuff like Coke and Taco Bell showing up in front of videos about What Supremacy (the ones with a favorable view thereof).
    • but you don't get to run multiple accounts for the purposes of manipulating their website and the information on it. These are sock puppet accounts, and nobody likes those because they ruin discourse on on platform.

      And before you go off and say "The discourse on Facebook sucks!" maybe if they'd ban all the sock puppets that wouldn't so the case...
    • Reading the article what Gizmodo and activist group Avaaz are asking for would affect more than just right-wing Facebook pages but let-wing and non-political pages as well. They actually acknowledged they have no proof Bannon was running these pages. They claim they are Bannon-related pages and the connection can be as simple as Bannon had them on his podcast; this screams of the nonsense that was the Youtube radicalization claims. These Bannon-related pages were found to be fraudulent because they linked t
    • Legally, or morally? (People tend to conflate the two.)

  • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @05:46PM (#60709316) Journal

    Wait wait, it turns out that Steve Bannon is a scumbag?

    Damn, no one could have seen that coming.

  • by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @05:49PM (#60709340)
    ...begins 'operations'.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Nocturrne ( 912399 ) on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @07:22PM (#60709748)

    Avaaz seems to only target their definition of "misinformation" from conservatives - I don't see any history of them investigating misinformation from liberals. Such a biased organization is clearly just part of the propaganda machine from the opposite political side and cannot be trusted.

    • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

      Maybe, just maybe, that's because there is so much shit coming from the conservative corner? Naaah, can't be it, it must be liberal bias.

      Look, a lot of conservative shibboleths are plain false: IQ is not an objective measurement of racial superiority, women are not just baby-bearing machines, black people do have equal rights, Earth's average surface temperature is rising, and Joe Biden won fair and square.

      So stop whining.

  • Facebook is supposed to be a *platform* not a publisher. Facebook has no more businesses determining what you post, than your phone company would have in determining what you can say over the phone.

    Facebook has a long, and shameful, history of censoring any opinions they don't happen to agree with. That is acting as a publisher, not a platform.

    • Facebook is, for the moment, a private company and can choose to moderate their platform (or not) as they see fit. Call that being a publisher if you want. It doesn't really matter.
      • There's a lot of terrible things that are legal, dude.

        Facebook does not present itself as a partisan op.
        • I was disagreeing with OPs assertion that Facebook "is supposed to be a platform." You can wish for it to be whatever you like, but it isn't "supposed" to be anything but what its owners want it to be.

          There's a lot of terrible things that are legal, dude.

          Agreed. Like running a network of misinformation pages on a social media network. But, like it or not, it's protected under the first amendment so no one is coming to take Bannon off to jail (for this, at least).

    • THIS JUST IN, walterbyrd ( 182728 ) FAILS TO UNDERSTAND SECTION 230 OF THE CDA.

      STOP THE FUCKING PRESS.

      Seriously, what a total noob you are. Do you know anything?

  • Having just listened to the Radiolab podcast "Post No Evil Redux" (which I recommend, and directly relates to this article) - I have a solution for censorship.

    It centers around the idea that "Freedom of speech doesn't imply freedom of reach". So, First amendment allows people to say almost anything, but the constitution was written at a time that for these words to reach a large audience the people you spoke to would have to retell your idea. That or you'd need to publish it in media.

    Put simply, if you

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