The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 20, 2018 at 7:32:57 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading
> Social platforms have a responsibility to address misinformation as a systemic problem, instead of reacting to case 
> after case.
> By NYT Editorial Board
> Oct 19 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/facebook-twitter-journalism-misinformation.html>
>
> A network of Facebook troll accounts operated by the Myanmar military parrots hateful rhetoric against Rohingya 
> Muslims. Viral misinformation runs rampant on WhatsApp in Brazil, even as marketing firms there buy databases of 
> phone numbersin order to spam voters with right-wing messaging. Homegrown campaigns spread partisan lies in the 
> United States.
>
> The public knows about each of these incitements because of reporting by news organizations. Social media 
> misinformation is becoming a newsroom beat in and of itself, as journalists find themselves acting as unpaid content 
> moderators for these platforms.
>
> It’s not just reporters, either. Academic researchers and self-taught vigilantes alike scour through networks of 
> misinformation on social media platforms, their findings prompting — or sometimes, failing to prompt — the takedown 
> of propaganda.
>
> It’s the latest iteration of a journalistic cottage industry that started out by simply comparing and contrasting 
> questionable moderation decisions — the censorship of a legitimate news article, perhaps, or an example of terrorist 
> propaganda left untouched. Over time, the stakes have become greater and greater. Once upon a time, the big Facebook 
> censorship controversy was the banning of female nipples in photos. That feels like a idyllic bygone era never to 
> return.
>
> The internet platforms will always make some mistakes, and it’s not fair to expect otherwise. And the task before 
> Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and others is admittedly herculean. No one can screen everything in the fire 
> hose of content produced by users. Even if a platform makes the right call on 99 percent of its content, the 
> remaining 1 percent can still be millions upon millions of postings. The platforms are due some forgiveness in this 
> respect. 
>
> It’s increasingly clear, however, that at this stage of the internet’s evolution, content moderation can no longer be 
> reduced to individual postings viewed in isolation and out of context. The problem is systemic, currently manifested 
> in the form of coordinated campaigns both foreign and homegrown. While Facebook and Twitter have been making strides 
> toward proactively staving off dubious influence campaigns, a tired old pattern is re-emerging — journalists and 
> researchers find a problem, the platform reacts and the whole cycle begins anew. The merry-go-round spins yet again.
>
> This week, a question from The New York Times prompted Facebook to take down a network of accounts linked to the 
> Myanmar military. Although Facebook was already aware of the problem in general, the request for comment from The 
> Times flagged specific instances of “seemingly independent entertainment, beauty and informational pages” that were 
> tied to a military operation that sowed the internet with anti-Rohingya sentiment.
>
> The week before, The Times found a number of suspicious pages spreading viral misinformation about Christine Blasey 
> Ford, the woman who has accused Brett Kavanaugh of assault. After The Times showed Facebook some of those pages, the 
> company said it had already been looking into the issue. Facebook took down the pages flagged by The Times, but 
> similar pages that hadn’t yet been shown to the company stayed up.
>
> It’s not just The Times, and it’s not just Facebook. Again and again, the act of reporting out a story gets reduced 
> to outsourced content moderation.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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