Facebook's fake news problem is no longer a Russian problem: it's at home

Facebook's protracted fight to eliminate the spread of misleading information on its platform took a bold step Thursday, when the company swept over 800 pages for promoting what it calls "inauthentic behavior." ".

The reputation of the social network for false information exploded in the 2016 presidential election, overrun by political spam deployed largely by Russian trolls and foreign profiteers. But the latest efforts of the company indicate that the Russian boogeyman has given way to something much more thorny: fake news of a house variety.

Facebook's purge has touched hundreds of political accounts, many of which have garnered millions of followers through the publication of partisan and sometimes overtly false content. Both liberal and conservative pages have been erased because, as the company says, they used clickbait to generate traffic and sell ads.

As the company wrote:

Today, we are removing 559 pages and 251 accounts that have consistently violated our spam policies and coordinated unauthentic behavior. Given the activity we observed – and its timing in anticipation of the mid-term elections in the United States – we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action. Many used fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same name and published huge amounts of content on a network of groups and pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many have used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it actually was. Others were advertising farms using Facebook to mislead people into believing that they were legitimate political debate forums.

Facebook's rationale for removing problematic accounts – using duplicate profiles, artificially boosting statistics, exacerbating political tensions to boost ad revenue – is tricky. He omits mention of political censorship, bypassing an allegation against Facebook by conservative groups in particular. According to Facebook's justification, it's not the content that's involved, but the way in which the content has been posted.

This, however, can not obscure an essential point: the mid-term sessions of 2018 are just beyond the horizon and the accounts scanned during the purge were often completely political.

By the Washington Post:

Pages and national accounts removed by Facebook on Thursday had a strong political bias. Nation in Distress, who claimed to be Trump's first proponent, recently shared a link to a story that described Maxine Waters as "insane". Founded in 2012, it had amassed more than 3.2 million likes and more than 3 million followers on Thursday morning before it was removed. The linked page in its "about" section corresponds to a website called "America's Freedom Fighters", which published duplicate content and press releases that appeared to have been written by others on violent crimes and gun rights – all with an ads sidebar. A site administrator declined to comment.

Page administrators do not necessarily adhere to Facebook's logic. Chris Metcalf, publisher of Reasonable People Unite, a leftist party, compares the disappearance of his overnight account to an infringement on freedom of expression, rather than the society realizing that she had often promised to remove false information.

He said wapo:

"I am a legitimate political activist. I do not have a blog clickbait. I do not have fake news site. And I do not do anything that all the other pages in this space do not do. "

Even with fewer Russian state actors invading Facebook's current thread – it is already assumed already settled -, the disproportionate influence of society in American political discourse continues at its usual pace and problematic.

Source: Facebook via Washington Post, The Verge