> In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms.
Why wouldn’t this article mention the Black American content as well? Certainly this is newsworthy, given the crucial implication here: foreign actors were pushing opposite views on many topics in order to manufacture division.
> Why wouldn’t this article mention the Black American content as well?
Relevant Magazine isn't a news outlet. It's a Christian culture magazine. So the point of the article is "Hey, our culture is being hijacked", not to give a full picture of what's happening in the news.
The RELEVANT Story
RELEVANT is a multimedia company whose purpose is to impact culture and give voice to what God is doing in and through our generation.......Our Mission
We’re twenty- and thirtysomething Christians seeking God and striving to impact the world around us.
In general, I prefer when people posting on HN post the URL to the original reporting, rather than one of the many summaries different venues write riding their coat-tails.
In this case, the first sentence ends in "internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal", with a link -- why not just post the MIT Technology Review article in the first place?
[Also, just as an aside, don't forget that obviously many Christians are Black people].
[And also, as far as your original question, if you scroll down in the MIT Tech Review article to the charts from which the headline of this re-report come from, you'll see that the troll farms were particularly successful in their "Christian" positioning, with 19 of the top 20 pages. The other groups targetted, they didn't achieve that level of penetration. This is notable, but I agree the other groups they were targetting is also notable!]
To me, seeing a Christian media outlet cover the story is interesting in itself, so I think this is sufficiently different from the MIT Technology Review article to merit its own post. However, since I don't know what kind of reach Relevant Magazine has among American Christians (and I suspect it's very little) I'm surprised to see it on the front page.
I encourage people to contribute to all kinds of things I'm not a "front" for. ???
Clearly, they are sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, and don't particularly hide it, it's right there on the page! "Front" to me implies that a) they are operated by the thing, not just sympathetic, and b) they try to hide that fact.
Those things don't appear to be true? But sure, you can tell people they are sympathetic to Black Lives Matter movement, if you think this is important context for their facebook reporting re-posts, why not. About half of the USA would currently apparently agree, and half disagree, with that sympathy. (I don't think the half that would agree are all 'fronts'!)
I don't know if they are sympathetic to "antifa" or not (which is not the same thing or people as Black Lives Matter, despite right-wing talking points), but... I am, personally.
I'm certainly in favor of contributing to bail funds, which is a pretty basic part of the legal system (like it or not), and which is not even the same thing as legal-defense funding. It's quite milque-toast, yet ignored.
Bail was designed to ensure the defendant arrives at the trial by taking a fraction of their wealth as collateral.
Instead, we now live in a society where most americans cannot afford a surprise $500 bill. We're really stuck-in-first-gear here if this is what we settle for.
The two of you broke the site guidelines egregiously with this flamewar. We ban accounts that do that, so no more of this, please—it's not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for.
Lol, mask off. I don't debate bad-faith actors, and that's all this reply is; sensationalist and fantastical; not rooted in the reality.
"Burning down cities"; a few buildings across seperate incidents. Reporting focused entirely on senstationalizing that, and ignored the very real, very NEEDED progress made by the remainder of the protests.
Just pre-empptively (because I won't be further replying to this sub-sub-thread): It's well documented that inciting of violence is OFTEN done by undercover cops, well-to-do-white-supremacist-home-owners-using-spray-paint-for-the-first-time and neo-nazis.
Edit: One more thing I can't let slide: Families can organize traditionally. Some don't get the privelege to choose; violence campaigns of austerity ripped apart their neighborhoods. Others self-determine that the traditional family structure doesn't suit them. Autonomy means we should be able to choose...
...either way, the forced assumption that "BLM is anti-family" is...WOW! This is a movement about family members having their loved one's LIVES ripped away by Illegitimate State Violence.
...The mental gymnastics you'd have to do to logically rest with the idea that BLM is somehow "anti-family", wow, ok buddy.
So nope, your little yugi-oh card does is not such a good uno-reverso, after all ♥
The two of you broke the site guidelines egregiously with this flamewar. We ban accounts that do that, so no more of this, please—it's not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for.
Are neo Nazis still active enough to be a significant part of the conflict around BLM? I was under the impression that while they're hateful and dangerous aholes, there numbers were so low to that interactions with them were rare?
This supercut should illustrate the way neo-nazis such as the proud boys [1]
are normalized and swept under the rug. Some 30% of the US voters will enthusiastically support such groups, and another ~20% happily look the other way.
Fascism is like a weed that must be continually demonstrated against. Else you end up with police departments executing their own countrymen in the street, pregnant and naked, gun to the back of the head; convinced that if they don't they "betray their brothers in arms". [2]
It is an insidious ideology brought about by increasingly desperate conditions of the proletariat and stoked by "might makes right" worship of the "glorious leader".
Ah I see, the term neo-nazi no longer requires a direct connection to the Nazi ideology.
I tend to reserve the label for those that follow the philosophy's that inspired the
Nazis such as the white supremacists Houston Stewart Chamberlain. I'd expect them to hold to racial purity beliefs.
I guess language changes but it does seem imprecise.
I'd say one of the dangers history teaches is the mistake of painting the other tribe as a monster. When you no longer see them as human you become a monster yourself and can justify ugly behavior.
The other is a fellow human capable of change, of redemption.
“… it was exported from white supremacist America to Germany.”
Stumbling upon that particular panel in the permanent exhibit at the Dokumentationszentrum at the former Reichsparteitagsgelände (“Nazi Rally Grounds”) in Nuremberg was an eye-opener - I have a sharp memory of seeing it the first time. The Nazis borrowed heavily from the Jim Crow laws that were still in force in the US South.
Note: the Dokumentationszentrum is a completely different, though complementary museum to the Nürnberger Prozess Memorium (“Nuremberg Trials museum”). Though far less well-known, I think it’s the more important of the two (the other is worthwhile, don’t get me wrong!)
How does a “normal,” “cultured” Western country go from being a fragile democracy to Hell on Earth for many of its erstwhile citizens and neighbors? Relatively little space there is spent on post-1939; at that point, individual resistance was futile, and there are many other sites that cover the greater horrors of the second half of the Nazi regime, but focuses on 1931-1939, when it might have been possible to stop.
The display text is mostly in German, but the English language audio guide is good. If any of you ever visit Nuremberg, I will walk you through it.
>How does a “normal,” “cultured” Western country go from being a fragile democracy to Hell on Earth for many of its erstwhile citizens and neighbors?
This something that deserves more thought in the modern day. Not only did it happen in Germany, hell on earth broke out in the Soviet union and North Korea.
You are free to disagree, but that doesn't change the facts of the matter.
A youtube channel by Saint Andrewism is a wonderful educational source which covers all the matters at hand in detail.
In particular, you may be interested in the history discussed in "The case against the Gu!IIotine", as well as "Nonviolence, a path to freedom?"
I'd also suggest Beau of the 5th Column; he has bite-sized five minute "Let's talk about"s which address specific current events as they develop, and add context via a short history lesson.
I'd finally point out that the State Monopoly on Violence is inherent.
I'd also point out that MLK was white-washed, and that neoliberal white culture curated the parts of his speeches what suited it.
I'd love to tell people that violence isn't the answer, but I can't do that unless I'm ready to feed them.
This quote, too, also is logical to me:
Malatesta: "Violence .. is eminently corrupting." largely paraphrasing this one but it rings true to the authors original sentiment.
So, in short, you can feel lucky, because you have the privilege to take whichever side in debate you choose, and you don't have to feel the collective grief and anxiety [which comes with] being targeted for something as arbitrary as the amount of melanin in your epidermis.
I think the argument isn't generally that non violence is always the only option it's that the current situation doesn't warrant violence.
I understand this is a subjective point of view as it is in response to police violence.
If things are as bad as the media suggests, that racist cops are targeting and killing black men and getting away with it then yes they system needs to be over thrown and the argument to use violence is easy to make.
But many don't believe things are that bad. I don't know as I don't live in these neighborhoods. But I think it's valuable to examine why people disagree on the issue.
Of course! A random Medium post by "Officer A. Cab"! Anyone spreading a bet line on this being a Russian outlet or an antwinkfa member writing fan fiction?
>We are all affected, but some much more harshly than others.
Somethings affect children more harshly than adults, no doubt.
> Black people accrue psychic trauma every time another news story like this breaks.
> Being able to "examine the issue" without being at this disadvantage is a privilege.
Whenever I read something like this, the cynic in me wants to reply, "If <insert group> are really that psychologically fragile, clearly they're not ready to participate fully in a liberal democratic society, which necessarily requires being to separate oneself and one's emotions from the issues being discussed."
As a matter of fact, every <insert group> is really that psychologically fragile. No more so than a certain <insert group> that is too "psychologically fragile" to handle the terrible burden of having a really well paid, cushy, slack-happy desk job with great benefits and WFH freedom, without a new article about burnout reaching the HN front page every week.
As for "being to separate oneself and one's emotions from the issues being discussed"...
- That would disqualify effectively much every participant in a modern liberal democracy, rendering it a non-democracy.
- That doesn't make much sense to begin with, as the impact of issues and policy on "oneself and one's emotions" is the fundamental measure of good/bad even if you're a robotic utilitarian.
>If you oppose the idea that Black Lives Matter, that's a white supremacist talking point.
No it's not. It's a factual, logical talking point. If you oppose the idea that Black lives matter, then you're being a racist. Black Lives Matter != Black lives matter
>If [anonymous, spontaneously organizing locals counter-protesting white supremacists aka] Anti-fascists oppose you...it's because you're being an asshole.
"We call ourselves the Anti-Bad Guy squad and we label our opponents Bad Guys. How can people not understand this? We can never be terrorists because we're fighting the Bad Guys. It's so simple to understand. Everything we do is justified because of our name."[0]
You've become so predictable (NPC) someone meme'd you years ago.
>Troll farms reached 140M Americans a month on FB before 2020 elections
I can imagine most of HN sees a headline that boils down to "lots of stuff on facebook is fake" and not care. A headline with a clear subject that people can love/hate is much better clickbait.
A little late here but just want to add, the original MIT article is paywalled if you’ve read more than your 2 free monthly stories there. The Relevant magazine story is not.
Also it is of interest that a Christian culture magazine is reporting on this, as that’s the kind of thing that needs to happen en masse to fix this problem. It needs to become a main topic of discussion in the communities being targeted by troll farms, and not just in tech circles.
That this article shows that is happening is newsworthy in and of itself.
Crucially, though, the report concludes that the farms’ motivations seem to be monetary. It points out that their content did not focus solely on divisive content, but on whatever generates clicks. Outrage bait is naturally a part of it, but the controversial content seems to be a means rather than the end goal.
If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth.
Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks.
I have a few thoughts on all of this. First off in a way I sympathize with all the folks running content farms abroad. You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I also think that much of this fake news is on Americans for eating the shit up.
One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information.
I see your point but I don't necessarily agree. A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Navigating a trustless information landscape is incredibly time consuming as looking for sources and invalidating information is much more time consuming than producing it.
Requiring people to stop acting on their "outrage" feeling is also extraordinary damageing to society as it also stops people from reacting to actual issues.
Finally, if you look at the savvy people do you really believe that they are actually better at detecting fakes? It seems that they are better at identifying information sources that can be trusted, but once trust is established I'm pretty sure they don't spend all their cognitive resources trying to disprove everything they read (well some probably are).
So a bit like with malware being more abundant on more popular OS, even if everyone moved to reputable sources, the trolls would move as well.
> A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information.
Another major aspect of a healthy society is distrust. People trusting anything they see written down is a major issue for a healthy society. This was rarely discussed when everything that was written down was controlled by the large media conglomerates, but it is becoming a huge point of contention today. Traditional media are furious that they are losing their unique ability to shape publish discourse, and are desperately lashing (there was a NYT article outraged that some site was permitting the creation of private rooms with no control of what is being discussed).
Censorship with little justification, all on top of sneering mockery of everything you may believe in, doesn't exactly strike me as the best way to promote trust.
>A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information.
You missed the root cause. The mainstream media lost the trust of the people with their biased reporting. This leads people to look for alternate resources, which are being manipulated like this.
> "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy"
Well, it's both:
* For misinformation spread through centralized media (TV, radio, newspapers, etc), we do need to stop it, because the privilege of running a media company comes with responsibility to not spread misinformation. The same applies to any official government channels.
* For misinformation that spreads person-to-person, we do need to address people's lack of ability to think critically and search for truth. This is a long-term goal that can be achieved by teaching critical thinking classes (like philosophy) in K12. Finland is taking this approach already[1].
Social media like Facebook falls somewhere in between. To the extent that Facebook can act as a media company (e.g. by providing a platform for groups with membership in tens of thousands), it should have the same responsibilities as TV stations and newspapers of comparable reach (in my personal, biased opinion).
While it doesn't make sense to stop people telling things to each other, it does make sense to go after the hubs where misinformation originates and spreads to many people at once (in my biased opinion).
When it comes to individuals, well, that's why we need educational reforms.
Side note: the entire point of Russian propaganda/misinformation campaigns is not to spread any particular viewpoint, it's to destroy people's ability to search for truth (everything is fake, might as well pick what resonates the most!), reason critically (bad faith reasoning 101), and hold a civil discussion to find common ground (any disagreement can be won by making the other person angry).
It is self-sustaining; affected people start coming up with their own alternative realities which spread like wildfire. Tribalism and fake news are the result.
> One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information.
I agree with the "ought" here, but don't think it's practical.
I think it's more likely that "democratizing" misinformation/lies/propaganda, combined with online anon- or pseudo-nymity, is simply a (strong) net-negative for, especially, democratic states, as much as we really really want it to be net-beneficial, and as much as we can imagine a world in our heads where it's net-beneficial. I think it may simply not be what we hoped, and not be practically able to ever be that.
I wonder if this is a problem that fixes itself naturally generation by generation. There is a propaganda / propaganda immunity arms race that seems to always eventually favor the skeptic. I think advertising is a good example - when you look at advertisements in, say, the 1980s is would be immediately rejected by any young person today who has a natural 'inoculation' to blatant advertising like that. Instead we have more subtle paid product placements from influencers and the like. I feel like maybe the same is true of outrage pornography clickbait farms like this. I suspect the primary customers of this sort of content skew older and as those generations die off a more subtle form of divisive propaganda might emerge, or it might just become less effective over time.
> If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth.
> Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks.
Not even. Russians noticed it and did the exact same thing, but everything that happens in Russia or is done by someone of a Russian ethnicity is connected to the Russian government when reported on in the US/UK.
Agreed. Everyone, regardless of their political leanings, tends to be ignoring the elephant in the room: why is there such an insatiable demand in America for conspiracy theories and white supremacy? It would serve all of us better to look at the root cause instead of getting hung up on the symptoms of the disease.
Well. Given their circumstances. There are relatively few resources where these folks are and little opportunity. If it's either work in the farm or factory and make $1/day or work online generating fake content and make $5/day, I totally get why those guys are flocking to the latter. For them it's a pretty simple choice. Work here and struggle to feed your family, or work there and don't struggle to feed your family.
I don't know if this is actually the case everywhere, but I would assume it's the case in many places.
> Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks.
Whenever they started doing that specifically through false-front Facebook groups, Russia has been doing that to the West nonstop, through most media that it could conceivably be done, since it became an independent country, taking over from the USSR which had been doing it for generations previously.
You are presenting this as if this is somehow unique to Russia. This is true of every large country against all of its rivals. Anything Russia is doing on this front is dwarfed by what the US, UK, France, Germany etc. are doing.
Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality. Both are propaganda.
One way or the other, Facebook now seems to be a pipeline for spreading propaganda: for ad clicks (marketing), ideological reasons, or worse.
It’s social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero, while its negative effects are worse than ever.
> It’s social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero
Unless you live entirely in their Messenger app, which I do. The timeline is full of contraganda, spam, and things like `Tell me your favorite color without saying it` bullshit
Just hide every content farm I find, and my feed is my old school friends day to day lives, local marketplace ads, and DnD Mini-painting groups. The worst thing I see are ads that are irrelevant, or my uncles deranged rants about his local politics.
Took me about 2 weeks of hitting hide from content farms to train the algo to steer me away from that junk.
Hmm, I wonder if Facebook could do that automatically? Like, write an algorithm to detect content farms and automatically hide them from your newsfeed.
They have that kind of algorithm, but most people want, or at least behave as though they want, outrage bait, and cute content farm affirmations. The moment you take a moment to be proactive and have ownership over your experience the algorithm happily shows you less crap and more people.
I'd argue that the only meaningful benefit (to me at least) of Facebook is as a contact list and finder. I would delete my Facebook instantly if I felt fairly confident that I wouldn't lose out on any outreach from less-than-weekly acquaintances.
"Reply to this post" things only exist because if lots of people reply, the algorithm thinks you're popular, and thus will show your posts more often without you having to pay.
> social utility seems to have dwindled to almost zero
That's not true. It's actually the most effective grassroots-politics tool out there, for "regular people". Everyone has an account already, so signing up to this or that group takes seconds and you can get down to the business of actually organising.
I saw it recently in my neighbourhood: local authority wanted to push a stupid change in road layout, a couple of guys set up a FB group, and in less than a month it had hundreds of members - the road change was protested so vigorously that it had to be scrapped, something rare around this town.
Am I annoyed by this state of things? Heck yeah, I hate FB, but realistically, it's often a force for good for "normal people".
Oh, no argument there. And the report does point out potential relationships with political actors. I’m just amused by the irony of these types of articles making exaggerations and unfounded conclusions.
> One way or the other, Facebook now seems to be a pipeline for spreading propaganda:
Facebook's overt business model is to be a platform for advertising (not just via overt ads, but also through paid reach of what looks like organic content). “Advertising” is just another word for “propaganda”.
So, you've noticed that Facebook “now seems to be” exactly what Facebook overtly is.
I don't mind ads interspersed with content. Like, I google something, I get some outright ads, and some higher-placed, paid-for links. But it's still a useful service for finding things.
Facebook appears to be nothing but clickbaity ads, which if I'm lucky, is trying to get me to buy something I don't need. If I'm unlucky, it's ideological poison for hire fueling culture wars or foreign agents meddling in elections.
I basically never use Facebook now, except if a friend asks me to post something, but whenever I do, and scroll through the timeline, I always end up depressed. Oh and yes, bombarded with all the weird stuff discussed in this thread.
This is pretty interesting. We should all know this by now, but it's a nice reminder. Outrage sells, and when sites must increase clicks and "engagement," they will necessarily be generating outrage.
Did these websites and social networks just discover that "outrage sells" or they've conditioned us to get more and more outrageous?!! It's kinda hard to tell!
This really does show something though, namely how financial motives drive outrage and polarization as much if not more than political ones.
On the YouTuber front there were more than one who jumped on the alt-right shock jock bandwagon back then for the same reason. It brought clicks both from the people attracted to that stuff and from the people outraged by it or just gawking at it.
Unfortunately I don't find that FB is in decline. I've found that groups organized on FB on any particular hobby topic are much more successful and active than on other platforms. Recently formed a group for discussion of DIY electric farm equipment. 70 members joined in 1 day.
FB feels like it should be a public utility. It is clearly filling a niche that people feel is needed. The barrier to entry to use is very low. I've encountered so many people who simply don't use other parts of the Internet much at all, and expect almost all content to be mediated through Facebook.
The thing is, because of Facebook's algorithm, even a hobby DIY group doesn't get treated as a completely-neutral public utility space.
FB will still prioritize things that generate interactions. So if little bits of controversy slip into the DIY discussions, that's still what bubbles to the top of everyone's feed.
It hasn't necessarily happened to your group, it may not necessarily happen, but the point is that this is what the algorithm was optimized to do.
I looked at the original report. Here are some quotes:
“The content isn't violating or borderline. It does skew very hard towards clickbait and engagement bait, however.”
“The religious pages tend to be a mixture of the heavy engagement bait like the meme from “Light of the World” and sensational click bait stories about children, animals, and police officers.”
“Why Do They Do It? Money is definitely a big reason. There are a few ways to monetize an FB page.
1. Link to a domain where you show ads
2. Enter into our partnership programs
1. Instant Articles
2. Ad Breaks
3. Do sponsored posting and sharing
4. Sell the Page after it reaches a large size.”
“Mostly, they seem to want to skim a quick buck off of their audience. But there are signs they have been in contact with the IRA... If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there.”
The last quote is the one talking about potential political links. There are some serious concerns, but not as concrete as the claims made by the article.
True, I guess my interpretation also erred in favor of the other explanation, but the political motivations as interpreted by the article are far from clear-cut.
> Crucially, though, the report concludes that the farms’ motivations seem to be monetary. It points out that their content did not focus solely on divisive content, but on whatever generates clicks.
And who would be behind it if they followed the money? My money is on parties like the Heritage Foundation, which is a quite open front for rich conservatives to pump money into certain goals, and I'm sure there's plenty more that have escaped the spotlight for now.
I mean yeah it's a conspiracy, but since it's in broad daylight nobody cares - it's not shady if it's out in the open.
> And who would be behind it if they followed the money?
Advertisers, probably. I worked in adtech doing fraud detection back in ~2013 and “fake news” sites were already prevalent, but their business model was usually boring old advertising. They were also big on ad fraud (e.g. serving ads in hidden iframes).
That’s not to say that the Kremlin/IRA were not behind some of it, but Occam’s razor is that most fake news is just a result of sites with no incentive to do honest journalism trying to drive clicks.
I don’t think Heritage Foundation is nearly hip enough or digitally savvy enough to make money this way. Their business model is to spend money on digital platforms like Facebook, fundraise from rich conservatives to enable that, and take a cut to pay for staff and overhead.
This is more likely Eastern European scammers who are just looking to build an audience any way they can.
Have you ever heard of the Vault 7 WikiLeaks release? You should look into it. In sum: You can't make any assumptions about where anything is emanating from because all of it can be spoofed.
> A surprising number of Black Americans are Christians, too.
Why's does that surprise you? Christianity is most popular in poor black southern regions. Black people are more likely to be Christians than white people.
Christianity is also much stronger in Africa than in the West.
I think it's possible in the near future Christianity will become a predominantly black 'thing' worldwide.
Yes! One interesting phenomenon is that the churches originally set up by British missionaries in Africa are now establishing African missions in Britain.
It’s not exactly “surprising” but the New York City stereotype of a Christian anti-abortion voter is a rural white guy in Alabama but the statistical reality is that it’s a rural black guy in Alabama.
Just a reminder that that magazine has no connection to MIT. It simply licenses the name from the alumni association (which is how the association funds itself).
From what I gather, there was a relaunch in 1998, and MIT has owned it since 2001. In general, I’d be extremely surprised if MIT ever just licensed its name out.
> In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms.
It's also interesting that these are the groups that have been identified as the best targets for a propaganda campaign. (Edit: You would think this would be successful for a wide variety of groups across the political and social spectrum.)
Do you think it's a coincidence that this article is getting clicks on HN specifically?
It is implausible that people have noticed that serving "Christians" and "African Americans" content they want to click on is profitable, but nobody has put the data together to realize that they can do the same thing to "Liberals" and other favored groups here on HN.
It's just, those articles won't get upvoted and clicked on here. Nobody wants to talk about themselves or their favored groups getting targeted like this.
There's plenty of people here reading this and congratulating themselves on how they aren't stupid like those groups, and then rolling straight over to their own content-farmed, clickbaited news solely posted for ad revenue that fits their own ideology one browser tab over.
"Those groups are the stupids! Not like imtelligent youse!" is one of the perennial clickbait stories. It's part of the reason why clickbait is so dangerous; a certain amount of division is inevitable, but people deliberately deepening the divisions just to make .0001 cents per view is not!
It is implausible that people have noticed that serving "Christians" and "African Americans" content they want to click on is profitable, but nobody has put the data together to realize that they can do the same thing to "Liberals" and other favored groups here on HN.
> 3 Only one of those groups helped elect a Russian asset
I dont usually care for politics but nobody has given me any convincing arguments on the matter. I have seen Russia gain more with Biden shutting down the pipeline. If someone is colluding with you what have they gained thus far? I just don’t see it at all.
I don't think our power is any weaker if you're talking about military power. Is the perception around the world about America different? Sure, but we're definitely nowhere near weaker, although now the Taliban has some high tech equipment, let's hope they don't figure out how to maintain and recreate any of it.
I was mainly talking about soft power and our alliances.
I'd say we are worse off militarily though, in a relative sense as other powers are rising, eg NK has nukes, China is flexing its muscle _much_ more, Russia's position is better, Iran is largely unchecked.
Our military and weapons development strategy is showing its weaknesses as well though. When exactly is the last thing we actually "won" ? How many places did we spend years/decades with our thumb up our ass, while bleeding lives and money?
Other articles have mentioned this before, but in reference to the second half of the entire decade.
Almost all "Black Lives Matter"[1][2] and anti-police[3] brutality, and pro-police status quo pages[3] on Facebook were run by foreigners residing in other countries. Some foreigners are firms and keeping score on how many in person protests and counterprotests they can accomplish.
That wouldn’t feed the narrative of conservative Christians being idiot rubes controlled by Russian disinformation and those on the left as being highly educated purveyors of truth.
We’re twenty- and thirtysomething Christians seeking God and striving to impact the world around us. We are people who want to live well—outwardly, creatively and intentionally. We are pro-Church and want to love our neighbors as ourselves. We serve the Creator, so we love great art—whether that be redemptive music, movies, books or design. We are daily seeking to show how God is at work in the world and in our generation.
Or because it’s not the focus of this website. Either way, you showed your true colors by using a biased assumption to accuse others of using biased assumptions.
I find that number so shocking that I question the methodology behind it. 140 million is nearly half of all Americans.
I can see nearly half of all Americans regularly engaging with SOME Facebook property, if you include Instagram and WhatsApp, etc. But the original old Facebook itself? In the 2020’s? I don’t know a single person who still uses that.
Perhaps your perspective is based on your demographics or location? In my anecdotal experience I know vanishingly few people who are not on “original old Facebook”. Male, 30s, southeast US.
There's a difference between "having an account" (I do too), versus "being any kind of active user".
I am responding to a quote claiming that troll fake news "reached 140 million on Facebook". Clearly, this is speaking to the latter.
You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms. That's not "I login once in a blue moon to spy on my ex", or "I have Messenger on my phone because a group that I'm in uses it to announce events". That is "I actively choose to consume angry and dumb political content on a regular basis". Perhaps I overestimate people, but 140 million seems high.
> You would have to be a fairly active user to run across deliberate misinformation, generated by offshore troll farms.
I think you are missing the point of this research. The entire point is that 19 of the top 20 Christian pages, for example, are produced by offshore troll farms, and until recently, this was generally not known.
So no, you do not need to be a fairly active user, not at all. Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide.
> Many, many casual users came across this because it was incredibly widely shared, and because Facebook's algorithms push such content far and wide.
That's my take, too. I know exactly the sort of mass-produced garbage content they're talking about, since I see things that my friends interacted with in my Feed. Therefore I am part of the 140 million people who was exposed to the media produced by these operations.
It's a simple thing, but many who write about propaganda don't seem to get it:
Propaganda can be divided into positioning and payload. Positioning is what is written to attract an audience. Payload is what the propagandist actually cares about.
There's very little payload. These farms aren't trying to "spread chaos" for its own sake. It's just a side effect of trying to gain an audience; clickbait media at its height was exactly the same.
Don't think the payload has anything to do with cultural issues. It's either narrow political stuff (I.e. getting people to believe Syrian rebels staged deadly attacks on themselves) or simply profit.
> These farms aren't trying to "spread chaos" for its own sake.
It's not their only goal, but it is definitely among them.
From Dugin's 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics, to this day required reading in Russian military schools:
> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".
For me the disappointment is Facebook. It seems to be all propaganda, possibly for clicks not payload, but very little actual content. Or really anything organic. Just a weird mish-mash of gamed blah.
Very true but the reason for it is that it is insanely profitable. This is the real ends for everything on FB. I always say "ain't no one convincing nobody about nothing" on FB. It is faux outrage for profit and until we start taxing digital advertising revenue, this will continue to be the world we live in.
"Oh Senator, this isn't advertising, nor revenue. This Elbonian Troll Farm is investing in Facebook by buying Class Adv-ERT shares, and owns a fraction of out Timeline business, and is entitled to post on it. In fact, I think we qualify for a tax cut."
I would argue that not having a payload makes it even more dangerous. At least, when there is a payload you know what you're dealing with. When there usually is no payload, it may suddenly appear and be very surprising in its reach and effect.
>Don't think the payload has anything to do with cultural issues.
Careful getting stuck in a frame where only a single antipattern exists. First, profit and narrow political stuff is a pretty broad area. Second, religion or culture has the potential to be a force in its own right... whether or not that's been the case here, so far.
Online religious movement exist, and some are big... but none have hit historic proportions yets. That doesn't mean none will. Christianity, or some other religious culture could easily have an arab spring, Trump or Brexit moment. Easily.
The existence of these pages can and might be of historical interest, depending on what happens to happen over the next 5-10 years. Christianity is a lot of people, don't underestimate the significance of religion.
This is an outrage. They should be run by American troll farms.
(Joking, but a huge part of the reformation wars that consumed Europe for at least a hundred years was the question of foreign influence through the pulpit vs. domestic political loyalty/propaganda; you can still occasionally hear people denouncing "papism")
American Christianity has deeply influenced the remnants of Christianity that are left in Western Europe, the Evangelical movement first crossed the Atlantic all the way back in the 1920s.
And we so easily forget that countries like Poland and Hungary are deeply Christian conservative countries with links to American republicans. Yes the foreign American influence is real.
European Christians are either catholic (Poland comes to mind), Orthodox (maybe Hingary, not sure. Russia definetly is) or Protestant (which have nothing whatsoever to do with US Evangelicals). That these groups have some overlap regarding abortion, LGBTQ rights, feminism or Islam doesn't change the fact they disagree on a lot of other things.
I have not heard this, and certainly not as a major cause, but don’t forget the greed of the princes who supported the Reformation. The lust for church property and unchecked power. In England this is especially visible where the trigger was not a theological dispute and the looting of church property was widespread.
It’s interesting that the accounts would be originating from Kosovo and (north) Macedonia. I assume these are just Russians routing thru Kosovar IPs for more deniability, or alternatively this could be tacitly sanctioned by Serbian govt. Anyhow, Kosovo relies heavily on the US, exists only because of a US bombing campaign, and is one of the only places in the world to have a 10ft statue of Bill Clinton in the capitol. I know less about (North) Macedonia, but it is a NATO member and also another state resulting from the dissolution of Yugoslavia; not sure if it is seen as a US puppet state in the same way as Kosovo is but there is some similarity. The origins of the accounts appear to be making a statement about American hegemony...
Macedonian here. Its true what you said about Kosovo being a puppet state, and yes Macedonia being an EU and US puppet too, but not to such extent. The troll farms in this case are not government supported, theyre basically run by digital marketers, the govt probably cant even track them down without the help of some foreign intelligence agency.
In the 2016 election there was a lot of fake news sites originating from Macedonia, and this is because since late 2000s there has been lots of digital marketers making quick bucks with black hat methods. I used to be a part of the forums, lots and lots of people did this full time, which was way more lucrative than the average 300 USD salary. Heck, high schoolers were dropping out of school to do this full time.
So this has nothing to do with the government of Kosovo or Macedonia or Serbia. And it could be russians routing IPs but I would doubt it, its just digital marketers trying to make a buck
Thanks for this. Definitely wasn’t saying they were sanctioned by Kosovo or Macedonian gvt. This gives me a better perspective either way though. I still think at the very least Putin (and Serbian hard liners) sees this favorably and would like it to continue.
> It’s interesting that the accounts would be originating from Kosovo and (north) Macedonia.
As someone whose spent a bit of time in the Balkans can I just say that you can buy a Macedonian sim card with no ID for a few dollars and get perfect 4G signal from close to the border in 5 different countries without ever stepping foot in the place?
Not trying to defend what's happening here, but just saying, not all this stuff is as clearcut as it seems. Blaming these places seems a bit premature without understanding the region.
I’m not blaming those places. I’m suggesting they are being chosen deliberately by the actual perpetrators, (which is really just speculation I admit).
Albanians are quite entrepreneurial and this is the poorest part of the Europe. By far. And 30% of people living in Macedonia are Albanians. And in general they speak English very well.
It might be the some foreign government involved I this but I doubt they are running this. This is all about money. And this article validates these assumptions.
No, not really, they developed business in Macedonia mostly and now clearly Albanian gangs are joining in. It is quite lucrative to post about anything controversial and they specialize in that kind of business.
Albanians do care about US, but as much as they can extract favors.
For example, Hillary was very popular (kind of not what you would expect) and they were able to make a lot on posting things about her for a long time, elections and after.
Sorry, did not mean to be insensitive but just pointing out that Kosovo’s existence in it’s current form has a lot to do with the actions of the US in the 90s, hence the statues and streets named after Bill Clinton. Not trying to minimize all of the history preceding that, but just saying that I think it is viewed as a US puppet state by Russia and Serbia. Definitely not trying to reduce all of the balkans to that set of conflicts - just commenting on Kosovo.
>The report found that troll farms were reaching the same demographic groups singled out by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) during the 2016 election, which had targeted Christians, Black Americans, and Native Americans. A 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found that at least one member of the Russian IRA, indicted for alleged interference in the 2016 US election, had also visited Macedonia around the emergence of its first troll farms, though it didn’t find concrete evidence of a connection. (Facebook said its investigations hadn’t turned up a connection between the IRA and Macedonian troll farms either.)
The original report doesn’t actually mention misinformation campaigns as the linked article claims. The motivation seems to be exclusively monetary (ads, links, selling pages etc.).
Nation states hostile to the U.S. might hypothetically have been involved, but I’ve seen no such conclusions made in the report.
It would be interesting to see the motivations. But the effect is the same: spreading discontent, fake news and extremism is bad whether people do it for profit or geopolitical advantages...
Even more interesting would be Christian anti-vax since this would seem to involve many of the already existing networks discussed here. I've been following the Herman Cain Awards for some time now and you notice a consistency in the memes among particular groups of users. Same with phrasing and messaging. How much discourse is actually affected by these troll farms would be very interesting indeed as it has real life impact, such as huge numbers of needless deaths.
Quite likely that troll farms are active there. Most likely on identity and environmental issues, too.
I still have some hope that Zuckerberg will come out soon and say that it was all a big practical joke to see how much people are willing to put up with, after which he pulls the plug. Well, one can dream.
You don't need to. There are troll farms everywhere there is a critical density sufficient to pay for them to exist through ads. That condition is sufficient.
It's not even just about politics. There are multiple large troll farms unbelievably dedicated to producing completely bullshit "life hack" videos that blatantly don't work as posted. This is non-trivially expensive content to produce (not Hollywood-level expensive, of course, but the video content is beyond "point an iPhone at it" level by quite a ways), and it is produced by the bucketload, because the ad viewership is there.
These are parasites that attack any sufficiently-sized interest group of any kind.
Of course, the media eventually converged on this method after their golden goose of classified ads got pulled from under their feet by craigslist Facebook eBay etc.
I wonder how future historians will view this; in hindsight, will we be able to say it was an accident of economics that drove the outrage of today?
It’s no surprise that economically disadvantaged countries would have some subset of people taking advantage of the situation. It is no different than how the mafia takes advantage of gambling, etc.
I have a few questions that may have some reasonable answers, but would hopefully spur some thoughtful discussion.
1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link.
2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues.
3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content?
4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll?
5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people.
1) Troll farm = Professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content
2) Through internal Facebook research in which documentation was leaked to journalists.
3) That's irrelevant to the story. The point is that the claimed motives behind the operators of the page are inauthentic and dishonest, and those claims could apply to either/both human and bot-generated content.
4) This question just makes your entire post sound like disingenuous trolling, but people of course expect honesty, and a page called "Kosovo engages with American Christians for profit" would not be criticized in the same way.
5) That's an obvious strawman - the people running the pages have shown to be dishonest in every way that their honesty can reasonably be measured.
You know, defining "provocative content" is a subjective endeavor. What is viewed as normal conversation in the real world by most people might be viewed as extremely problematic, unmitigated, obvious hate-speech by some in a Silicon Valley thought-bubble. How do we really clarify this?
> 2) internal Facebook research in which documentation was leaked to journalists.
a) How do we know that some Facebook employees are not using their own biases to give incorrect subjective labels to some content based on their own activist viewpoints? Maybe, maybe not, but I would stress that we're relying on subjective interpretations here and just have to trust them.
b) How do we know that the journalists who are interpreting this data and reporting on it are both willing and able to really do anything other than take the face-value interpretation of the data they were handed? I can count the number of journalists I've seen in my life who tried to dig into the nuanced details behind stories on one hand.
> 3) the claimed motives behind the operators of the page are inauthentic and dishonest
This is a hypothesis which may be (or likely is) reasonably supportable, but I would clarify that mind-reading has never been a thing.
> 4) a page called "Kosovo engages with American Christians for profit" would not be criticized in the same way.
Maybe. My goal isn't to necessarily defend these website operators. They might be, or even most likely are, creating random content to achieve fame and/or profit through social media. Ok, does that separate them from 99.9% of people/businesses/organizations on social media?
> 5) the people running the pages have shown to be dishonest in every way that their honesty can reasonably be measured.
My main goal in this set of comments isn't to necessarily defend the honor of these website operators. Maybe they're pure, manipulative scum?
My main goal is to point out that Facebook (and the media) has shown to be dishonest in every way that their honesty can reasonably be measured. I do not understand how anybody can trust this interpretation of the facts at face value for many, many reasons here.
> 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link.
> 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content?
Bot generated content would definitely qualify as a troll farm.
I would just note that an 'advertising agency' is rather indistinguishable from a 'troll farm' - using provocative content to get eyeballs on their product is basically the whole game.
Why would 19 of the top 20 Christian pages be run by Americans who specifically only connect to VPNs in Kosovo and Macedonia when they manage their pages? I think at some point common sense comes into play here.
I am interested in the means by which they DO identify user location, and whether the ones they use can be spoofed.
And for those who cannot help but ask "But why would....", while that is an interesting and valid question, it is orthogonal to this specific question.
Well, if the app is installed, then there's a gajillion methods (GPS, Wifi, etc)
For conventional browsers in a desktop environment I'd suspect all the normal methods of fingerprinting browsers would reveal a lot. And Netflix et al can detect VPNs from a browser, so clearly that's not impossible. I notice that Google Maps on my browser knows where I am despite me using a VPN, but then I'm also logged in to Google on my phone, so maybe it's just tracking my phone location rather than my browser location.
I'm no expert, but I'll take a shot at some answers...
> 1) What is a "troll farm" and what is the criteria used for a distinction between a troll farm and merely some points of view one might disagree with? Maybe this is mentioned somewhere, but I don't see it clearly defined in the link.
It's down to intent. I'd define it as: "A troll farm is intended to manipulate opinion in some manner for political goals by (mis)representing itself as a genuine member of the community it intends to manipulate."
> 2) What is the proof that these are indeed foreigners? It would be trivial for a social media company to label domestic users they find distasteful as foreigners to more easily silence certain points of view, especially given the media's unwillingness/inability to understand nuanced technology issues.
I don't think TFA provides any proof of its claims, but points to a MIT Technology Review article [0] that claims a report "obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it" as its source. It would be entirely reasonable to dismiss the entire article as "fake news" based on this attribution.
> 3) Heck, where is the proof that these pages are even moderately operated by actual people and are not mostly bot-generated content?
Again, no proof provided. Does that make a difference to the intent of the page, though?
> 4) We live in a global, connected world that embraces diverse points of view, right? Are eastern Europeans or others, many of whom still embrace a traditional Christian heritage, expected to not post about their point of view because somebody in San Francisco claims its a troll?
That's not what these pages do (post content in Eastern European languages intended for Eastern European audiences addressing issues faced by Eastern European christians). They're posting in English about things that are contentious for American readers.
> 5) How can a data scientist make a definitive claim that the people running these sites have "never been to church"? Maybe these social media firms are making big assumptions about people and are entirely wrong. Maybe they have entirely far too much information about people.
I didn't read that as a definitive claim, but more as an opinion expressed by one person.
I think this is an interesting part "For the most part, the people who see and engage with these posts don’t actually “like” the pages they’re coming from. Facebook’s engagement-hungry algorithm is simply shipping them what it thinks they want to see."
Correct me if I'm wrong but this seems like the issue is that content farms are able to successfully target Facebook's algorithm. (At least for certain topics)
All of these posts are feeding off the FB's "share" functionality. Almost no one is engaging with these posts on the page. These posts spread like wildfire because someone will be scrolling through FB, see a meme they get a chuckle out of or agree with, then hit the share button, never taking into account the source of that material.
With this sharing, the post spreads like wildfire from timeline to timeline.
That's just how recommendations work on social media platforms these days... If you only saw posts from people/pages you've explicitly followed then discoverability becomes a challenge
> Troll farms—professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks
How is this any different than what BuzzFeed or Upworthy were doing ten years ago to build their audiences?
It's frustrating that we're not shown content from these groups. Hard to imagine that stuff from "Happiness Is In Your Mind" or "Positive Quotes" lines up with the kind of stuff you'd imagine when you see the words "troll farm".
Apparently, foreign state actors have been actively building competence and skills how to attract and manipulate large audiences on social networks. If you think you're smarter that those followers of Christian groups and you can't be manipulated, well, I have bad news for you.
This would be such a relief to me, as it would suggest that many of the trivial, shallow, grossly unchristian things that circulate from those groups don't reflect what Christians think and believe, but instead follow what games Facebook and serves foreign interests. I understand it's not good news in general, but it's reassuring to people who expect more of Christianity.
> This would be such a relief to me, as it would suggest that much of the trivial, shallow, grossly unchristian things that circulate from those groups doesn't reflect what Christians think and believe, but instead what games Facebook and serves foreign interests. I understand it's not good news in general, but it's reassuring to people who expect more of Christianity.
Its not reassuring, IMO, because the reason it effectively games Facebook and serves foreign interest in is because American Christians lap it up and relay it.
It's a little odd that the article focuses on "american" christianity. Don't these pages have global audiences?
A lot of the "truth crisis" of online media relates to online media usage of the "invisible half."
Facebook went orbital around the same time that the internet went universal. Smartphones made the internet available to all those people who hadn't been using it in the 1990s & 2000s.
Around 2010, your uncle Dave got his first smartphone and started blasting hourly messages from mafia wars achievements. The average Angela & Gabriel from Manilla got connected to free, Facebook-only internet.
No one pays much attention to the laggards directly. I mean, they are noticeable in FBs DAUs, amazon's gross sales and such. They're just rarely noticed as disaggregated people. Facebook, or any distant tech company, has no idea what kind of impact they are have on this vast sea of people. Billions of people go from non computer users to using their smartphones for their media and communications, and no one close to Zuck speaks the language or has any idea what's going on.
We learn in retrospect. For most of the arab spring, social media was the official headquarters of dozens of active rebels, revolutionaries, political movements and everything in between. They had recruited armies on social media before the companies paid much attention to it.
Trump, Brexit, most political events of the last decade have been heavily tied to this phenomenon. It will keep happening.
Consider this. The current religious makeup of the world is the legacy of various religious explosions where a belief system "went viral," one way or another. From now on, this happens online.
The next vatican will be built in Zuck's front yard. From his perspective, he'll just discover one day that facebook now hosts the world's largest religion.
There's a strong strain of (bogus) piety in conservative American Christianity that thrives on pages, sites, and media branded as Christian. "Wow, I can get my ticket punched for the stairway to heaven just by visiting the Jesus Is Lord page? Cool."
It's weaker in other countries. At any rate, it started out weaker.
So this sort of trolling is, in the early 21st century, peculiarly successful at targeting Americans. In that way it's similar to the televangelism craze of the late 20th century. Like televangelism, it is spreading globally.
FB should pay these trolls. They're a huge boost to FB's "engagement" business model. There's nothing to be done about it except mass boycotts (account cancellation) of FB. Clergy and other church leaders could try, if they got organized, to drive such boycotts. But they won't; FB is too convenient.
Similar analysis applies also to targeting of Black communities, in which church leaders are big offline influencers.
IDK... There's a strong strain of "cat-pictureiness" to the internet... always has been. Most of us indulge in it, in one sense or another. If people are christian, and they're in vapid cat picture mode... these sites might grab their attention.
Social media is a niche finding, attention grabbing device. There's no mystery in how these got so many people's attention.
The question is what is being done with their attention. Most likely it's just selling them stuff. Most likely. A more unlikely, but also more worrying scenario is that some scheiter has suddenly become a messiah with 100m followers because FB algorithms accidentally did it.
I mean, people will do these sorts of things. But, if Zuck does it accidentally for cheese... I will be mad with him. ISIS was bad enough.
Kind of agree, but I think it should be twitter, not FB.
Twitter is inherently more "revolutionary" in aesthetics. Lots of politics, shrill arguments and such. It's also popular among journalists, politicians, and such. It represents a relatively elite user base.
FB is the populist social media site. Your Uncle who never had a computer until he got a smartphone in 2013, he's a facebook user. The fisherman who got a smartphone before home electricity, he's a facebook user.
The dichotomy isn't necessarily FB-Twitter, but a lot of social media's political stuff in the west (Brexit, Trump...) has come from the non elite parts of social media. It was neither mainstream nor fringe, which hints at the populism of it.
Religion is a great candidate for revolution. Major power shifts could happen in broad daylight and journalists, politicians and social media execs probably wouldn't even notice.
I did a free "birthright" style trip to Israel when I was younger. One of the events during the trip was a presentation from some business executive that was also a hasidic jew that founded and ran a holding company that actually appeared to be a pretty seriously large business. I'll always remember though when he was going through all the businesses they owned that one was some media company that owned major networks and production companies for televangelism. I always thoughts that was hilarious.
I think focusing on religion/christianity is missing the point here - it's irrelevant probably, the point is that on global web 2.0 websites there may be manipulation
That's kinda weakness of english language itself, because when everybody is capable of using it, then it's hard to distinguish actual native speakers from foreign actors (and genuine users too) that are proficient at it,
meanwhile let's say that you have group of people only using some not so popular language like X, then it's way harder to pretend to be X user, so at worst you're being trolled by people from your country which may not have as bad intentions.
Or maybe I'm too optimistic about my not so popular language :)
I find the headline to be incomplete to the point of incomprehensibility. Both Facebook and Christianity are international in scope – what on Earth makes a Christian page on Facebook "foreign"?
Taking evolutionary psychology into account, probably the best long term solution is an organized religion that is strong enough not to be hijacked by troll farms. It seems that the easily hijacked Christian groups are due to weakened Christian institutions.
Like, this seems unlikely. Given their business model (get cheap clicks from FB, sell for slightly more) it's vanishingly unlikely that these pages have a FB rep in any real sense, and even less likely that said reps have any pull within the company.
Now, if you'd said FB refuse to ban violating game advertisers, that would be a much more likely state of affairs.
A friend asked some questions I wasn't sure what my answers to were, and am curious what people here think:
What is the definition of a "troll"? What makes these pages different than any other large social media page, almost all of which are presumably run by people for eyeball-click-generating financial purposes, just like these?
>These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia
So the two poorest countries in Europe. And ones with incredibly pro-US stances, to the point where they don't have a foreign policy beyond whatever the US ambassador tells them to do.
What the article says without realizing it is that making a living off journalism is impossible in the first world. The rent extracted from monopoly advertising by Facebook and Google has made the majority of journalism and editorial jobs and all the distribution jobs that were part of newspapers untenable.
So you need to find the cheapest English(ish) speakers you can to both write the articles and be the equivalent of the news paper boy. If I were a younger man I'd head to Nigeria and start a troll farm there because the living standard is even lower than that of Macedonia and the number of English speakers higher.
It's not the rent per se, it's the scale. FB/G outcompeted traditional media by having lower margins, compensated by scale. Alas, turns out healthy social systems are sustained through better information nutrition than mass-produced low cost soylent.
As a counter argument, it's much better for people to believe in Jesus than the Kardashians, and any entity willing to destabilize a society knows it very well.
A dichotomy that is thankfully entirely fictional. It's better to believe neiter.
But if we are being reasonable, relgion has caused unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries. The Kardashians hardly tweak the needle in pain inflicted. It's not like people are going to war over them. I think some perspective is needed about what religion actually is at times. It isn't just sunday church with Grandma.
I used to think like that, but have come to realize it's people that caused all that.
There are many different 'tribes', for want of a better name, be they based around religion, nationality, personality cults, even sport, they can be used for good and bad. But it's the leaders, the people, that make that decision.
After all, they may not have gone to war for a Karshadian, but they have for a Trump.
I certainly don't disagree with you, but I think it is still right to blame religion specifically because religion often isn't passive and it's intentionally so. It noticed those traits in humanity you pointed out, and it capitalizes on them through evangelism and then division. Evangelism and then separating you from other groups is built into pretty much all major religions, which is likely why they are still around.
Of course a lot of people don't practice that so much now, there are a lot of passive religious people. But it's built into the fabric of the idea of religion I feel, which is worth criticizing.
> It is still right to blame religion (...) often isn't passive and it's intentionally so. (...) capitalizes on them through evangelism and then division
You singling out religion is saying more about you than it says about religion and religious people.
I don't even need to squint my eyes too much to see how your description still applies to all types of different ideologies - Trotskyists, "being Woke" and Racial Supremacists are all examples that come to mind.
Spare me the personal jab. It's a discussion about organised religion, in which I am criticising it specifically, it doesn't mean I think religion is the lone offender.
Perhaps my using the word "blame" in the grandparent wasn't very clear. I mean blame it specifically for the issues it specifically creates, and not just let it go blame-free because humans would have had wars anyway. Issues such as evangelism in African countries creating religious tensions that wouldn't otherwise exist.
To your more reasonable paragraph, of course it can apply to other ideologies. I am just pointing out that religion is quite a bit more organised than most ideologies, hence it's centuries of success. To be super duper clear, I said more organised than most, this doesn't mean I think other ideologies can't be organised in the same ways.
> Issues such as evangelism in African countries creating religious tensions that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Wars and conflict arise whenever there is a dispute for resources and a power imbalance. You are basically claiming that the different nations and tribes would not get into conflict if it were not for religion? This reeks of "Noble Savage" fallacy.
Also, how many tensions were solved because of evangelism and a shift in cultural/moral values? Can you quantify those?
Plenty of purely religious wars have happened. If you want to defend religion you also need to defend the totality of religion including Aztec human sacrifice, the crusades etc.
The issue with religious justification is it’s effectively random, the only thing you can say is practices that are counterproductive to propitiate a religion die out over time. IE the shakers prohibiting reproduction for everyone not just priests is probably why their not around anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers#Celibacy_and_children
I am not defending religion per se. I am just refuting the affirmation that religion should be blamed for wars that were carried out by people using religion as a justification.
> Plenty of purely religious wars have happened
I'd love to hear examples of those, but let's agree beforehand that a "purely religious war" would be one where there had no conflict over resources or ethnic-national divisions?
If you want a specific example, here’s one of the more interesting ones specifically because it was outside of the kind of institutions that would benefit from winning a war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Crusade
That said, your criteria represent an overly narrow view of history because most possible wars didn’t happen. You need to both gather people into a fighting force and then actually start fighting to have a war so while religion might be a pretext was also quite frequently the cause.
And of course religious violence was often at a much smaller scale than an overt war. Add up smaller conflicts all the way down to stoning someone specific and collectively you have an enormous death total across human history.
From the wikipedia page you linked, on the second paragraph: The peasant population had been afflicted by drought, famine, and disease for many years before 1096, and some of them seem to have envisioned the crusade as an escape from these hardships.
It didn't even take that long to see how religion is mostly a pretext for a war over resources.
> religious violence was often at a much smaller scale (...) collectively you have an enormous death total across human history.
The problem is with violence, not with religion. Lots of people have committed acts of violence due to road rage, their sports teams, jealousy of a love interest and (the internet's favorite) political arguments. To try to blame Religion over the enormous death total is as silly as blaming "Car-Based Transportation", "Football" and "Biology".
That’s really not what that sentence means. It wasn’t that that some people viewed the crusade as a means to gain wealth from the enemy, rather they believed they simply being a soldier as part of an army was an improvement. Considering people had gathered resources to make the trip it was arguably a accurate assessment though they eventually got slaughtered.
The context was: “Calling for a crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II planned the departure of the crusade for 15 August 1096. Nevertheless, a number of unexpected bands of peasants and low-ranking knights organized and set off for Jerusalem on their own.”
Of course this is based on history books written about the time period I haven’t read the associated primary sources. Also, there where a lot of crusades with something of a sliding scale for religious involvement vs other motivations.
> To try to blame Religion over the enormous death total is as silly as blaming "Car-Based Transportation", "Football" and "Biology".
Again human sacrifice, you can exclude plenty of deaths as ethic / religious conflict, but you can’t hit zero. Millions have been sacrificed due to religion not just ethnic conflict. Death or conversion is another thing that shows up regularly.
I'm not arguing that. My argument is mainly that we shouldn't be attributing to religion all the evil things that happened where religion was only a pretext.
Sure, if that’s your rebuttal and your willing to accept millions, then yea some people will of course blame religion in cases where it’s not at fault.
The inquisition for example gets marginally worse treatment than it deserves. While they did torture many innocent people to death they were sometimes used by others as a means of murder. The death total wasn’t 10’s of millions either. Hell they even regularly let innocent people go
On the other hand some significantly underestimate these evils by insisting on hard evidence of each individual death. Which of course fails when paperwork was lost or was never created, people died from the torture before they could be burned etc.
No I'm not claiming that, you're putting words in my mouth and you're misconstruing my arguments. I have been extremely clear.
As I've had to painstakingly clarify for you, just because I have commented on one thing, does not mean I am subtly making comments about other things. I am being very explicit, very clear. Please read my comments, because I'm not one to bury my lede.
A better way to approach this discussion may have been to ask me questions instead of just assuming answers. You could have asked, "Do you not believe they would have gone to war for other reasons?" to which I would have replied "Of course they likely would have! But it was over religion in this instance."
There is a country with over 1 billion people that sorta-kinda breaks your argument. Its leadership is staunchly anti-religion, and I heard they are quite organized.
(They are also responsible for a large number of contemporary violations of human-rights and atrocities going on in the world)
Which is evidence toward the idea that organized groups can do great evil, which was my point about religion. I am not saying that organized religion is the only ideological method to organized people into wrongdoing, just that it is one of them, and it's one of the most effective ones so far.
> organized groups can do great evil, which was my point about religion.
If your point can be made by replacing "religion" with anything that can characterize a group or society, your point is not about religion. You are trying to make a particularization based on a generality.
That is not only a cheap rhetorical trick, it is also the kind of thing that leads to biases, prejudices and "othering", which ironically enough is one of the things that do lead to one of the most effective ways to lead people into polarization and conflicts based on segregation of individuals.
Your last paragraph is certainly true. In the end, how large are those groups compared to religious ones? Catholicism, a sect of Christianity, has 1.2 billion followers alone. Scale matters.
How many of those Christians are promoters of human-rights violations? How many self-professed Christians went on to support leaders that used religion to justify wars?
Now tell me how many people still support Communist/Socialist revolutions, even after seeing all this historical bloodbaths that they brought. How many people still praise Che Guevara even after they are made aware of how many people he killed in the name of "justice"? How many people still would support Mao? Pol Pot?
== How many of those Christians are promoters of human-rights violations?==
Any of the ones who put money in a collection plate to help fund the church. Those funds helped pay to cover up human rights abuses. Catholics still support the Vatican, where the leaders live and who were the ones sweeping things under the rug.
== Now tell me how many people still support Communist/Socialist revolutions, even after seeing all this historical bloodbaths that they brought.==
Talk about moving the goalposts. People still praise early Americans for their Revolution. How many did that kill? How many native Americans were slaughtered by the people we lionize?
You know communism and socialism are not the same thing even if you write them next to each other, right? Not to mention that all 1.2 billion Catholics follow the same religion, leadership, and structure. Politics don’t cross the same number of borders.
This game can be played all day. Which is likely what you want because it changes the subject off of religion.
Interesting. You want to assign all blame to the followers of the things you disagree with, but you want to find an excuse to the supporters of the things you agree with.
> Those funds helped pay to cover up human rights abuses.
Possibly true. But the people donating money were not doing it with the intent of "let's help the child molesters go unpunished". On the other hand, I've heard/read from far too many socialists that they fully support Che's actions, or that "those bastards deserved to die."
== but you want to find an excuse to the supporters of the things you agree with.==
We should be aware of our mind’s ability to play this trick. Have you analyzed if you might be falling into this trap? Who is it that I agree with, exactly? I don’t remember stating. It seems you have filled in your own details of who I am and what I believe with a nice straw man that you can attack.
Ironically, I’m struggling to think of a historical figure that was more socialist than Jesus.
== or that "those bastards deserved to die."==
And I’ve heard from plenty of “Christians” that the Crusades were justified, slavery wasn’t that bad, immigrants are rats, Manifest Destiny justifies Native American slaughter, and on and on.
The absurd things that you have heard Christians say are not supported by their leadership. In contrast, there are barbaric actions done by the so-called "heroes" that are defended and even praised by many self-professed socialists.
> The absurd things that you have heard Christians say are not supported by their leadership.
The absurd things that I have heard Christians say (as a Christian myself) have been disproportionately directly from leaders in the Christian community (particularly, but not exclusively, the elites of the American Christian Right, some of whom are also significant figures in one of the remaining heirarchical churches in America.)
That includes the examples specifically cited by the poster upthread.
(There are, of course, other Christian leaders that disagree.)
By "leadership", I meant those that founded and shaped the religion. IOW, the ones that led by example and showing skin in the game. The "leaders" you are referring to are anything but.
This all depends on what you define as “leadership”. I have absolutely heard prominent pastors (local religious leaders) make those claims and I suspect anyone being honest with themselves has too.
When you say leadership are you referring to the leadership who abused small children (local level) or the leadership who covered it up (national/global level)?
The constant “whataboutism” towards socialism doesn’t answer any of those questions. Socialists aren’t a global society like Christians. They don’t have a universal set of instructions to run on (like the Bible). Giving money to a local “socialist” running for office doesn’t trickle up to a global socialist network like the church. You see the difference, no?
May I also point out that the greatest schism in Communist groups is over Leninism/Trotskyism, and how their divergences come exactly from the fact that one of them believes that Communism can only be achieved when (what you call) Socialist practices are applied universally?
> set of instructions to run on (like the Bible).
I let the silly comment about "Jesus being a Socialist" slide, but if you see the Bible as a set of instructions I'd suggest you actually go learn more about Christian Theology and Philosophy before comparing all Christians to fundies.
I grew up Catholic attending Catholic school for 13 years, so that is my reference point. The New Testament was absolutely viewed as instructions from Jesus on how to live a meaningful life. He was showing us how to put God's word into everyday action.
Certainly the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule are instructions on how to live, right?
> May I also point out that the greatest schism in Communist groups is over Leninism/Trotskyism
The Stalinist/Trotskyist split is a split within Leninist-derived Communism, and it hasn't been the “greatest schism” in that community since at.least the rise of Maoism; I’m not sure there are any Trotskyists left (in the US, leading ex-Trotskyists went on to form a significant part of the core of the neoconservative movement.) AFAICT, Leninist-derived Communism is all Stalinist “socialism in one state” now.
The biggest split in Communism (at least, the Marx-derived subset) seems between developed-capitalism first Marxists and Leninist-derived vanguardists, though the former subset is also less tied to old orthodoxy and so has mixed a lot with non-Marxist socialism and is less easy to draw a firm bubble around than the Leninist vanguardists.
> relgion has caused unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries.
Religion has been used as a justification to cause unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries. Even if no religion existed, wars and conflict would still exist.
I want to hear a legitimate argument for why because the worst effects of being obsessed with pop culture icons appears to be people buying useless merch whereas the worst forms of religious zealously tend to spawn significantly more dangerous ideologies.
With the Kardashians and Gwyneth Paltrow as bad as it gets is news drama and vagina-scented candles rather than wars, creationism and women without reproductive rights
>it's much better for people to believe in Jesus than the Kardashians
The problem is not what you believe in but how you do. Religion is by definition dogmatic and in a sociatal context very well suited to create/base a self image on. Its a nice layer 8 intrusion vector.
To be fair, there can be dogmatic kardashian fans but its much more unlikely. Just consider the short news lifespan of this celeb world.
Religions that we observe today are systems of beliefs with a shelf life measured in millenia. Modern cults tend to implode within a few short decades, if that.
I grew up in a Christian cult that is well over 100 years old and has survived many a scandal. Follower numbers took a big hit once the www emerged and was able to distribute information to the masses without gate keepers but they still have all of their land and wealth in place throught the globe and the system still works.
At one point there were over three million followers in the United States...those officially inducted or "baptized" through a program that closely resembles and is modelled after the "three degrees" of freemasonry. These people amount to a sleeper cell that will do exactly as they are told, immediately and without question.
It didn't start like this. The founder established the organization as a way to use Christianity to spread the tenents of freemasonry to the masses instead of just white males of means. His first successor was a drunken fundamentalist.
What definition is that? I see that religion is an axiom, not unlike many other axioms that we take for granted. At what point do you "just believe" the physicists? When they talk about atoms? Subatomic particles? Fields?
I'm not religious and I'm strongly in the science camp. But I don't pretend that my choice of worldview is not based on axioms that I myself cannot test.
Aply the verification approach to religion and you will see many inconsistencies and contradictions. I believe no major religion would widthstand a scrutinizing critical look.
This sceptical approach down to the core is fatal for religions, thus discouraged, thus dogmatic.
Science is hard to reproduce, true, but it is non the less encouraged.
> Aply the verification approach to religion and you will see many inconsistencies and contradictions.
Inconsistencies and contradictions like the fact that we observe neutrinos decaying in the sun, which proves that they change? But we observe neutrinos arriving together with light after a supernova, which proves that they move at the speed of light. How does that concur with our axiom that an object moving at the speed of light had no mass and experiences no time, so it cannot change?
Inconsistencies and contradictions are found as much in science as they are found in religion.
>Inconsistencies and contradictions are found as much in science as they are found in religion.
I dont think its "as much" but anyway, science works to resolve these tensions, regardles of personal believes.
You had to reach for the edges of scientific progress to come up with these examples, whereas i was speaking of the foundation of religion.
At least in my religion, those versed in it and who deal with it have resolved or are working to resolve such tensions. Maybe some religions don't. But then your statement should be "Foo religion", not "religions".
Well, I read somewhere that Theosophism stated that: Truth is our religion
Which I would sign, too.
(but probably not the specific truth, they found, I do not really know more of them, except that they were the base of Rudolf Steiners philosophy, I am not a huge fan of)
When people "just believe" the physicists, it's shortcut. If you dig beneath all the turtles, there are facts there. Yes, there is great possibility and space for manipulation and distortion, but it is rooted in the reality, which percolates through all the layers of human interpretation.
Religion lack that root, there is nothing but human culture in it, which is then mistaken for objective truth about environment.
Science is part of culture. And what is “human culture” anyway? You seem to think it’s some fiction we all believe. This isn’t culture. Something like that would be worthless. Culture, which is related to “cult” and “cultivation”, is supposed to help you become more fully and better you and part of that is a better grasp of the truth.
I don’t know the Kardashians are very American. Successful recent immigrants who then leveraged fame into substantial wealth. It’s not a flattering look at the American dream, but it’s not a bad thing to aspire to either.
I think it's a myth that the enemy tries to destabilize the country with cultural issues. Remember Gawker? They too were incendiary culture warriors. But it was because it got clicks, not because they wanted to undermine society.
If anyone is trying to distract us with cultural issues, it's probably our own ruling class.
I don't think so. Belief in a supernatural god is literally training your brain to suspend disbelief. This makes you more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other mental viruses.
How did Church kill more people than Hitler? You shouldn't believe estimates that, for example, Spanish Inqusition killed "millions" - those are obviously false, since they sometimes exceed total population of Europe at the time. Modern estimates are 3000-5000 [1]. The same goes for victims of missionaries in America and Africa.
I'm not denying the fact that Church DID in fact kill people thorough it's history, it's just many popular estimates are wildly inaccurate, and sometimes deliberately, to make Church look worse.
I beg to differ. I have met people who have been mentally damaged by religion to a point where they are no longer a useful member of society, to the contrary. While media is also doing a lot of damage to people, especially in the last 2 years, I am convinced nothing can top the horror that is religion. Besides, people that have to believe in a supernatural overload to function in this world are just spooky to me.
Yeah, I saw these calculations somewhere, like considering the Nazi to be Christians etc.
There is something very wrong with the world. When you actually read the gospels, it is clear that Jesus was very much against violence and his main message was love, you can see it on every page, each allegory. Whatever happened in the institutional Christianity like Crusades was a sick invention of a human mind. I wonder what was going on in the heads of people who read the Gospels but decided to take their swords and kill others anyway. To me these are not Christians, only "people who call themselves Christians."
Well, "the Bible" is a complex concept. Not all Christians accepted the Old Testament. Since the very beginning there were groups that saw an enormous conflict between the basic message of the Old and and New Testament. First there were Gnostics and Marcionites, and then many others until Cathars in the 14th century when the Pope said that anybody who kills a Cathar can get their castle. So in the history of Christianity, there were longer periods of (some) Christians not believing in the ST than believing in it.
This distinction is crucial because the ST contains all sorts of atrocities. Modern Christians try to justify them by allegoric interpretations but the logic of this approach is very weak and basically indefensible. Whereas when you don't feel limited by the ST, things become much easier (and a bit more logical).
Odd choice of counterpoint, because people are merely fans of the Kardashians; they don't demand any particular doctrine or mindset.
I would say it's better for people to believe in Jesus than the flat earth or that vaccines don't work or that the election was stolen from Trump. But these seem to be oddly linked; being an evangelical christian in the white American tradition seems to make people more susceptible to dangerous nonsense that has nothing to do with Christian doctrine.
> they don't demand any particular doctrine or mindset
But they attract one, don't they? And that's how MOST religions work.
The big Abrahamic religions are rare as religions go, because they insist that what you do should follow from what you believe.
Most religions are perfectly fine with it being the other way around. As long as you follow the customs that give a sense of community and meaning, you're given a lot of leeway in how you justify them - and that's how fandoms work too, including presumably the Kardashians fandom (which I'm happy to not be very familiar with).
I think it’s not that religion is good or bad, it’s what you replace it with. Humans are in some sense geared to mythical beliefs - believing in something higher than us sort of like a father figure, there is a reason every famous work of art or fiction exploits that - be it Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. You can go way beyond in the past and cave engravings and such also seem to tell the same story.
Wiping out clean religion (or the sense that there is a father figure watching and judging you) seems to have had bad consequences wherever it has been tried. And it has come back with vengeance. Go to StPetersburg in Russia in a church on Sunday - all the churches are almost full to the brink.
No, people aren't predisposed to believing in a father figure judging you. That's such a western biased view. People are predisposed to follow the crowd. Hence the dominance of religion in a prescience era. As a species, we are rapidly moving away from religion as a whole thanks to modern scientific thinking.
Your conscience is judging you. Your family is judging you. Your employer is judging you. Your neighbors are judging you. Your customers are judging you. We are social entities with a judgment organ: the brain. Good luck rationalizing that away.
Amnesty International/The Republican Party/Greenpeace/<insert political party or NGO you happen to like> is a troll farm, too.
That's taking it too far, for the sake of edginess. Trolls cynically employ outrage tactics for purposes unrelated to the audience's interest in the topic. That religions attract cynical power abusers, like any other large organization, is another matter, regardless of your stance on religion.
> In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms.
Why wouldn’t this article mention the Black American content as well? Certainly this is newsworthy, given the crucial implication here: foreign actors were pushing opposite views on many topics in order to manufacture division.