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Judd Legum @JuddLegum
, 7 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
1. Facebook says it wants to stop disinformation campaigns on its platform, but can it?

By vacuuming up personal information from millions & providing advanced micro-targeting to anyone w/a few bucks, it has created the ultimate playground for bad actors

popular.info/p/trumps-groce…
2. Axios is spinning Facebook's actions yesterday, deleting 32 pages and accounts, as a "win" for the company.

The NYT headline is "FACEBOOK BUSTS A SHADOWY PLOT TO JOLT ELECTIONS"

But is there any evidence that Facebook has busted anything?

popular.info/p/trumps-groce…
3. I spoke with @benimmo, of the @dfrlab -- which Facebook is partnering with to analyize this activity.

Nimmo told me he would be very surprised if there weren't additional clusters continue to spread misinformation and division to influence 2018

popular.info/p/trumps-groce…
4. Importantly, Nimmo notes that prior to 2016, the RussianIRA targeted the LEFT and the RIGHT.

The accounts deleted yesterday were all targeting the LEFT and had the hallmarks of an IRA operation.

Where are the accounts targeting the right?

popular.info/p/trumps-groce…
5. Also important: Facebook is NOT informing the 290,000 people who followed these accounts that they were targeted by a disinformation campaign. They aren't going to tell them anything because it would be "premature." popular.info/p/trumps-groce…
6. The coverage of this Facebook announcement had all of the problems inherent in the modern media environment:

1. A focus on who "won" and "lost" -- as if this was all a game

2. Headlines that emphasizes short term actions over long term trends

popular.info/p/trumps-groce…
7. If you are looking for alternatives, please try out my newsletter, Popular Information

You can subscribe at: popular.info

No need to worry about the Facebook algorithm. Will arrive right in your inbox.
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More from @JuddLegum see all

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TRUMP: "At the request of Democrats it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall."

What Democrat has requested a border wall made of steel?
TRUMP: "The border wall would very quickly pay for itself."

Absolutely no evidence of this. Trump cites the cost of illegal drugs, most of which come through official ports of entry.
TRUMP: "The wall will also be paid for indirectly by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico."

This is not true. And the deal hasn't even been approved by Congress.
Read 4 tweets
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A total and humiliating capitation to a president with no interest in the truth.

The news media is supposed to inform the public.

They are now being used to disseminate government propaganda.
REMEMBER: When Obama wanted to address the nation on immigration, the networks refused to air it because they believe it would be "overtly political."

What a joke.

goo.gl/a8SSgT
The idea that a Democratic rebuttal or fact-checking will make this better is insulting.

If I break my arm and a doctor gives me a cast, I'm thankful.

If a doctor breaks my arm and hands me a band-aid, it's not a favor.
Read 3 tweets
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Any network that airs this live is knowingly participating in a disinformation campaign
Some conflicting info, but @JenniferJJacobs of Bloomberg says the networks will air this live

This show just how deeply the mainstream media misunderstands Trump and his tactics

@JenniferJJacobs This is what happened when Obama gave a primetime address on immigration in 2014
Read 4 tweets

Related threads

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Russia’s social-media trolling op began stepping up its Twitter presence to new heights in late July 2017 -- more than 8 months after sowing discord and disinformation in the 2016 election. bloomberg.com/amp/news/artic…
This burst of activity－revealed in a new dataset of nearly 3m tweets－focused on pushed headlines & news stories originally from US-based, pro-Trump site, 'Truthfeed' which specializes in hyper-partisan, factually incorrect stories...aka Right-wing propaganda.
By 10/22/17, right before Twitter banned nearly all of the known accounts linked to the IRA's troll farm, Truthfeed content accounted for about 95% of the accounts’ English-language activity.
Read 20 tweets
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Facebook has some really creepy plans!
Just check their patents!
Small thread with thanks to @jashkenas 👇

1⃣ Facebook wants to track your eye movements
using special infrared LEDs that shine into your pupil & cornea to determine gaze patents.google.com/patent/US20180… #Facebook #privacy
Facebook wants to reads your comments for positive or negative “affinity scores”
to generate sentiments and “trust scores”
and use the resulting data sets from trusted users
to train a machine learning model
patents.google.com/patent/US20180… | #privacy #facebook
to manipulate people..
3⃣ Facebook wants to “automatically sense, record and identify all types of activities such as walking, running, jogging, cycling, rowing, driving with car, bus, train, walking stairs, jumping, swimming, playing football & skiing” patents.google.com/patent/US20150… | #Facebook #privacy
Read 8 tweets
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The Best Alternative For Every #Facebook Feature wired.com/story/facebook… #DeleteFacebook A smartphone-like grid of green rounded rectangles with one
For news, Wired recommends @nuzzel. Great app, but it never stuck for me because I don't use social media for news. (@AppleNews is OK, but still limited to a handful of countries.) My tip: Pick a trusted news source (mine is @tagesschau), use their site, pay them if you can.
Here's more on getting news, again from @WIRED: wired.com/story/news-app…. (#RSS is still an option, of course. I never stopped using it. I love @Inoreader.)
Read 9 tweets
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I've talked before about Russian #disinformation, and how the goal is to exploit existing divisive issues to weaken the enemy. 1 #InformationWarfare #WednesdayWisdom #CambridgeAnalytica #Russie #Putin #deza
Bernie v. Hillary, Benghazi & the "email scandal" were perfect targets. There was already tension & division on those topics, so they were easy to exploit. 2
Russia also targeted #peopleofcolor (specifically black voters) to sow distrust of Hillary & the political process, which helped Trump's campaign. 3
vox.com/2018/2/16/1702…
Read 20 tweets
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THREAD

#CambridgeAnalytica #Russia ties.
1.Alexander Kogan a #CambridgeUniversity academic, who orchestrated harvesting #Facebook data, is tied to a #Russian University and had grants for researching into social media networks.
2.Alexander Kogan harvested the data in cooperation with #CambridgeAnalytica.
Read 81 tweets
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50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica. Psych prof/developer Aleksandr Kogan accessed 270k FB users' data w his app, then collected their friends' data…& sold it all to Trump's data firm which used it to target ads in 2016 election theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/…
FB 2018: "We learned a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us…by passing data from an app…using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government… military work around the globe." FB knew in 2015
"purpose of Kogan’s work was to develop an algorithm for the 'national profiling capacity of American citizens' as part of SCL’s work on U.S. elections, according to an internal document signed by an SCL employee describing the research"– 3/2017 report theintercept.com/2017/03/30/fac…
Read 45 tweets

Trending hashtags

#dataprotection #Russian #Hammond #Trump #BoilerRooms #OperationMockingbird #disinformation #cambridgeanalytica #SpadiTrading #Zander #history #sharemondays #Pentagon #Gazprom #YesEvenThem #Collusion #intereference #normalization #Wikileaks #EU #Johnson #fintech #SCL #cyber #HybridWar

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