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Ryan Broderick @broderick
, 12 tweets, 5 min read Read on Twitter
The Facebook/WhatsApp stuff has me feeling like I'm stuck in an insanely boring Groundhog Day.

(short thread)
Me and @inigo_av interviewed Carlos Merlo, a fake news producer in Mexico, the week before their election in June. Not only had his operation been running for years. Merlo had been doing interviews bragging about it!

buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
Here's Merlo in the NY Times in May bragging about his bot armies and spoofed local news pages. He saw himself as a local Cambridge analytica.

nytimes.com/2018/05/01/wor…
On June 28th, TWO DAYS before the Mexican election, DFR Lab releases a report about Merlo. Within a few hours of DFR Lab's research and our story going live, Facebook effectively wipes Merlo off their platform. They ban a huge chunk of his network.

medium.com/dfrlab/electio…
Except Facebook knew about Merlo for 6 months. DFR Lab is part of The Atlantic Council, who are partnered with Facebook. Facebook told me that Merlo had been in their own internal election report and they knew DFR Lab had isolated him as a problem too.

buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
So here we are now in Brazil. WhatsApp has been a massive problem for local factcheckers. Researchers built a public WhatsApp monitor. Only 8 percent of the 50 most widely shared images scraped by the monitor were truthful. It's a fake news swamp.

buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
The researchers behind the monitor pen an Op-Ed in the New York Times this week, essentially declaring WhatsApp misinformation a public crisis.

nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opi…
What happens the next morning? Brazil's biggest newspaper releases a bombshell report alleging local marketing firms have been buying bundles of phone numbers and using them to mass-WhatsApp voters anti-leftist propaganda. Maybe for months.

www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2018/10/…
That same morning WhatsApp's new CEO, Chris Daniels publishes a piece in the same newspaper, writing, "We have a responsibility to amplify the good and mitigate the bad."

www1.folha.uol.com.br/opiniao/2018/1…
But what has Facebook been doing? They've been getting even tech outlet in America onboard with an embargo to publish tours of their "election war room"
Obviously, here in Brazil, the War Room tours mean nothing. The country just learned that marketing firms have been using encrypted messages to manipulate the electorate for god knows how long.

And what does WhatsApp say this morning?
It's been almost two years since the US election, almost three since Brexit, and the only thing that seems to be changing with Facebook and their "family of apps" is the PR strategy.
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More from @broderick see all

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Amol Rajan moderating the #NewsXchange Question Time event this morning just asked David Rhodes, head of CBS News, “When did you know Charlie Rose was a sex pest?” to snickers from the audience.

Then he asked it again to a huge laugh from the audience.
He also kicked off the debate by saying that he’s very excited for “Steve Bannon and other great speakers today.”

By the way, the theme of the week is “polarization” and right before Amol went on, the BBC’s Tony Hall called fake news the greatest threat of our lifetimes.
A student from the audience asked the whole panel about how they feel about “platforming white supremacists.”

Rajan says, “wonder who you’re talking about.”

He polls the audience if Steve Bannon shouldn’t be here today, only about 10 hands out of about 200 go up.
Read 27 tweets
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Bolsonaro's win in Brazil tonight marks the end of the first Facebook elections. Here's a piece I've been working on for almost four years new:

Here’s How A Handful Of American Tech Companies Radicalized The World
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha… via @BuzzFeedNews
In the last 4 years, I’ve been to 22 countries, 6 continents, and been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections.

Three things are now very clear to:
1) A handful of American companies, Facebook and Google more than any other, have altered the fundamental nature of almost every major democracy on Earth.

In most of these elections, far-right populism has made huge strides.
Read 7 tweets
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Reminder that the EU will vote this afternoon on whether or not to essentially destroy the internet as we know it money.cnn.com/2018/09/12/tec…
Two parts of this that would have the most drastic and immediate effect:

-Platforms like Facebook and YouTube would be liable for copyright infringements committed by users.
-Aggregators like Google News or Apple News would have to publishers for displaying article snippets.
Memes are inherently bad now and publishers shouldn't have to rely on Google News' traffic hose, but the EU's proposal would effectively kill UGC overnight and turn the internet into television.
Read 5 tweets

Related threads

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#Thread Des gens ont peur que le Référendum d'initiative citoyenne permette aux démagogues de tromper l'électorat et de faire voter des trucs absurdes.

La crainte mérite d'être débattue.
D'un côté, à partir du moment où les gens se sentent dépossédés de la décision dans le système actuel, ils tendent à privilégier la prise d'info minimale sur les sujets de société.

S'ils sont acteurs de la décision, ils seront incités à se renseigner plus amont.
"oui mais ils vont se renseigner sur Facebook, les fake news, les complotistes, toussâââ"

Franchement, si vous croyez en vos idées, ne vous croyez vous pas capable de les défendre et de convaincre les gens de bonne volonté/bon sens ?
Read 16 tweets
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🔥FACEBOOK🔥

@Facebook “used us for crisis PR...They are more interested in making themselves look good & passing the buck…I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments.” ~@brooklynmarie

HT @ChiefCovfefe
Facebook was pushing reporters to prioritize debunking misinformation that *affected Facebook advertisers*, which @brooklynmarie thought crossed a line: “You’re not doing journalism anymore. You’re doing #propaganda.”🤬

Another fact-checker who has long worked on the #Facebook partnership said they were demoralized, saying that #Facebook is “a terrible company and, on a personal level, I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”🔥

#DeleteFacebook

amp.theguardian.com/technology/201…
Read 3 tweets
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#THREAD
Perché da sempre, riguardo al M5S, #IoNonCiSonoMaiCascata
-1 Perché è proprietà privata di una Srl ambigua di cui si sa poco o nulla
-2 Perché basa il suo potere sull’esacerbare la rabbia, la frustrazione, l’invidia della gente
-3 Perché ha immesso in politica gente assolutamente priva di cultura e esperienza, squilibrata caratterialmente, più facile da manovrare
-4 Perché ha le caratteristiche di una setta
-5 Perché ha sdoganato l’idea che studiare, conoscere, sapere sia cosa inutile; per lui vale l’”università della strada”, ossia l’ignoranza più grassa difesa con arrogante supponenza
Read 13 tweets
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#Thread
Be very careful about what you read about #AhvazAttack.
There are many fake news, unconfirmed reports, fabricated photos and photos taken for propaganda use.
For example @bbcpersian journalist @BahmanKalbasi claims a group has taken responsibility when it is not true.1/8
.@guardian journalist @SaeedKD mislead public opinion by writing 'children' were killed by 'terrorists'. And when you read his piece you only see there was one child and not children. But what the headline of the article suggests is very different to its context.2/8
Director of Iran project at @CrisisGroup, @AliVaez jumps in to protect Iranian regime and asks US officials to condemn the attack. However, he has never asked US officials before to condemn Iranian regime for arresting, raping, torturing and executing political prisoners.3/8
Read 9 tweets
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#Thread

STATE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE:

The Presidency rejects allegations of opposition politicians, as well as some newspaper editorial opinions creating the impression that President Buhari is against the use of card readers in the upcoming elections,... (Cont’d)
... hence his decision to decline assent, for the 3rd time, to the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2018.

We wish to state in clear & unambiguous terms that the issue of e-voting and use of card readers was NEVER an issue for the President’s decision to decline assent to the Bill.
It is equally important that this issue was not raised either by the Executive or the Legislature in the recent reviews. Moreover, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) adoption of e-voting reforms is enshrined in the 2015 Amendment Act to the Electoral Reform Act.
Read 13 tweets
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#Thread on #NPAs. Stay with me.

RBI revealed this in an RTI: At the end of March 2018, a record high 7,990 borrowers of above Rs 5 crore had not repaid a whopping Rs 3.71 lakh crore to banks for 1-30 days after due date. That is a four-year high record of early defaulters! 1/n
2/n. These early defaults rose by a record 281.9 per cent over December 2017 when they stood at only Rs 972 billion . On a year-on-year basis, the rise is almost 228 per cent - the highest growth of early stage overdue repayments in 4 years.
3/n. More than 5,000 of these 7,990 were new and unique early defaulters of loans above Rs 5 crore. What does this number tell us? We have been told that all bad loans are of UPA era. This number tells us that Modi govt might be brewing its own banking crisis as well.
Read 9 tweets

Trending hashtags

#Palantir #bmw #Nigeria #NAFTA #CambridgeAnalytica #RosanneKnows #lifelog #TrumpSupporters #NotTrue #startup #Stillwell #RedMeat #PAM #Hass #DARPA #Youtube #Arizona #follow #PlazaCarso #PayAttention #Aadhaar #DataWeaponization #ChristianTaliban #AUSTRAC #Tzhenguiz

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