NEW: Facebook, Twitter And Google Are Still Failing To Tackle Manipulation On Their Platforms, A NATO-Linked Report Says buzzfeednews.com/article/albert…
Between May - August 2019, NATO StratCom conducted an experiment. For the cost of €300, they bought 3,530 comments, 25,750 likes, 20,000 views and 5,100 followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram from manipulation service providers
Researchers were able to identify 18,739 accounts used to engage with the purchased interactions, and to observe what other pages these accounts were interacting with.
A key purpose of the test was to assess how the 4 platforms deal with inauthentic interactions & accounts
A key purpose of the test was to assess how the 4 platforms deal with inauthentic interactions & accounts
The results of the experiment are startling: Four weeks after the purchase, 4 in 5 of the purchased engagements were still online, and three weeks after a sample of fake accounts was reported to the companies, 95% of the accounts were still active.
Although the vast majority of inauthentic accounts and manipulated interactions noted was on pages that are commercial in nature, the researchers noted the accounts engage with hundreds of political pages.
Why does this matter: It suggests that inauthentic activity on social media enabled by manipulation service providers (a growing industry mostly originating from Russia) will often go unnoticed, considerably increasing the risk of malicious interference in democratic processes
