Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.
WhatsApp provides $1 million for misinformation research. Speaking of the globe-spanning chat app, which announced in July that it would fund misinformation-related research: WhatsApp said this week that it’s giving $50,000 each to 20 projects from 11 countries. Among the topics getting funding (Poynter’s Daniel Funke has the full list):
“Is correction fluid? How to make fact-checks on WhatsApp more effective”
“Seeing is believing: Is video modality more powerful in spreading fake news?”
“Misinformation vulnerabilities among elderly during disease outbreaks”
“Values and arguments in the assimilation and propagation of disinformation”
“WhatsApp group and digital literacy among Indonesian women”
“We failed to look and try to imagine what was hiding behind corners.” The New York Times published an alarming look at how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg “ignored warning signs” of the extent of misinformation on their platform — beginning with its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — “and then sought to conceal them from public view.” Among the most egregious parts of the piece reveals how, beginning in October 2017, Facebook ramped up its work with Definers Public Affairs, a Washington-based consultancy “founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics” like former Jeb Bush spokesman (and Crooked Media contributor) Tim Miller that “specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.” The company worked with Definers to, among other things, “discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros.”
WHAT pic.twitter.com/5DhRfLNayX
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 14, 2018
So Sen. Chuck Schumer pushed to *kill* congressional scrutiny of Facebook.
He also just happens to have gotten more $$ from Facebook employees in 2016 than *anyone else in Congress.*https://t.co/qiuM2H7l60
A good reminder that the swamp does exist — and it's bipartisan. pic.twitter.com/KmBAlf3Kvx
— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) November 15, 2018
A big theme of the Times Facebook story is that their Bush White House public policy guy saying they can't do anything about hate speech or disinformation or Russia because conservatives will get mad at them https://t.co/k4MQNchAvE pic.twitter.com/XLiAp7REih
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) November 14, 2018
Yet Sandberg, in particular, was not shy about using her Democratic ties to try to dampen the fervor against Facebook. After Amy Klobuchar introduced the Honest Ads Act, she got an angry phone call from Sandberg (who had featured her on "Lean In.")
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) November 14, 2018
The most impressive thing about the NYT Facebook story is their ability to trace huge missteps directly to executive decision making. It holds people like Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan responsible for multiple policy failures and the company’s complete loss of political capital
— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) November 14, 2018
This Republican strategist at Facebook, knowing that his mother-in-law was drinking Russian disinfo, argued downplaying the impact was better.
This is like something out of Nabokov /3 pic.twitter.com/PLdyNndsGE
— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) November 15, 2018
The Soros conspiracy-mongering is super vile but the sheer shittyness of basically funding fake news while on the apology tour really takes the cake for me in the NYT FB article https://t.co/CezJBFxUzJ pic.twitter.com/y3BNvi98eN
— Leigh Honeywell (@hypatiadotca) November 15, 2018
— Crooked Media (@crookedmedia) November 15, 2018
The Times’ own TL;DR of the story is here.
Facebook responded to the Times’ allegations in a brief post, saying it cut ties with Definers on Wednesday night and claiming that “Mark and Sheryl have been deeply involved in the fight against false news and information operations on Facebook.” George Soros called for an “independent, internal investigation of [Facebook’s] lobbying and public relations work.” This morning, Sandberg told CBS News:
We absolutely did not pay anyone to create fake news — that they have assured me was not happening. And again, we’re doing a thorough look into what happened but they have assured me that we were not paying anyone to either write or promote anything that was false. And that’s very important.
“Heavy on memes, light on language.” Facebook also posted an update about its takedown of “36 Facebook accounts, 6 pages, and 99 Instagram accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior” on November 5, following an FBI tip. The source of the accounts hasn’t been confirmed, but the content is similar to that created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Labs has been analyzing the content and published some of its findings in a Medium post:
Just like the original troll factory, these accounts posted highly divisive content which targeted both sides of America’s partisan gulf. Some, such as @black.voices__ and @ur.melanated.mind, focused on African American communities. Others, such as @maga.people and @4merican.m4de, posed as conservatives. @feminism_4ever and @lgbt_poc focused on gender and race issues; @american.atheist_ and @proud_muslims focused on religion…
The suspect accounts paid particular attention to race and gender issues, including the hyper-sensitive questions of violence against African Americans, and transgender rights.
Some examples from DFR’s Ben Nimmo:
Example of content recycling: this meme was posted by suspect account not_your_negro.
It's watermarked to known IRA account woke_blacks_, and the same image was posted by another IRA account, afrokingdom_.
(H/t the @UsHadrons archive) pic.twitter.com/p4zcPL11Dg
— Ben Nimmo (@benimmo) November 13, 2018
Most of the content on the Instagram pages was heavy on memes, light on language, perhaps to avoid language slips.
It was also bitterly divisive.
Equating Christianity with child abuse, for example. pic.twitter.com/C5F7rx5NPq
— Ben Nimmo (@benimmo) November 13, 2018
Unlike other operations we've seen, this one had a real focus on celebrities, personalities and pundits, on both sides of the political gulf.
Probably an audience building technique; it also allowed them to pivot more easily from one hot issue to another. pic.twitter.com/X0kVKedqne
— Ben Nimmo (@benimmo) November 13, 2018
And, yet again, this was not about "they're on my side".
They pushed both sides, to push both sides further apart. pic.twitter.com/8uDqUGKKq5
— Ben Nimmo (@benimmo) November 13, 2018
