71–80 of 113 posts
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The occupy movement had a leader?
Probably several well-funded ones. We just never got to know them. That whole event wasn't even remotely spontaneous.
So Facebook is complicit in allowing its platform to be weaponized by the state against all speakers of Vietnamese (in and outside of the country). When questioned, they simply shrug their shoulders and say "if we did anything to stop this, our platform would be banned in Vietnam." I'm beyond the point of expecting anything more from Facebook, but I would think the US government should have some leverage here. Vietna…
Does Facebook have rules that are consistently applied to every country? AFAIK, Facebook complies with the local governments' requirements everywhere it operates even though they will occasionally publicize some resistance.
That sounds like a rule that's applied consistently, to every country. And yes, I know it's weasel words that mean exactly the opposite of what they appear to mean.
My guess would be the US is still the world leader in imperialism/psyops/cultural influencing in any form of media.
I think Orwell first made that observation, but it's become a much more effectice propaganda instrument since his day.
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Of course they do. On one hand Twitter was known to have FBI and CIA working inside them. But here's Israel explaining[0] their troll army operations explicitly (see former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett directing the organization at 3:28 in video) https://youtu.be/4xl30Re1EUI?t=208 Why wouldn't any powerful state do this? It is effective, and other countries do it so you can't abandon that "battlefield".
> On one hand Twitter was known to have FBI and CIA working inside them. {{By whom}} An ex-employee of the FBI or the CIA isn't the FBI or the CIA. Are you still working for your previous employer?
At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psychological operations” at the National Security Council, The Post has learned. Another is Matthew Williams, the company’s co-lead of its Trust and Safety department who spent more that 15 years in intelligence with the agency.
The discovery of the DC-to-Silicon Valley pipeline comes amid an outcry over revelations that the FBI influenced Twitter to suppress The Post’s account over its reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business interests in October 2020 and has regularly demanded specific accounts and tweets be banned.
Multiple releases of internal company documents since Dec. 2 show Twitter developed a close working relationship with the intelligence community, which frequently leaned on them to censor political speech."
Meta’s top policy manager for “misinformation,” Aaron Berman, is a former CIA senior analytics manager.
The migration from the intelligence services is particularly pronounced at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, where at least nine former CIA agents and six former intelligence employees at other federal agencies are or have been employed.
Jim Hanson, president of information warfare analysis and consulting firm WorldStrat, told The Post Meta took a particular interest in bringing G-men and woman on board after the 2016 presidential election.
Meta’s top policy manager for “misinformation,” Aaron Berman, is a former CIA senior analytics manager who spent 15 years with “The Company” — even writing the president’s daily briefings.
Others include Scott Stern, Meta’s senior manager for trust and safety risk intelligence, who spent more than seven years with the FBI leading “high-stakes operational determinations for complex and ambiguous overseas counterterrorism operations,” according to his LinkedIn page.
Stern joined Meta in January 2020 to help develop algorithms to combat “misinformation,” as well as more traditional FBI bailiwicks like child safety and counterterrorism."
[0] https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...
"Zuckerberg tells Rogan FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship" [1]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
Maybe it's cognitive dissonance. Maybe it's simply that you support what they are doing, who they are censoring, the propaganda they promote, or you feel this deep-state apparatus is aligned with your interests and your worldview, but it's very obvious what this is.
I'm going to assume you're an intelligent person, just being disingenuous. They explicitly admit they are in these positions to counter "misinformation".
So Facebook is complicit in allowing its platform to be weaponized by the state against all speakers of Vietnamese (in and outside of the country). When questioned, they simply shrug their shoulders and say "if we did anything to stop this, our platform would be banned in Vietnam." I'm beyond the point of expecting anything more from Facebook, but I would think the US government should have some leverage here. Vietna…
Could Facebook be doing better or more? Probably. But they are surrounded by malicious actors from all sides, ranging from people who issue coordinated takedown requests like in this story to people who use Facebook to maliciously push "fake news" stories to just banal and boring spammers to outright scams. Balancing this all out and keeping a grip on things at scale is very hard, perhaps even impossible.
Even HN would be vulnerable to these kind of attacks; HN's scale is much smaller than Facebook's but still much too large for anyone to really get a "grip" on. A few years ago one of my stories got flagged[1], and while I'm probably biased I don't think it should be (I probably should have email dang about it, but I didn't post it myself and didn't really want to bother him with it). Was it "coordinated"? Probably not. The end result is the same though: people abuse the "flag" feature to hide stories they would prefer to not be seen. I also know for a fact that some companies will coordinate employees to upvote comments and stories because I worked for a company that did this.
Is HN currently under attack from coordinated flagging? Maybe, maybe not. I would be surprised if it hasn't happened on at least some occasions, and the only reason it doesn't happen more often is that it's small enough to fly under the radar for most of these kind of government agencies.
I think it's important to have a good understanding of the situation as only with a good understanding can you come up with a good solution. "Facebook bad" may or may not be true, but it is not a good understanding of things.
Just another ex-eastern block country cooking the same recipe. I still wonder, why all this state agent are allowed into the free net. They usually are not even allowed into the western internet, in china you cant even have a VPN without going to prison. So the normal citizen cant look at western internet, but the western internet allows those state agents to post undeclared content. Its like a trapdoor function rigg…
> in china you cant even have a VPN without going to prison This isn't really the case. Technically that's the law, but like many others it isn't actually enforced. It comes into play when the party wants to make an example out of a VPN provider. Viet Nam is generally more relaxed anyways. The policy has always just been to care about things written in the Vietnamese language. Even foreigners living in the country, p…
I doubt it, the ruling members of the party are pretty much there since the end of the war and look much much older than the population, I'm not sure they even grasp the modern Vietnam much as seen during the disastrous covid food delivery by the army.
There's a power divide but also a generation divide.
The UK has the 77th Brigade for this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-77th-brigade-brit... It has allegedly targeted Covid policy dissenters like Peter Hitchens.
Your source is pre-covid. I did a cursory search into their Covid activities and found an expansive report based on an alleged whistleblower[1] and a narrower admission by the Secretary of State for Defense that they > [use] publicly available data, including material shared on social media platforms, to assess UK disinformation trends. It is not to be involved in regulating, policing or even reporting opinion that i…
Hitchens is certainly out there. But everybody knows that, and expects it. He's a controversialist, and whatever views you have, he'll have written a trenchant article denouncing at least a few of them.
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[flagged]
This is a very good point.
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> On one hand Twitter was known to have FBI and CIA working inside them. {{By whom}} An ex-employee of the FBI or the CIA isn't the FBI or the CIA. Are you still working for your previous employer?
"Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants. [0] At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psyc…