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Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

cbc.ca

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Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#121

Post by throwthrowuknow »

m-i-l wrote: post #41

I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms... However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrag…

Why are you making it sound like speech needs to be qualified? The point of freedom of speech is that it doesn’t need to be approved by any authority.

Sounds more like a mealy mouthed argument against it.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#122

Post by jeroenhd »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #42

I'd wish the EU would pay for California separatism as much as the US is supporting breaking up the EU (Orban, AfD in Germany, Farage, ..)

The EU would be better off promoting separatism for the redneck states rather than specifically supporting California. Direct trade with California is tough, but if the southern states were to fall off, the east coast of the USA would still provide a decent area to trade with.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#123

Post by dmix »

jazz9k wrote: post #114

The same thing happened with the BLM groups during Covid. It was mostly people from overseas that created the groups and were promoting them.

Any political issue that is popular or viral will have stuff like this. It’s definitely not unique to this one Alberta issue since it happens all the time. It’s just a topic that has reached beyond a local issue so it gets good traction on social media.

YouTube and Tiktok have been paying creators for years. You can guarantee people will post stuff that gets traction, not just nefariously but even regular creators getting pushed in certain directions because it’s a reliable source of views. Many will do it for free just for attention or a sense of power.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#124

Post by giarc »

mrweasel wrote: post #7

Canada may not have laws against this, but some countries might classify this as "subversive activity harmful to the nation". That is normally punished by imprisonment, losing the right to conduct business and hold public office.

She lives in a different country, Canadian laws can't do anything about it. I'm not sure what the answer is to this, but it's a real problem.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#125

Post by giarc »

swader999 wrote: post #97

I live here, rural and in areas you'd expect this to have more traction. Nobody is even talking about it. It just doesn't come up in conversation. It might get fifteen percent of the vote and only then because only people that care will bother to show up.

Fellow AB resident here.... then what do you make of their claim that 99.2% (or whatever the number was) of residents in Sylvan Lake, Drumheller etc signed the petition? Has to be completely fabricated right?

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#126

Post by betaby »

If Facebook propaganda is so effective (and cheap) Western democracies should promote democratic values in Belarus/Kazakhstan.

Canada should use this channel to promote tariff cancellation in the USA.

I doubt that Facebook is efficient on important matter. If I'm wrong then Canadian government is doing very bad job in promoting democratic values in and outside Canada.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#127

Post by trumpdong »

giarc wrote: post #119
dmix wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which led Twitter to release a feature allowing you to see which country accounts were originally made which confirmed a lot of suspicions about Indian/Pakistan accounts positing politics stuff because it goes viral and pays. Other sites would benefit from that sort of feature to at least set the bar higher.

Didn't they almost immediately retract that after it became clear so many of the GOP adjacent accounts were based offshore?

They did.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#128

Post by vintermann »

miki123211 wrote: post #95
ifwinterco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income. I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being India…

On the other hand... on the internet, everybody is an American (or a Brit). There are many people who don't live in a country where English is spoken natively, but who speak it well enough to lurk on the English internet. Those people are exposed to American and British politics and start to form opinions. It's not unusual for us to have our own takes on what happens in these countries.

But we don't pretend to be something we're not.

Re: Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

#130

Post by dmix »

giarc wrote: post #119
dmix wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which led Twitter to release a feature allowing you to see which country accounts were originally made which confirmed a lot of suspicions about Indian/Pakistan accounts positing politics stuff because it goes viral and pays. Other sites would benefit from that sort of feature to at least set the bar higher.

Didn't they almost immediately retract that after it became clear so many of the GOP adjacent accounts were based offshore?

No they released the feature. The more controversial part was X also announced they’d start a large ban campaign to kill off foreign accounts posting stuff low quality politics memes like this just for money. This got push back as a bunch of big accounts claiming it would create false positive bans and they had legitimate interest in the topics despite not being American etc. I didn’t follow it closely after that but I believe it still led to some foreign accounts being banned, just not at the scale Nikita Bier wanted.

“Just ban them” is admittedly more complicated than it sounds once you think about it. Ie what about Canadians who post about American politics all the time. Or is it just low quality Indian accounts. How do you measure quality. Etc

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