The creepiness that is Facebook

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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 08, 2017 4:37 pm

Subpoenas likely if Facebook resists Russia inquiries
BY GREG GORDON AND PETER STONE
ggordon@mcclatchydc.com

SEPTEMBER 07, 2017 10:48 PM

WASHINGTON
The discovery that a Russian company bought election-related Facebook ads in last year’s presidential race opens new avenues for Justice Department and congressional investigators and likely will lead to subpoenas for confidential records of social media advertisers, former prosecutors say.

Facebook’s disclosure, which a key Senate Democrat called “the tip of the iceberg,” appears to show that Russians searching for ways to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects broke criminal laws barring foreigners from attempting to influence U.S. elections.

The findings could ease investigators’ efforts to win Facebook’s voluntary release of records showing whether Russian intelligence agencies went even further to boost Donald Trump’s chances – by buying far more ads with much stealthier methods than the easily traceable $150,000 in purchases that the company divulged on Wednesday.

If Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms don’t cooperate, subpoenas could be in the offing.


The evidence of Russian ad buys on Facebook "is likely to be of great interest to all of the entities investigating Russian interference with last year’s election,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now heads the Columbia University law school’s Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity.

“To the extent that Facebook and other social media companies don’t voluntarily cooperate, I would expect subpoenas to be issued and other legal avenues to be pursued," she added -- though it’s uncertain whether the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees would oblige Democrats' push to compel cooperation.

Russia’s use of social media is a focus of investigations into the Kremlin’s massive, multi-pronged cyberattack by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the congressional intelligence committees.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he has believed since the beginning of his panel’s investigation that Russians were using “the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything – the Facebooks, Googles and Twitters … to intervene in our elections.”

Addressing a major intelligence conference in Washington, Warner called “the tip of the iceberg” Facebook’s revelation that it had tracked thousands of the ads to a Russian company linked to a so-called, Kremlin-directed “troll farm” that spread Russian propaganda.

The sponsored Facebook ads pop up near the top of Facebook users’ private news feeds. Ads that are targeted to a certain subset of people are known as “dark posts,” because only the recipients see them. Many such ads are designed to automatically disappear once they’ve been viewed by Facebook customers.

U.S. intelligence agencies also say Russian operatives unleashed automated attacks using computer commands known as “bots” to circulate fake news about Clinton, often via phony Twitter accounts.

Warner said he wants Facebook representatives “to come back in” for further questioning by Senate investigators.

“I want to see Twitter back in” as well, he said. “I want to see others come back in.”

No evidence has surfaced that Facebook officials knew about the Russian ads until the recent completion of an internal inquiry. A company official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told McClatchy it considers that inquiry to be a starting point for further review. So far Facebook has searched mainly for the most easily found accounts traceable to Russia, but not those that may have been created using LLCs and other entities whose origins are more difficult to track.

Facebook usually puts up a legal fight over demands for client information, but the company’s published policies make exceptions in the case of subpoenas in criminal investigations and, presumably, in counterintelligence investigations like the ones into Russia’s cyberattacks.

Company spokesman Andy Stone said the firm is “cooperating with authorities” and “we are investigating, as well.”

If investigators serve the company with a subpoena, he said, “we will process it in accordance with our policies.”

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment on whether it has sought or will seek subpoenas from the grand jury it is working with to obtain Facebook’s records.

But Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who is a senior adviser for the new watchdog group American Oversight, said she is sure that Mueller “is taking a hard look at this” and will ask a grand jury to subpoena the company if it doesn’t voluntarily provide access to the purchasers of all sponsored ads.

She said “the latest revelations regarding the Facebook ad buys suggest numerous crimes, including conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

If Russia were found to have used front companies or loosely regulated U.S. nonprofit groups to conceal the source of funding while spreading fake or harshly critical news about Clinton over Facebook, then investigators would want to know whether any were targeted to swing states or districts crucial to Trump’s upset victory.

Former New York federal prosecutor Jaimie Nawaday, now a partner in the law firm of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, said even without collusion, such activity would rise to a new level of illegality.

“If Russian agents were using front companies to purchase advertising in the United States in order to promote federal criminal activity surrounding an election,” she said, “that would be classic money laundering.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... rylink=cpy



ISSIE LAPOWSKY
BUSINESS
09.06.1704:55 PM
THOUSANDS OF FACEBOOK ADS TIED TO BOGUS RUSSIAN ACCOUNTS


DANIEL BISKUP/REDUX
AMID ONGOING CONCERN over the role of disinformation in the 2016 election, Facebook said Wednesday it found that more than 5,000 ads, costing more than $150,000, had been placed on its network between June 2015 and May 2017 from "inauthentic accounts" and Pages, likely from Russia.
The ads didn't directly mention the election or the candidates, according to a blog post by Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos, but focused on "amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights." Facebook declined to discuss additional details about the ads.
Facebook says it had given the information to authorities investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. "We know we have to stay vigilant to keep ahead of people who try to misuse our platform," Stamos wrote in the post. "We believe in protecting the integrity of civic discourse, and require advertisers on our platform to follow both our policies and all applicable laws."

Even If Kushner Can't Recall His Russia Talks, the FBI Would
Speculation has swirled about the role Facebook played spreading fake news during the 2016 election. Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has gone so far as to wonder whether President Trump's tech and data team collaborated with Russian actors to target fake news at American voters in key geographic areas. “We need information from the companies, as well as we need to look into the activities of some of the Trump digital campaign activities," Warner said recently.
Brad Parscale, digital director of the Trump campaign, has agreed to an interview with the House Intelligence Committee, and maintains he is "unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operations of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign."
Wednesday's revelation is a new wrinkle in the ongoing Russia investigations. In July, Facebook told WIRED it had found no indication of Russian entities buying entities during the election.
In the larger context of political ad spending, even $150,000 is a nominal amount. According to a report by Borrell Associates, digital political-ad spending totaled roughly $1.4 billion in 2016. And yet, this finding exposes what seems to be a coordinated effort to spread misinformation about key election issues in targeted states.
Facebook is remaining tight lipped about the methods it used to identify the fraudulent accounts and Pages that it has since suspended. One search for ads purchased from US internet addresses set to the Russian language turned up $50,000 worth of spending on 2,200 ads. Facebook said about one-quarter of the suspect ads were geographically targeted, with more of those running in 2015 than 2016. According to The Washington Post, some accounts may be linked to a content farm called Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.
Facebook said it is implementing changes to prevent similar abuse. Among other things, it's looking for ways to combat so-called cloaking in which ads that appear benign redirect users to malicious or misleading websites once people click through. That allows bad actors to circumvent Facebook's ad review process.
But while Facebook may be able to limit what people can and can't buy on its platform, it doesn't change the fact that social media has created a stage for anyone looking to spread false information online, with or without ads. As the $150,000 figure indicates, this finding is but a small fraction of a much larger problem.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-ti ... -accounts/


THINK JARED....THINK PARSCALE ......THINK CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA.....THINK MERCER
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 15, 2017 11:12 am

Facebook doesn't know the full extent of Russia's ad purchases during the 2016 election

Natasha Bertrand

Facebook still does not know the extent of Russia's advertisement purchases during the 2016 election — or whether these unidentified ad buys are still on the site.

That is primarily because the Russia-linked entities that purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads last year could have used the site's self-service tool to bypass the company's employees.

A Facebook spokesman told CNN on Thursday that there was "no sales support." A company representative would not elaborate when asked by Business Insider if it plans to change its ad sales policy.

Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos said in a statement last week that, in reviewing ad buys, Facebook found "approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 — associated with roughly 3,000 ads — that was connected to about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of our policies."

"Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia," he said.

But there may be more ads that Facebook has yet to uncover.

"We continue to investigate," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider.

Russia's use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to spread fake news and propaganda during the election has become a "red-hot" focus of FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's election interference, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is also weighing whether to hold a public hearing focusing on how Russia used social media to "manipulate" voters.

Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters last week that he thought the advertisements the Russians purchased were "just the tip of the iceberg."

Facebook has since confirmed that Russia-linked groups went further than ad buys and memes, and tried to organize anti-immigrant, anti-Hillary Clinton rallies in Texas and Idaho.
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-a ... ion-2017-9


MARK ZUCKERBERG’S RUSSIA PROBLEM IS BIGGER THAN FACEBOOK

With Mueller bearing down and Congress demanding answers, Silicon Valley is losing its political firewall.

BY MAYA KOSOFF
SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 10:03 AM

Facebook, which initially rejected claims that it enabled the spread of misinformation during the presidential race, is now a central focus of the Justice Department probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Bloomberg reports that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors are investigating how Russia manipulated social media to post propaganda and spread fake-news stories, and are “seeking additional evidence” from companies like Twitter and Facebook. The latest revelation follows news last week that Facebook turned over information to congressional investigators showing that it sold about $100,000 worth of ads—a relatively small amount of ad spend, but one that nevertheless could have reached 70 million Facebook users—to a shady pro-Kremlin Russian propaganda company seeking to target U.S. voters.

It’s a remarkable turn of events for C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously called it “pretty crazy” that Facebook could have had a material impact on the election. In the last several months however, new fears about cyber warfare, including Russia’s sophisticated propaganda machine, have moved from the intelligence community into the mainstream. On Monday, the Daily Beast reported that Russian operatives also sought to organize conservative protests in the U.S., using false identities to create Facebook events designed to inflame partisan divisions over immigration and Islam. According to Bloomberg, multiple agencies including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the F.B.I. are now racing to prevent future hacking and disinformation operations, including potential threats to the 2018 midterm elections.

Facebook is also rushing to fix what threatens to become a major P.R. issue. Over the past week, Facebook has said it will shut off advertisements for news outlets publishing misinformation; that it will take new precautions when placing ads inside videos; and that it will be more responsive to advertisers in not pairing them with content “that wouldn’t reflect well on their brands.” Its new guidelines for publishers that want to run ads, for instance, demand an “authentic, established presence on Facebook” and proof that “they are who they represent themselves to be, and have had a profile or page on Facebook for at least one month.” Facebook also said that it has now shut down all inauthentic accounts and pages believed to be operated out of Russia. The response comes after Facebook said earlier this year that it would add new services to detect abuse and fake accounts on its platforms, and take down what it calls “false amplifiers”—fake accounts or groups that coordinate online harassment campaigns or spread fake news.

The mounting scrutiny comes at a precarious time for Facebook and other major Silicon Valley companies, which are quickly seeing their political firewall in Washington eroded. For years, the Big Five tech oligopoly (Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet) has managed to stay off Congress’s radar, ensconced in a halo of consumer goodwill that has mostly protected them from the sorts of regulatory threats that have resulted in anti-trust investigations and large fines in Europe. Now, the Era of Good Feelings seems to be coming to an end, just as the federal government is taking a harder look at the ways in which social-media platforms were weaponized in 2016. Suspicion of Facebook is a bipartisan enterprise; Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has said that it’s “probably more of a question of when” than if Facebook officials will have to testify. The committee’s top Democrat, Senator Mark Warner, argued this week that “the whole notion of social media and how it is used in political campaigns is the wild wild west.” He added that Facebook’s earlier denials “in the immediate aftermath of our elections” raises questions about what they knew, and when they knew. (Facebook said in a statement that “we have shared our findings with U.S. authorities investigating these issues, and we will continue to work with them as necessary.”)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09 ... n-facebook


Shuttered Facebook group that organized anti-Clinton, anti-immigrant rallies across Texas was linked to Russia
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook ... ies-2017-9



Facebook may still not know full extent of Russian ad buys
The company may still have some fake ads online.

Rob LeFebvre, @roblef
18h ago in Internet

It's been just over a week since Facebook admitted to discovering that it sold $100,000 in ads to hundreds of fake pages and accounts that were both related to each other and apparently run from Russia. Both Democratic and Republican senators are looking for some sort of public hearing on the matter. Now, according to a report by CNN Money, sources familiar with the matter say that Facebook still doesn't know the full extent of the possible fake news ring and that there still may be more ads on Facebook to this day.

CNN's Dylan Byers writes that ad buys on Facebook are purchased via an automated self-service tool, which avoids any human interaction from the social network. Facebook's Andy Stone told CNN that there wasn't any communication between the people who bought the discovered ads and the website's sales team. This apparently happens with larger ad buys. While this might be one way to shift the blame from itself, notes Byers, Facebook will still need to figure out how to prevent these systems from being exploited in the future.

According to CNN, Facebook employees have taken to internal message boards to call for more transparency about the content of these ads. So far, the company has only said that the ads weren't directly about the US election, but mainly focused on spreading social messages to help reinforce the divide between political sides - including "topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights." About one-fourth of the ads were targeted to specific geographical locations, as well.

Facebook's statement on the matter says that in addition to new tech to detect fake accounts and reduce misinformation, the company is working on ways to "better detect inauthentic Pages and the ads they may run," along with changes to help "more efficiently detect and stop inauthentic accounts" when they're actually created.

We've reached out to Facebook for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/14/fac ... n-ad-buys/


Facebook Ads Could Be Programmed to Reach ‘Jew Haters’ and ‘NaziParty’ Workers
John Patrick Pullen
Updated: Sep 14, 2017 6:09 PM ET
For better or worse, Facebook's ad platform has made it easier than ever to reach niche audiences. The positives of that have been apparent to advertisers for years, but now the downsides are starting to show.
Specifically, until this week marketers could use anti-Semitic terms and hate speech to reach Nazis and white supremacists via Facebook ads. An investigation by ProPublica revealed that advertisers could target people who list "NaziParty" as their employer or are interested in topics including "jew hater," "how to burn jews," and "history of 'why jews ruin the world'" through promoted posts.
Facebook removed the ad categories after the publication contacted the social network. Facebook claims the categories were generated by information users entered when filling out their profiles. For instance, a Facebook user may have added the description "Jew hater" to his or her profile, and that term would then appear to advertisers as a potential category of users to which ads could be directed.

"We’ve removed the associated targeting fields in question," said Rob Leathern, a product management director at Facebook said in a statement. "We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
The revelation comes after Facebook has promised to get tougher on hate speech in advertising. But it's more than just an embarrassing slip for one of the world's largest advertising platforms. Last week the social network revealed that a Russia-based organization spent big on divisive ads during the 2016 presidential campaign. The company received more than $100,000 to spread polarizing messages on topics that included immigration, race, and gay rights.
In revealing the Russia-based ads, Facebook noted that the messages were not specifically linked to any one candidate. However, a network of more than 1 million real and fake accounts gamed Facebook's system to influence the social network with more than 100 million 'likes.' This 'collusion network' may have been used to boost certain posts and accounts, say researchers. And this information came to light as Facebook also acknowledged that Russian-connected accounts used the social networking site to organize anti-immigrant rallies last year.
It's becoming clearer by the day that a lot needs to be done to fix Facebook before the 2020 presidential campaign. But as ProPublica outlines in its investigation, problems will persist. For instance, though these anti-Semitic niche audiences were small, if advertisers target interests like "Second Amendment" they can reach larger audiences that encompass the smaller groups. In other words, despite Facebook's changes, advertisers can capture these eyeballs. They just need to use a bigger net.
http://fortune.com/2017/09/14/facebook- ... ic-russia/


Russia, Fake News and Facebook: 24/7 Manipulation

By Rob Enderle
Sep 11, 2017 10:47 AM PT
fake-news

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Back when the Internet first came to be, there was the typical set of blue sky and lollipop predictions that the result would be more facts, less censorship, more intelligent discourse and less successful manipulation.

Being able to converse with each other would lead people to be more honest, and our world increasingly would resemble a utopian ideal of peace and prosperity. Now, decades later, "fake news" has proliferated, censorship is growing stronger, and rather than having politicians who can't handle the truth, we seem to have politicians who have no idea what the truth is.

In fact, instead of becoming more literate, we seem to be regressing. Last week, we discovered that Russia allegedly paid US$100K for ads to piss us off; we saw the emergence of Verrit, a biased news service that Hillary Clinton thinks is a better Snopes; and the rumor spread that Hurricane Irma was a category 6, even though the highest classification for a Hurricane is 5.

Oh, and as bad as Trump has been with responding to Harvey and Irma, some folks think Obama was worse with Katrina -- even though he wasn't yet president. Katrina hit on George W. Bush's watch.

I'll focus on the problems associated with citizens being manipulated by fake news and then close with my product of the week: Varonis which, given the Uber Consent Decree, most firms should have on their short list now.


Verrit: The Left Is as Delusional as the Right

Hillary Clinton last week foolishly connected Verrit to Snopes. I'm getting a tad tired of both extremes in politics ignoring the truth and pretending only the other side is made up of idiots.

Yes, there is a serious problem with our president, who doesn't seem to be able to read anything. On the other hand, referring to Verrit as kind of the liberal Snopes is stupid. Most fact-checking sites are perceived to be liberal because, let's face it, conservatives often have issues with facts.

However, we tend to forget that this behavior isn't just tied to conservatives. People generally don't like to hear opinions -- or facts -- that contradict their beliefs. Currently the right seems to be having most of the free speech rallies, and the left is trying to shut them down. Apparently neither side sees the deep irony in this.

Since Clinton's announcement, Verrit, which apparently wasn't able to handle the massive load resulting from the endorsement (it crashed), has been found wanting by real news organizations like The Washington Post.

The folks mocking the site most aggressively are the extremely conservative (joking) Bernie Sanders supporters whom Verrit accused of putting Trump in the White House. (By the way, my view on what put Trump in the White house is that it was a bunch of political game players who cheated badly on both sides.)

Facebook and Russia

Last week, in connection with investigating the source of Fake News on its network, Facebook discovered a Russian connection. About $100K was spent, not to elect either candidate, but to ferment internal conflict.

Now we seem to be acting like this is the limit of Russia's expenditure, even though the level of infighting in the U.S. is unprecedented, suggesting this expense and effort might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Even a relatively minor marketing campaign by a U.S. company typically runs in the millions, and though they are rare, there are even $100M campaigns. So why would we assume that a state player like Russia would spend just $100K? It is likely only the tip of the iceberg on Facebook, and why wouldn't we be looking for where else Russia spent its money? I'd bet on lobbyists.

In any case, whoever put the program together should get a raise, because we sure are pissed off at each other. You'd think the government at least would point out that much of our anger might have resulted from the full extent of Russia's efforst at manipulation. Maybe it is spending too much time on Verrit...

Wrapping Up: There Is No Monopoly on Stupid

Our key difficulty is that we seem so locked into having our argument dominate that we lose track of what is right and wrong, or what is important and what isn't. Whether people have flood insurance during a hurricane is important; what the first lady has on her feet isn't, for instance.

We care more about blame than we care about fixing problems. We'll support a politician we like, even one who does something stupid (like blocking the U.S. missile defense program), and we'll criticize a politician we don't like, even one who does something that helps us out, like responding quickly to a disaster.

All of this generally falls into a bucket called "confirmation bias," but we also could call it "programmatic stupidity," because we intentionally are leaving out information that could help us make better decisions.

We likely were always way too easily manipulated -- but with technology, manipulation has gotten much easier. Perhaps we should resist more, because if the world ends, there really won't be anyone left to blame.

We must start realizing that we are being manipulated aggressively by both foreign and domestic actors who are betting we are too stupid to look things up. We must get smarter before we find we lose what we value, and our freedom becomes a distant memory. Put differently, the Internet is the new boob tube. The sooner we realize that, the smarter we'll likely become.


One of the interesting things that happened last month was the FTC's decision to impose a $20M fine on Uber for creating what was effectively a BS level of protection on customer data.

You see, after Uber was called out in 2014 for bad practices, it wrote a new policy but basically did little else. The result was not only that the FTC got pissed, but also that it hit Uber with that huge fine and mandated that it get its act together. Your kids likely protect their homework better than Uber was protecting customer information.

A big part of the problem was that virtually everyone had access to everything, and that isn't an uncommon problem in many companies. However, with this FTC ruling we now have a precedent that means other firms will be held to the same standard.

Varonis is a product designed to manage and monitor data access. It is designed to prevent the exact thing that seemed to enrage the FTC and result in this huge fine.

Varonis
Customers trust us with their data; if we lose that data, we are likely to lose them as customers -- and customer data breaches tend to be career enders.

Varonis makes sure that only authorized folks have access to data. It reports variances so that breaches can be detected and stopped in a timely way, and when there is a breach, it helps identify the related causes.

We need to ensure the accuracy of our data, but we also need to focus more on protecting that data. That is exactly what Varonis does, so it is my product of the week.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/84798.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 16, 2017 7:39 am

Report: Facebook gave special investigator Robert Mueller detailed info on Russian ad buys
Posted 10 hours ago by Jonathan Shieber (@jshieber)

An official for Facebook told TechCrunch that the company is “continuing to cooperate with the relevant U.S. authorities,” as investigations into the Russian hack of last year’s presidential election continue to expand. In the latest development, authorities are now investigating how agents used online advertising on social networks and search platforms, and tech companies are being forced to hand over new, sensitive information to investigators as a result.

In some cases, that means providing different information to different investigations, as The Wall Street Journal is reporting today.

Facebook has apparently turned over more detailed information to the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, than the company shared with Congress last week, the Journal reports.

Mueller’s investigation has received copies of the Russian-bought ads and details about the specific account information and targeting criteria the buyers used to distribute their ads, according to the Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.

It’s likely that Facebook was compelled to turn over the information because the investigating team received a search warrant.

If indeed, Mueller is using warrants, then it’s likely that Facebook won’t be the only tech company that may be forced to reveal information about potential clandestine advertising buys, which Russian agents are alleged to have made in order to influence the U.S. election.

The Journal reports that Mueller’s team could have gotten information that Facebook withheld from Congress because of concerns around privacy laws or fears of disrupting the Mueller probe. My guess is that Facebook is likely also thinking that the Mueller investigation is a tighter ship and less likely to leak details of the ads whereas Congressional staffers could leak like sieves.

It’s clear that Facebook has no interest in revealing details of the ad buys, or telling individuals whether they were targets of what amounts to a Russian plot to influence the U.S. election.

It’s something members of the tech community have taken Facebook to task for already.


We’ve reached out to the Office of the Special Counsel and for comment and will update if we hear back.

Last week Facebook revealed that it had sold as much as $150,000 in political ads to pro-Kremlin entities between 2015 and 2017.

It was part of a broader report that indicated 500 “inauthentic” accounts linked to Russia had purchased 5,000 ads from the company. The developments today relate to that same trove but are a sign of yet more data now being handed over to authorities.

Last Wednesday, as the company released its assessment, Facebook representatives also spoke to Congress as part of ongoing House and Senate investigations into Russian interference in the election. Facebook even told The Washington Post, “there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm.”

As we reported, the Internet Research Agency is widely known for its pro-Kremlin online propaganda campaigns, which U.S. intelligence agencies believe is backed by someone with close ties to the Russian intelligence community who is a close friend of Vladimir Putin’s.

Facebook’s disclosure was the first time it admitted that Russians had reached out to voters during the elections. The company had previously denied that there were any ad buys made by Russian agents or anyone connected with the Russian government.



All of these discoveries and announcements come amid serious questions about the role of Russia in the last election … and whether the President Donald Trump’s campaign (or people associated with that campaign) colluded with the Russian government.

Committees in both houses are writing up reports on the role Russia played in the election.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook isn’t the only social media company to come under fire for either unwittingly or knowingly playing a role in disseminating propaganda on behalf of a foreign government.

Twitter is also expected to come before congressional inquisitors in the coming weeks, according to a report from Reuters last week, quoting Democratic Senator Mark Warner.

“It was my belief that the Russians were using those sites to interfere in our elections, and the first reaction from Facebook was, ‘No. You’re crazy.’” Warner said at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance conference in Washington.

“I think what we saw yesterday in terms of their brief was the tip of the iceberg,” Warner said.

He also told reporters he expected Twitter to soon brief the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether members of President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Moscow.

Facebook has been reluctant to share any details with the public and have extended that reticence to the Congressional investigators that are looking into Russian interference. The Journal reported that Facebook believes the data on ads could be protected under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Bi-partisan leadership from the Senate Intelligence Committee is pushing for company representatives to come to Capitol Hill and publicly walk Senators through how potential Russian agents came to advertise on the company’s social network.

The Senate could compel Facebook executives to show up by issuing a subpoena… But subpoena power to testify is not the same as a warrant. Search warrants have more legal force behind them and mean that the company has to disclose more information than it would in live testimony.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/repor ... n-ad-buys/



Cambridge Analytica refuses to say who had access to its massive and hypertargeted US voter profile database.

DID JARED KUSHNER’S DATA OPERATION HELP SELECT FACEBOOK TARGETS FOR THE RUSSIANS?
The Russians used social media to rile the electorate. Investigators wonder if they had inside help.
BY CHRIS SMITH
SEPTEMBER 15, 2017 1:08 PM

The headlines were about Facebook admitting it had sold ad space to Russian groups trying to sway the 2016 presidential campaign. But investigators shrugged: they’d known or assumed for months that Facebook, as well as Twitter and other social-media platforms, were a tool used in the Kremlin’s campaign. “The only thing that’s surprising is that more revelations like this haven’t come out sooner,” said Congressman Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “And I expect that more will.”

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Video: Middle East Journeyman

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

Senator Martin Heinrich is leading the charge to update American election laws so that the origins of political ads on social media are at least as transparent as those on TV and in print. Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, is also part of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is tracing Russia’s 2016 tactics. “Paul Manafort made an awful lot of money coming up with a game plan for how Russian interests could be pushed in Western countries and Western elections,” Heinrich said, referring to a mid-2000s proposal Manafort pitched to a Russian oligarch. “Suddenly he finds himself in the middle of this campaign. If there is a person who I think is very sophisticated in this stuff, and runs in pretty dicey circles, that is the place where I would dig.”
No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Maybe no one. Or perhaps the chaotic Trump campaign unwittingly enlisted Russian-connected proxies who were eager to exploit any opening to damage Hillary Clinton’s run. It’s also plausible that Trump’s long-shot, anti-establishment bid was willing to take on assistance without asking too many questions. “Are we connecting the dots? I’m finding more dots,” said Quigley, who recently traveled to Prague and Budapest to learn more about the history of Russian influence campaigns. “I believe there was coordination, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09 ... a-facebook
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 17, 2017 5:28 pm

Reports: Facebook Gave Mueller Copies, Records Of Russian Firm’s Ad Buy


ASSOCIATED PRESS
By ESME CRIBB Published SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 2:31 PM
Facebook gave special counsel Robert Mueller, who is overseeing the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, records of Russian ad purchases on the website and copies of the ads, several outlets reported Sunday.

Reuters first reported that Facebook had given Mueller data on the ads last week, and the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Facebook turned over copies of the ads and details about how they were targeted and the accounts that purchased them.

CNN on Sunday confirmed, citing an unnamed source with knowledge of the matter, that Facebook gave Mueller copies of the ads and “related information.”

Both CNN and the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook did not give the same information to congressional committees also investigating Russian interference, and that Facebook’s policy states that it will only turn over the “stored contents” of an account in response to a search warrant.

In a statement to CNN, Facebook said it was giving Mueller information “including ads and related account information.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/r ... irm-ad-buy



Facebook handed Russia-linked ads over to Mueller under search warrant

by Dylan Byers @CNNMoney
September 17, 2017: 11:29 AM ET


What $100,000 can buy you on Facebook
Special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are now in possession of Russian-linked ads run on Facebook during the presidential election, after they obtained a search warrant for the information.
Facebook gave Mueller and his team copies of ads and related information it discovered on its site linked to a Russian troll farm, as well as detailed information about the accounts that bought the ads and the way the ads were targeted at American Facebook users, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN.
(On Sunday, Facebook told CNN in a statement that it was providing information to Mueller, "including ads and related account information.")
The disclosure, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, may give Mueller's office a fuller picture of who was behind the ad buys and how the ads may have influenced voter sentiment during the 2016 election.
Facebook did not give copies of the ads to members of the Senate and House intelligence committees when it met with them last week on the grounds that doing so would violate their privacy policy, sources with knowledge of the briefings said. Facebook's policy states that, in accordance with the federal Stored Communications Act, it can only turn over the stored contents of an account in response to a search warrant.
"We continue to work with the appropriate investigative authorities," Facebook said in a statement to CNN.
Facebook informed Congress last week that it had identified 3,000 ads that ran between June 2015 and May 2017 that were linked to fake accounts. Those accounts, in turn, were linked to the pro-Kremlin troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.
In those briefings, Facebook spoke only in generalities about the ad buys, leaving some committee members feeling frustrated with Facebook's level of cooperation.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN last week that Facebook had not turned over the ads to Congress. Warner has also called Facebook's review "the tip of the iceberg," and suggested that more work needs to be done in order to ascertain the full scope of Russia's use of social media.
Warner also indicated that his committee may call Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks in for "some level of public hearing."
As CNN reported Thursday, Facebook is still not sure whether pro-Kremlin groups may have made other ad buys intended to influence American politics that it simply hasn't discovered yet. It is even possible that unidentified ad buys may still exist on the social media network today.
The special counsel's spokesman declined to comment.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/15/media/f ... index.html



Facebook says likely Russian-based operation funded U.S. ads with political message
Joseph Menn, David Ingram
6 MIN READ

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it had found that an operation likely based in Russia spent $100,000 on thousands of U.S. ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May.

Facebook, the dominant social media network, said 3,000 ads and 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights.

Another $50,000 was spent on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads, likely by Russians, Facebook said.

U.S. election law bars foreign nationals and foreign entities from spending money to expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate. Non-U.S. citizens may generally advertise on issues. Other ads, such as those that mention a candidate but do not call for the candidate’s election or defeat, fall into what lawyers have called a legal gray area.

Facebook announced the findings in a blog post by its chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and said that it was cooperating with federal inquiries into influence operations during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees on Wednesday about the suspected Russia advertising, according to a congressional source familiar with the matter. Both committees are conducting probes into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, including potential collusion between the campaign of President Donald Trump and Moscow.

Facebook also gave its findings to Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of investigating alleged Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, a source familiar with the matter said. The company produced copies of advertisements as well as data about the buyers, the source said.

Mueller’s office declined to comment.

Facebook said it found no link between the Russian-purchased advertising and any specific presidential campaign. The ads were mostly national in their focus and did not appear to reflect targeting of political swing-states, the company said.

Even if no laws were violated, Facebook said the 470 accounts and pages associated with the ads ran afoul of the social network’s requirements for authenticity and have since been suspended.

Facebook did not print the names of any of the suspended pages, but some of them included such words as “refugee” and “patriot.”

More than $1 billion was spent on political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, thousands of times more than the presumed Russian spending identified by Facebook’s security team.

But the findings buttress U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Russia was actively involved in shaping the election.

FILE PHOTO - A 3D plastic representation of the Facebook logo is seen in this illustration photo May 13, 2015. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Facebook previously published a white paper on influence operations, including what it said were fake “amplifier” accounts for propaganda, and said it was cracking down.

As recently as June, Facebook told journalists that it had not found any evidence of Russian operatives buying election-related ads on its platform.

“TROLL FACTORY” CONNECTION

Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the Facebook report “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence community.”

The Facebook logo is displayed on their website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France, February 1, 2017. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau
“We are keenly interested in Russia’s use of social media platforms, both the use of bots and trolls to spread disinformation and propaganda, including through the use of paid online advertising,” he said in a statement.

A Facebook employee said Wednesday that there were unspecified connections between the divisive issue ads and a well-known Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg that publishes comments on social media.

Ellen Weintraub, a member of the U.S. Federal Election Commission, said U.S. voters deserve to know where the ads are coming from and that the money behind them is legal.

“It is unlawful for foreign nationals to be spending money in connection with any federal, state or local election, directly or indirectly,” Weintraub said in a phone interview.

She declined to comment on the Facebook ads, saying she could not discuss subjects that could come before the agency.

Facebook declined to release the ads themselves, prompting a sharp rebuke on Twitter from Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of First Look Media, a producer of feature and documentary films, television and podcasts.

“Facebook keeps the targeted political ads it publishes secret, emboldening criminals,” wrote Omidyar, the eBay founder who also provided funding to launch media organization The Intercept. “I don’t see how that can possibly be legal.”

Facebook’s disclosure may be the first time a private entity has pointed to receiving Russian money related to U.S. elections, said Brendan Fischer, a program director at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for more transparency.

“Whoever may have provided assistance to Russia in buying these Facebook ads is very likely in violation of the law,” he said, adding that Facebook has a legal duty to act if it is aware of similar activity in the future.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-face ... SKCN1BH2VX


Facebook Gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller More Details on Russian Ad Buys Than Congress
Social-media company shared copies of ads and account information, people familiar with the matter say
By Deepa Seetharaman, Byron Tau and Shane Harris
Sept. 15, 2017 6:29 p.m. ET
Facebook Inc. has handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller detailed records about the Russian ad purchases on its platform that go beyond what the company shared with Congress last week, according to people familiar with the matter.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-g ... 1505514552
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 19, 2017 3:00 pm

Facebook Knows More About Russia’s Election Meddling. Shouldn’t We?
Mediator
Jim Rutenberg
MEDIATOR SEPT. 17, 2017

A Facebook mural on the company’s campus in 2014. Facebook is under fire for running ads purchased by fake users trying to cause disruption in the American electorate. Credit Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Here’s what we know, so far, about Facebook’s recent disclosure that a shadowy Russian firm with ties to the Kremlin created thousands of ads on the social media platform that ran before, during and after the 2016 presidential election:

The ads “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum,” including race, immigration and gun rights, Facebook said.

The users who purchased the ads were fakes. Attached to assumed identities, their pages were allegedly created by digital guerrilla marketers from Russia hawking information meant to disrupt the American electorate and sway a presidential election.

Some of those ads were pushed out to very specific parts of the country, presumably for maximum political effect. Facebook has identified some 2,000 other ads that may have been of Russian provenance, although, as CNN reported last week, it can’t rule out that there might be far more than that.

Here’s what we don’t know, at least not directly from Facebook:

• What all of those ads looked like

• What specific information – or disinformation — they were spreading

• Who or what the accounts pretended to be

• How many Americans interacted with the ads or the fake personae

We also don’t know what geographical locations the alleged social media saboteurs were targeting (The regular list of swing states and counties? Or the most politically flammable fringes?). Facebook says that more of those ads ran in 2015 than in 2016, but not how many more.

Nor has Facebook reported whether the people who were targeted were from specific demographic or philosophical groups — all of which means we really don’t know the full extent of the duping on Facebook, and maybe Facebook doesn’t either.

Facebook says it is working to prevent a repeat. And it was hardly the only platform that Russia is presumed to have used to disrupt the political debate in America; there were others in the mix as well, particularly Twitter, which has divulged even less than Facebook has.

But, in total, there’s a stunning lack of public specificity about an alleged foreign campaign to influence our domestic politics. It was an effort that involved “the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda,” as The Times’s Scott Shane noted in his penetrating investigation earlier this month.

Mr. Shane’s report helped fill in some blanks when he unearthed several of the phony accounts, like that of one Melvin Redick, a professed Pennsylvanian. On his Facebook page, Mr. Redick appears to be a loving dad of an adorable little girl, but as it turns out he doesn’t actually exist. That account was early to spot and promote DCLeaks, the site that became a receptacle for hacked information about prominent Americans.

And then last week The Daily Beast uncovered a promotion for a supposed “Citizens before refugees” rally in Twin Falls, Idaho, in August of 2016. As the independent (and embattled) Russian news organization RBC reported in March, the supposed group behind that rally, SecuredBorders, was the creation of the Internet Research Agency, which is suspected of being behind the Facebook ads in question here.

So a picture starts to emerge. But it’s a spotty one, only as good as the journalism that’s working so hard to fill the canvas, and the scraps we’re getting from law enforcement and the social platforms themselves.

Facebook is cooperating to varying degrees with efforts in Washington to understand how it might have been used by Russian influence agents. As The Wall Street Journal first reported late last week, Facebook handed evidence related to the ad campaign over to the special prosecutor investigating the Russia allegations, Robert S. Mueller III.

When I asked Facebook why it couldn’t be more forthcoming with the public, the company responded with a statement saying, “Due to federal law, and the ongoing investigation into these issues, we are limited as to what we can disclose publicly.”

Facebook is referring to its obligations under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the federal law that prohibits the government from unduly spying on our electronic communications.

Photo

Posts taken from SecuredBorders, a Kremlin-tied Facebook page that posed as an American activist group and spread provocative anti-immigrant messages.
Facebook, which didn’t elaborate, appears to be saying it is legally restricted from the willy-nilly handing-over of information about its users to the government or, for that matter, the public. And it’s certainly a challenge for Facebook to decide where the line is between sharing vital details about its use in a plot like election meddling, and exposing private data about its legitimate users.

On Friday, I asked Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or Epic, an advocacy group, where he stood on the question.

“The best case for that is that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech,” he said. “And if the United States government were to try to comprehend the identities of controversial speakers, we’d be up on the front lines saying the government doesn’t have the right to do that.”

But in this case, “We’re talking about non-U.S. persons engaging in political speech in U.S. elections, and it’s a stretch to extend that kind of protection to this type of activity,” he said.

Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, told me that the electronic communications privacy law did not extend protections to advertisements or posted messages that were readily accessible to the public.

That’s not to say that Mr. Mueller’s involvement doesn’t add to the sensitivity for Facebook. It does. But sooner rather than later Facebook owes it to the public to provide still more detail about the ads. And it owes it to its users to let them know if they have directly interacted with the equivalent of digital spies sent to influence them.

Then there’s democracy itself, and the new problems the social platforms are creating for it.

The American electoral system includes a complicated campaign finance regime that was devised to keep Americans informed about who finances the media messages designed to sway them.

The system is imperfect. And it’s been badly weakened over the years. But it still requires, for instance, that television stations keep careful logs of the ad time they sell to candidates and political groups around elections, and make them available to the public. It is also illegal for foreign interests to spend money in our campaigns.

The Russian effort was able to elude those laws through social media, where the system has clearly — and fundamentally — broken down.

“We now know that foreign interests can run campaign ads — sham issue ads — in this country without anyone having any knowledge of who was behind it, and that fundamentally violates a basic concept of campaign finance laws,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate for greater regulation of political spending through his group Democracy21.

Facebook’s announcement about the Russian ads prompted calls from Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico for a new law requiring that social media ads receive the same regulatory scrutiny as television ads (“I’m Vladimir Putin and I approve this message!”).

As of now, we don’t even know the full extent to which the Russian ads violated the current legal requirements. That’s something Mr. Mueller should be able to determine. But Facebook and other platforms need to get more information out there publicly, too, so the necessary discussion about potential remedies doesn’t have to wait for the Mueller investigation to conclude. Hopefully they will.

This much should be clear: Arguments that sites like Facebook are merely open “platforms” — and not “media companies” that make editorial judgments about activity in the digital worlds they created — fall woefully flat when it comes to meddling in our democracy.

The platforms have become incredibly powerful in a short amount of time. With great power has come great profit, which they are only too happy to embrace; the great responsibility part, not always so much.

“Given the role they played in this election, they now have a major responsibility to help solve this problem,” Mr. Wertheimer said.

After all, the 2018 midterms are just around the corner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/busi ... ussia.html



COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE RUSSIA
Image
https://investigaterussia.org
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Sep 19, 2017 3:57 pm

"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 20, 2017 6:14 pm

ROUND ‘EM UP
Exclusive: Russians Appear to Use Facebook to Push Trump Rallies in 17 U.S. Cities
‘Being Patriotic,’ a Facebook group uncovered by The Daily Beast, is the first evidence of suspected Russian provocateurs explicitly mobilizing Trump supporters in real life.

BEN COLLINS
GIDEON RESNICK
KEVIN POULSEN
SPENCER ACKERMAN
09.20.17 11:39 AM ET
Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.
The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.
The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.
“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald!”
The Florida flash mob was one of at least four pro-Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton demonstrations conceived and organized over a Facebook page called “Being Patriotic,” and a related Twitter account called “march_for_trump.” (The Daily Beast identified the accounts in a software-assisted review of politically themed social-media profiles.)
Being Patriotic had 200,000 followers and the strongest activist bent of any of the suspected Russian Facebook election pages that have so far emerged. Events promoted by the page last year included a July “Down With Hillary!” protest outside Clinton’s New York campaign headquarters, a September 11 pro-Trump demonstration in Manhattan, simultaneous “Miners for Trump” demonstrations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in October, and a pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower last November, after his election victory.
The ‘Next Level’ of Election Interference

The Being Patriotic Facebook page was closed in August 2017—right when Facebook purged accounts secretly operated by a notorious St. Petersburg troll factory called Internet Research Agency. According to a public report by U.S. intelligence agencies (PDF), Internet Research Agency is financed by “a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.” Being Patriotic’s posts included scores of pro-Trump or anti-Clinton memes framed and watermarked in the same style as those found on the Heart of Texas and Secured Borders Facebook pages previously identified as Russian operations.
The Being Patriotic Twitter account was suspended at around the same time.
A Facebook spokesman told The Daily Beast the company was “not able to confirm any of the details here,” in response to a question about the Russian origin of Being Patriotic, but did not challenge The Daily Beast’s reporting.
On Sept. 6, Facebook acknowledged for the first time that inauthentic accounts from 2015 to 2017 promoted what the company’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, characterized as “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.” But Stamos said that most of the fraudulent activity it found—some 3,000 ads connected to 470 now-shuttered accounts linked to Russian troll farms—“didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting, or a particular candidate.”
After The Daily Beast found known Russian accounts that used Facebook’s Events tool to promote rallies inside the United States, the company said that it was not well positioned to determine “if something like coordination occurred” between the Trump campaign and Russia—something investigators and security researchers doubt because of the social network’s massive trove of information on its customers.

But the discovery of the Being Patriotic rallies suggests that the fraudulent activity on Facebook did indeed involve messaging on behalf of Trump, did prompt at least some Americans to rally on Trump’s behalf, and did result in the Trump campaign volunteers subsequently sharing material from those events.
The pro-Trump events represent “the next level” of suspected Russian influence operations, said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has testified about those operations to a Senate committee investigating them.
“This would be a direct effort that they attempted that’s more than online promotion,” Watts told The Daily Beast. “‘Let’s organize and try to get people to move to events in a proactive way around a candidate. Again, if it traces back to Russia, you can’t deny that’s foreign influence in an election.”
Railing Against #BLM, Too

The extent of Being Patriotic’s impact is not clear. In June of last year, for example, the Being Patriotic Facebook page asked participants to “gather in front of Trump Tower, N.Y.” The event received call-outs on Facebook and Twitter, and 138 people marked themselves as “attending” on Facebook. Over 400 marked themselves as interested.
March_For_Trump specifically reached out to Nick Toma, a local news anchor in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for coverage of a “Miners for Trump” rally it promoted last October, only a month before the election.
“@NickTomaWBRE Hi, Nick! We're holding a ‘Miners for Trump’ rally tomorrow. If you're interested in covering it, please let us know,” March_for_Trump wrote on October 1st.
When Toma was emailed the link to the tweet, he told The Daily Beast: “Don’t recall ever seeing it before.”
Facebook has turned over some of the illicit ads to special prosecutor Robert Mueller after a federal judge issued a search warrant for the material, according to CNN. Facebook also showed congressional investigators that material but did not leave it with them. Legislators investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 election have expressed frustration over what they describe as insufficient disclosures to Congress, and have indicated that they will seek public testimony from Facebook and other social-media companies.
Watts, the former FBI agent and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted that “plausible deniability is built into any Russian active-measures strategy,” such as using troll farms in St. Petersburg or Macedonia to conceal influence campaigns. But compelling unsuspecting Americans to gather in the streets on behalf of Trump shows the reach and efficacy of those efforts.
The page earned such a large following, a known Macedonian fake news distributor, Nikola Tanevski, purchased BeingPatriotic.com this year, but the page is currently dormant. Tanevski runs popular, pro-Trump fake news factories USATwentyFour.com and TheAmericanBacon.com. Attempts to reach Tanevski did not receive a response.
The layers of deception went beyond Facebook posts and manufactured rallies. When it wasn’t organizing events, Being Patriotic encouraged violence against minorities in incendiary posts. “Arrest and shoot every sh*thead taking part in burning our flag! #BLM vs #USA,” Being Patriotic’s Twitter account posted in April 2016, using the hashtag for the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
The account also advertised a toll-free “Being Patriotic Hotline” to report instances of voter fraud on Election Day.
“Detected a voter fraud? Tell us about it! Call 888-486-8102 or take photo/video and send it to us,” the account wrote on Nov. 8. Being Patriotic’s sister account, @March_for_Trump, plugged the same phone number, as well as a hotline for the “Trump Lawyer Team.” The number is now disconnected.
‘Broward’s Most Famous Trump Fan’

When asked for comment, the White House referred The Daily Beast to the Trump campaign, which, in turn, did not respond to emailed questions. But Susie Wiles, who served as Trump’s campaign manager in Florida, told The Daily Beast that the Broward County portion of the flash mob “was not an official campaign event.”
That’s despite the fact that the event was promoted on “Official Donald J. Trump for President Campaign Facebook Page for Broward County, Florida.” Photos and videos of the demonstration were posted there afterward.
When emailed the link to the Facebook posting, Wiles told The Daily Beast: “There are groups such as this across the state—and maybe other places, too. Groups of people get together and establish a presence such as this but it is unaffiliated with the campaign, per se. The photos ring no bells with me.”
Wiles also said that the Trump campaign’s purported Broward County Facebook page, which markets itself as being “official,” was not set up by the campaign.
“The Donald Trump campaign did not set these Facebook pages up,” she told The Daily Beast. “Rather, supporters (like the lady registered as the contact) set them up to support the campaign and subsequently the president.”
The “lady” registered as the contact is Dolly Trevino Rump, the Trump campaign’s chairwoman for Broward County who, until this April, was also the secretary of the local Republican Party. The Miami Herald described her as “perhaps Broward’s most famous Donald Trump fan.” Rump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast. Neither did the chairman of the Broward County Republican Party.

The Being Patriotic event listings for its Florida flashmobs included the names and phone numbers of people listed as local volunteer coordinators. When contacted by The Daily Beast, two of those coordinators vaguely recalled the events taking place, but not much else.
Betty Triguera, who was listed as a coordinator for a gathering in Sarasota, Florida, told The Daily Beast that she recalled but didn’t attend the event.
“We got the information from it on Twitter but I didn’t go,” Triguera said unable to remember other details.
Jim Frische, who was listed as a coordinator for an event in Clearwater, Florida, told The Daily Beast that he was called about organizing an event and put one together.
He said he was unsure if it was organized by the campaign.
“I don’t recall the group’s name,” Frische said. “I know somebody called and said would you organize something so I put together a group. “I remember doing it and I think we had a dozen or so people out on the street corner. I remember afterward hearing it had happened all over the state.”
—with additional reporting by Sam Stein
http://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-a ... in-florida




Facebook will face Senate during Russian probe hearing
Senator Richard Burr believes the social network has a lot more to say about Russia's ad buys.

Mariella Moon, @mariella_moon
7h ago in Internet

A recent report said Facebook still hasn't discovered the exact number of fake news ads Russian-linked advertisers bought before and after the 2016 Presidential Elections. We might find out if that's true in the near future, because according to Bloomberg, the Senate Intelligence Committee expects the social network's representatives to testify at a public hearing. The committee plans to look into Russia's use of social media to meddle in the elections, and Facebook will most likely have to answer questions about the ads it sold to fake news rings.

Earlier this month, Facebook admitted that it sold at least $100,000 worth of ads that led to fake news pages during the elections. Both the inauthentic accounts and the advertisers that paid for the ads operate out of Russia. The social network also admitted that it wasn't equipped to filter out those kinds of advertisements -- its contractors were only on the lookout for violent and sexually explicit materials. CNN says Facebook already handed evidence over to special counsel Robert Mueller and his team to help them uncover who's behind the ads.

Committee Chairman Richard Burr, however, believes that "Facebook has been less than forthcoming on potentially how they were used." The panel still has to decide the scope of the hearing and when it will take place, but based on Burr's statement, Facebook's reps may have to prepare for a grilling.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/20/fac ... c-hearing/



Russian Agents Used Facebook to Organize Pro-Trump 'Flash Mobs': Report

Events included rallies with names like "Down with Hillary!" and "Miners for Trump."

By Brad Reed / Raw Story September 20, 2017, 9:25 AM GMT


A new report from the Daily Beast sheds more light on how Russian intelligence operatives used Facebook to organize support for Donald Trump’s candidacy during the 2016 presidential election.

According to the report, a Russian-sponsored Facebook group called “Being Patriotic” helped organize and promote multiple Trump rallies and events throughout the election campaign, including a pro-Trump “flash mob” in Florida that was promoted by a local Trump campaign chairman, who posted photos from the event on his Facebook page.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” said the Facebook event page for the events. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald!”

The “flash mobs” weren’t the only events that the Being Patriotic group organizer, either. The Daily Beast also found that “events promoted by the page last year included a July “Down With Hillary!” protest outside Clinton’s New York campaign headquarters, a September 11 pro-Trump demonstration in Manhattan, simultaneous “Miners for Trump” demonstrations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in October, and a pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower last November, after his election victory.”

At its peak, Being Patriotic had 200,000 followers on Facebook. It was shut down last month, shortly before Facebook publicly disclosed that it had received cash from Russian groups for political ads during the 2016 election.



Are We Missing a Big Part of the Facebook Story?

By JOSH MARSHALL Published SEPTEMBER 20, 2017 7:04 PM

Over recent weeks we’ve learned much more about how Russian operatives used Facebook to support Donald Trump, attack Hillary Clinton and spread conspiracy theories pumped up the heat of the 2016 campaign. One big question has been: how effectively did they target those messages, given Facebook’s vast ability to target messages? And if they did target their messages to areas of particular Democratic weakness in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, how were they able to do that? Where did they get the data to drive the effort?

One possibility is obvious: Maybe the Trump campaign gave the Russians access to their data and voter files. To date, there’s at least no public evidence that this happened.

But maybe it didn’t have to.

What I’m about to relay is not new information. But I’m not sure it’s been considered in the context of the new information about Facebook and other digital campaigns apparently run by the Russian disruption campaign which we’ve only learned about quite recently.

Back in May The Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating article about a Florida political operative named Aaron Nevins. When news reports surfaced identifying the online persona Guccifer 2.0 as the one who had the files hacked from the DNC, Aarons essentially cold-emailed Guccifer 2.0 and asked if he had any material to share on Florida. That was on August 12th, 2016. It turns out he did. A lot.

10 days later Guccifer 2.0 sent Nevins 2.5 gigabytes of data from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Note that that is different from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the hack we’re most familiar with. The Journal described the documents like this …

DCCC documents sent to Mr. Nevins analyzed specific Florida districts, showing how many people were dependable Democratic voters, how many were likely Democratic voters but needed a nudge, how many were frequent voters but not committed, and how many were core Republican voters—the kind of data strategists use in planning ad buys and other tactics.

The Journal reviewed these documents as well as Democratic voter analyses also sent to Mr. Nevins about congressional districts in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

Nevins posted some of that data on his anonymous Florida politics blog. Guccifer 2.0 in turn sent that link to Roger Stone. There’s a whole other mystery about what happened to that data from there, who may have used it, what Stone did with it and so forth. But let’s set that aside for the moment. Nevins just asked for whatever “Florida based information” Guccifer 2.0 might have. He had a lot. There’s every reason to believe that Guccifer 2.0 had comparable data for other states and that he had data from multiple Democratic campaign committees. At least he had information from the DCCC and the DNC.

US intelligence believes Guccifer 2.0 is a fictive persona created by Russian military intelligence. The Facebook campaigns appear to have been run out of a St. Petersburg, Russia troll farm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The IRA is nominally a privately owned operation. But it seems clearly to work on behalf of the Russian government, even if it is technically independent from it. In any case, the big picture should be clear. If the Russian election disruption campaign needed election and voter data to effectively target its digital campaigns, they seem to have had a lot of it, precisely the kind of detailed data on strong partisans and more marginal voters that would be key to directing such an effort.

Certainly, whoever was calling the shots on the Russian side might still need assistance making sense of them. At a minimum they’d need a reader of English and some basics of US geography. But far from needing guidance from the Trump campaign, they likely had – at least in some respects – better data than they did. At a minimum, they had Democratic side data which could have been used to great effect on its own or created an even fuller picture if married to the data Republicans and the Trump campaign had.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/are ... re-1084524
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby JojoCivil » Wed Sep 20, 2017 9:43 pm

Pretty lame Facebook gits...

(the many posts above being noted, and this divergence, but still...)

when children are crushed and people are ruined

give more money than you get in value from the P.R. release, you scum.



this references the announcement that fb is giving $1million to Mexican Red Cross and waiving (they don't always for non profits?) the donation fees for Mexican Red Cross (probably have to set up fb pay shitstem)

so don't give these pos turds the click but here is a cnnnnnnn munie link
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/news/co ... index.html

Stand Firm

We say peace!
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby conniption » Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:21 pm

MoA

September 07, 2017

Facebook Blames Russia To Deflect From Fraudulent Ad-Sales


A typically political and business strategy to lessen public attention of an evolving scandal is to launch a diversion campaign. A well designed counter campaign makes sensational claims about an unrelated issue. It is intended to take the media attention away from the real issue. Any decent public relation department will have several "canned" campaigns ready to launch on a moment's notice.

Yesterday a new report proved (again) that Facebook cheats with its advertisement reach data. This explains why advertisements booked on Facebook have much less impact than Facebook claims and the paying customers assume.

Only hours later the company launched a diversion campaign. Its purpose is to keep the media off the real scandal. The diversion claim, presented without evidence, is that a "Russian operation" bought influencing advertisements on Facebook aimed at the U.S. public.

Here is the real scandal that Facebook tries to cover up...

continues: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/fa ... sales.html

comments: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/fa ... l#comments
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:26 pm

Moon needs to update

More importantly, the way Cambridge Analytica gained access to some 30 million Facebook accounts without users’ consent, along with private voting records, raises serious privacy concerns.


DID JARED KUSHNER’S DATA OPERATION HELP SELECT FACEBOOK TARGETS FOR THE RUSSIANS?


Russian Agents Used Facebook to Organize Pro-Trump 'Flash Mobs': Report
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby conniption » Thu Sep 21, 2017 8:18 pm

^^^
Postby conniption » Thu Sep 21, 2017 4:21 pm

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 21, 2017 4:26 pm


slan (seemslikeanightmare), you run this place like a concentration camp.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 21, 2017 8:50 pm

I can't comment on an article that is 2 weeks old without being called silly bad names? Oh well


concentration camp....... wow

overreaction to a simple observation :)






Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 26, 2017 6:59 pm wrote:
Edit: per the notion SLAD runs some Irish terror regime that intimidates everyone into silence, well, I am skeptical on that front
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 22, 2017 4:12 pm

trump calls people he does not like or who disagree with him bad silly stupid childish names

trump makes stupid wild unfounded accusations about people he does not like or who disagree with him

Russian Facebook Ads Contained Photos Stolen From Other Users

By SAM THIELMAN Published SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 2:13 PM
0Views
Facebook initially withheld from Congress the thousands of ads it says were purchased by Kremlin-affiliated trolls because some of them contain photos stolen from other Facebook users, a congressional staffer briefed on the content of the ads told TPM on Friday.

The staffer said some of the ads include images of people who are essentially innocent bystanders to the propaganda war Russia waged across social media platforms during the 2016 campaign. The staffer suggested it may be possible for Congress to redact the ads to maintain the privacy of any users whose photos were stolen, in order to give the public access to some of the material Russian operators deployed to try to illegally influence voters.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment to TPM.

In a reversal, the company announced Thursday that it had “reached out to congressional leadership to agree on a process and schedule to provide the content of these ads, along with related information, to congressional investigators.” Facebook already had handed over details of the ad buys, including copies of the ads themselves, to special counsel Robert Mueller.

On the company’s blog, general counsel Colin Stretch essentially handed the public disclosure matter over to Congress: “We believe Congress is best placed to use the information we and others provide to inform the public comprehensively and completely.”

The staffer TPM spoke with speculated that the stolen photos may have been used to build fake Facebook profiles—under the site’s default settings, every user’s profile photos, past and present, are not merely visible but also available for download by any other user.

There’s already some evidence that Russian operators built fake Facebook accounts using stolen photos: The New York Times found that pictures belonging to Charles David Costacurta, a Brazilian man, had been used to build a profile under the name “Melvin Redick” that used to disseminate Russian propaganda.

In Congress, there is a growing sense that the public should know how, specifically, it may have been affected by foreign interference on social media platforms.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, went further: “An American can still figure out what content is being used on TV advertising,” he told CNN. “But in social media there’s no such requirement.”

Warner suggested the need for “a reform process” that would enable Americans “to know if there is foreign-sponsored content coming into their electoral process.” The senator is writing a bill that would require online media companies to publish disclosures similar to those mandated of broadcast television stations, which are individually licensed by the Federal Communications Commission.

Zuckerberg said publicly that he didn’t “think society should want us to “pre-screen political ads. Requiring the company to pre-screen any category of advertisement would necessitate a major increase in human staff, since, by Zuckerberg’s admission, most ad buying on Facebook is automated.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... ser-photos


Donald Trump hits the panic button after Facebook begins cooperating with Trump-Russia investigation
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 1:09 pm EDT Fri Sep 22, 2017
Home » Politics

After months of denials, Facebook has acknowledged that it sold political ad space to Russia during the election. Moreover, Facebook is now cooperating with the investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. It’s just a matter of time before the identities are revealed of the specific Russians who bought those ads, and any connections to the Trump campaign are exposed. So it’s notable that Donald Trump himself hit the panic button today over those ads.


As part of his Friday morning Twitter bender, Trump tweeted “The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary? The greatest influence over our election was the Fake News Media ‘screaming’ for Crooked Hillary Clinton. Next, she was a bad candidate!” This tells us a lot. Not one word of it is accurate, of course. But it tells us that Trump has specific reason to fear Facebook’s cooperation with investigators.


For one thing, there’s the embarrassment factor. The American public is about to see hard evidence that Trump only “won” the election because Russia was running fake ads pushing false information which misled voters. But there may be more to it. Trump’s level of consternation here suggests that he believes these ads will be traced back to his own people. Otherwise, why bring further attention to the story by preemptively denying it?


Donald Trump is behaving as if he expects the Russian Facebook ads to eventually become a much, much bigger story. He’s trying to preemptively taint the narrative by spinning it into a rant about the media and his opponent. Whenever Trump does this, another shoe usually drops before long. Mark Zuckerberg seemed spooked this week when he spoke about the matter in an online video he posted to Facebook. He now seems more than willing to give investigators whatever they need. This story is just getting started – and Trump just helped confirm it.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/pa ... book/5059/


seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 08, 2017 12:02 pm wrote:
How Russia Created the Most Popular Texas Secession Page on Facebook
When is a Texan not a Texan?

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The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Moscow
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that they had shuttered almost 500 accounts they believe were associated with a Russian company that spent some $100,000 on ad buys since June 2015. As a release from Facebook noted, “these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.” Tabbing the accounts as “inauthentic,” Facebook added that the accounts and affiliated ads “focus[ed] on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”
One other arena these actors may have targeted: secession movements within the U.S. At this point, it’s little secret that a number of American secession movements — including Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and both white and black nationalists — have constructed links with Russian actors, including those funded by the Kremlin. Tracing these links has become an unexpected hobby of mine, and I’ve written on the topic a handful of times, from The Diplomat to Slate to The Daily Beast.
Moscow’s ties to the California secession movement, which received a boost following Donald Trump’s election, has seen the greatest coverage — understandably so, given the former #Calexit leader’s willingness to highlight his links to the Moscow-funded Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR) at every turn. Only so many people would be willing to open a “California Embassy” in Moscow, after all. (For my own writings on #Calexit’s myriad ties to Russia, in addition to the links above, click here, here, or here.) As Jonathon Morgan, the founder of Data for Democracy, noted a few months back in detailing the online footprint of Russia and California secessionists, the primary group pushing #Calexit was further “amplified by many of the same accounts that infiltrated conservative Twitter communities and promoted a pro-Trump, white nationalist agenda.” Not exactly an organic upswell.
#Calexit was further “amplified by many of the same accounts that infiltrated conservative Twitter communities and promoted a pro-Trump, white nationalist agenda.”
But for all of the egregious links between Russia and California separatists, the earliest foray into ties between Moscow-linked actors and American secession movements, per my research, was found in my former home: Texas. Back in 2015, I put together a piece for POLITICO Magazine detailing the ties between Lone Star secessionists and Russia, dovetailing off a recent visit from the Texas “foreign minister” to St. Petersburg, where the Texan turned to Russian media to fan the flames of secession. As local Russian officials were threatening to deliver arms to Mexico (and unidentified “guerrillas”) to allow Mexico City to reclaim Texas, Texas secessionists themselves were finding sympathetic ears in Moscow.
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Smile! Secede!
Then, in 2016, the same “foreign minister,” the Texas Nationalist Movement’s (TNM) Nathan Smith, returned to Russia, attending the same pro-secession conference as the California secessionists — and, this time, with the AGMR, the group behind the conference, receiving funding from the Kremlin. In the time since, it’s come out that the AGMR also helped fund the Texan’s travel to Russia.
But promotional efforts behind Smith’s trip were kept to a minimum. Not only did the TNM not mention Smith’s travel to Moscow — despite promoting his stop-overs in France and the U.K. — but the only evidence of Smith’s presence, besides a clip shared by RT (see 0:12), is a tweet from, of all people, former #Calexit head Louis Marinelli.
And that’s where the evidence, as of mid-2017, stood, as it pertained to Moscow’s links with Texas separatism. Funding for travel to, and organizing in, Moscow; plumping support in Russian-backed outlets like RT and Sputnik; odd comments about funding Mexican guerrillas to claim lands lost. Noteworthy enough developments, but without much evidence of success, or much lasting impact.
***
Enter the “Heart of Texas.” The Facebook site, for the past two years, existed as the most prominent Texas secession social media presence online. With over 225,000 followers as of summer 2017, the page, at one point last year, boasted more Facebook fans than the official Texas Democrat and Republican pages combined.
The page was laced with the kind of xenophobic, nativist, and anti-immigrant material many still associate with the Texas secession movement. Plenty of posts targeted Muslim immigrants and refugees, slammed liberals and LGBT activists, condemned vegetarians and Hillary Clinton. Taken on its face, the “Heart of Texas” page plugged material largely associated the American far-right — an amalgamation of InfoWars conspiracy, neo-Confederate separatism, and white nationalist calls for a return to an America past. The page supported the armed insurgents in Malheur, pushed conspiracies surrounding Jade Helm and Antonin Scalia’s death, shared fake Founding Father quotes, and came with the type of Texas-first chauvinism few other states can match:


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Let’s keep Texas Texan, and Texas secession pages foreign
But there was always something off about the “Heart of Texas” page. There was no contact information ever listed, for instance. Unlike TNM, there was no address, no phone number. No individuals identified behind the “Heart of Texas” page. Unlike those fake news pages run by Macedonian teens, there were never any ads placed on the pages, meaning the project was either a bizarre labor of love or something backed by some kind of money. Likewise, while it’s unclear when the Facebook page was founded, the site’s Twitter page (twitter.com/itstimetosecede) went live in November 2015 — within the time-frame listed by Facebook for its surge of Russia-linked “inauthentic” accounts. And when it came to the site’s paltry “about” section, all we learned was that “Texas’s the land protected by Lord [sic].”

Protected by the Lord, but not by grammar
And then there were the typos. Horrible, no-good, laugh-till-you-cry typos, lining every other post, especially through 2016. There’s no possible way I can capture the types of aggressively strange typos — often complete with Russian grammatical structures, no less — in a synopsis, so I’ll let these posts provide an overview of the type of grammar and spelling the “Heart of Texas” page brought to bear:



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The site also ginned up Election Day-related outrage, calling on Texans to “look who vote [sic] in the elections in order to avoid large groups of voting illegal migrants.”
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If the site was limited to eye-bleeding typos and paeans to Dr. Pepper and Whataburger, the page might have been simply another odd, tone-deaf attempt from actors trying to collect fans who don’t care about things like literacy or fact-based analysis. Idiotic, sure — but largely harmless.
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Last November, however, the “Heart of Texas” page tried to roll into the real world, organizing a series of Nov. 5 rallies across the state. Claiming that “It’s time to say a strong NO to the establishment robbers,” the page said a Clinton victory would lead to “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens,” more “refugees, mosques, and terrorist attacks,” and even the outright banning of guns. “We are free citizens of Texas and we’ve had enough of this cheap show on the screen,” the organizers wrote.
The “Heart of Texas” Twitter page also plugged the rallies — even offering to send details via direct message — while its Facebook complement “drew up an approximate map for the #Texit statewide rally,” whatever that means. The site further called for supporters to “open carry” and “make photos.” For some reason, the Facebook page also included a picture of Chris Kyle, co-opting the American veteran’s legacy into the secession movement.


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“Secede IF Hillary!”
As it is, the rallies didn’t generate much participation — only a few dozen people showed up at scattered sites across the state, if memory serves correctly. (In combing my screenshots, it doesn’t look like I snagged any screen-caps of the small turnout, unfortunately.) But in transferring its support from online to on-the-ground participation, the move mirrored, in a certain sense, the Columbian Chemicals plant explosion hoax in Louisiana, perpetrated, presumably, by Russian actors.
But the rally organization did do one thing. In gathering online support, the “Heart of Texas” page obtained identities of potential supporters of Texas secession — supporters whose information the folks at the “Heart of Texas” said they would pass along to the TNM. That is to say, the “Heart of Texas” page — a page likely run by foreign, presumably Russian, actors — was putting its talents toward recruiting for a very real Texas secession organization, one that had already received funding from a Kremlin-backed group.
***
For the past few months, things seemed hunky-dory for the folks behind “Heart of Texas.” They chugged along, posting much of the same material, albeit recently (and unfortunately, for those laughing along) cleaning up many of its typos.
Then, Facebook announced it was cleaning up hundreds of “inauthentic” accounts linked to Russia. And like that, the “Heart of Texas,” along with its Twitter page, was gone. Just like that, Facebook’s most popular Texas secession page was no more.

While no Russian actors have come forward to claim responsibility for the site, there’s any amount of circumstantial evidence — the typos and grammatical structure; the strategic goals behind the site, and the fact that it was shuttered at the same time as hundreds of other Russian-linked fake pages; the parallel rhetoric put forth by other Russia-linked, U.S. domestic politics-related pages; even the ties with the TNM, a group already supported materially by a Kremlin-financed outfit — pointing to actors in Russia as the ones pulling the site’s secession strings.
So RIP, “Heart of Texas.” We hardly knew ye. (Literally.) Looking forward to seeing where pro-secession foreign actors turn to next on Facebook — and where we can enjoy those wonderful typos once more. After all, as “Heart of Texas” told us, for those in love with Texas shape, always be ready for a Texas size.
https://medium.com/@cjcmichel/how-russi ... 4dfd05ee5c
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby conniption » Fri Sep 22, 2017 6:55 pm

russia-insider

Possible Alien Reptile Mark Zuckerberg Vows Fight Against Pro-Russia Thought Crime


WARNING: Contains graphic images (towards the end of the article) indicating that the Zuckster might indeed be an unidentified form of interplanetary species.

Image

Prospective presidential candidate and possible alien Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will be handing over the contents of 3,000 ads purchased by ‘inauthentic accounts’ from the social media giant prior to the 2016 election, which Facebook attributed to a Russian ‘troll farm’ with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Congress, in turn, will surely mandate that Facebook keep a short leash on opinions deemed to be “hateful,” “discriminatory,” or “Russian” leading into the 2018 midterm elections and of course, the 2020 Presidential race. There are, after all, dangerous communist opinions afoot that might once again convince gullible Americans to elect the wrong person.

As iBankCoin previously reported, Facebook claimed in early September over $100,000 worth of ads were sold to a “Russian bot farm” – most of which were purchased in 2015 and did not appear to favor any particular candidate, according to the company.

“Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia,” said Facebook Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos.

Of note:

~~ The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.
~~ Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.
~~ About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.
~~ The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we [Facebook] released in April about information operations.

If true, the implication is that Russia was trying to whip Americans into a political frenzy a year before the election – regardless of the candidates or eventual president.

Facebook rule changes...

continues... http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/p ... me/ri21013


~~~



~~~

conniption » Thu Sep 21, 2017 4:21 pm wrote:
MoA

September 07, 2017

Facebook Blames Russia To Deflect From Fraudulent Ad-Sales


A typically political and business strategy to lessen public attention of an evolving scandal is to launch a diversion campaign. A well designed counter campaign makes sensational claims about an unrelated issue. It is intended to take the media attention away from the real issue. Any decent public relation department will have several "canned" campaigns ready to launch on a moment's notice.

Yesterday a new report proved (again) that Facebook cheats with its advertisement reach data. This explains why advertisements booked on Facebook have much less impact than Facebook claims and the paying customers assume.

Only hours later the company launched a diversion campaign. Its purpose is to keep the media off the real scandal. The diversion claim, presented without evidence, is that a "Russian operation" bought influencing advertisements on Facebook aimed at the U.S. public.

Here is the real scandal that Facebook tries to cover up...

continues: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/fa ... sales.html

comments: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/fa ... l#comments
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Re: The creepiness that is Facebook

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 24, 2017 10:20 am

but more fundamentally, to divide Americans to pit one American against another on some very device issues. It's the kind of cynical campaign you would expect of having a KGB operative running a country. There's a lot we don't know yet about it. I think we know only the minimum of the advertising. And, of course, advertising was only one method the Russians used on social media, and this was only one platform.




JOHN DICKERSON: Let me ask about another development this week. Facebook turned over some information related to Russian efforts to influence the election. What exactly did they turn over, and why is it important?

ADAM SCHIFF: They're providing us with all of the commercials that Russia used on its platform. But I think what's important for people to know is there are a couple of real significant issues here. One is, of course, the paid advertising was designed not only to help Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, but more fundamentally, to divide Americans to pit one American against another on some very device issues. It's the kind of cynical campaign you would expect of having a KGB operative running a country. There's a lot we don't know yet about it. I think we know only the minimum of the advertising. And, of course, advertising was only one method the Russians used on social media, and this was only one platform. But there's also an issue about the use of Facebook's
algorithms and the way it tends to potentially reinforce people's informational bias. And this is a problem that goes well beyond Russia, but in one example, if you were looking or interested in an article about Hillary Clinton's health, what the Facebook
algorithms result in you're seeing a lot more stories about Hillary Clinton's health and reinforce a misperception or inaccurate information? That is a far broader issue than Russia, but one that we really need to know a lot more about.

JOHN DICKERSON: And that's a Facebook problem, not a Russia problem. I mean, that's a problem with their algorithm that keeps us all siloed in certain narrow areas.

ADAM SCHIFF: Yes. There's certainly a Russian implication because they use these algorithms to amplify misinformation or slated information. But it's far broader, and we have to ask, "Is this in our society's interest to create these informational silos?"

JOHN DICKERSON: What's the impact, though, of these Russian Facebook ads? I mean, is anybody saying that they had any influence on the election that changed the outcome in any possible way? It seems a small amount to have done anything like that.

ADAM SCHIFF: Well, first of all, that small amount is only what Facebook has thus far confirmed came directly out of Russia. They have acknowledged that they haven't looked or analyzed or completed a report yet on advertising Russia may have done through third countries. So Russia will use proxies in the Caucasus or other parts of Europe to potentially buy ads or amplify misinformation. And, of course, this is just one platform the Russians were using. This has nothing to do with the Russian use of bots on Twitter. So if you look at the full extent of Russian use of social media, was it in any way decisive or determinative? Hard to say because we really have so little information thus far about the extent of Russian use of social media.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript ... t-24-2017/






Facebook’s Russian ads may just be the tip of the iceberg
The three thousand ads seem like a suspiciously small number.
LUKE BARNES
SEP 22, 2017, 3:57 PM

After previously saying it was “crazy” to suggest Facebook helped Donald Trump become president, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the social media giant will hand over 3,000 Russia-linked ads to Congress to help with their investigation into the Kremlin’s election interference.

“I care deeply about the democratic process and protecting its integrity,” he said in a public Facebook post. “While the amount of problematic content we’ve found so far remains relatively small, any attempted interference is a serious issue.” Zuckerberg added that Facebook would continue to investigate the actions of other additional groups that may have tried to influence the election, including those in other former Soviet states.

But the 470 fake accounts, and the 3,000 ads purchased for $100,000 seem like strangely small numbers for a social media site that has two billion monthly users and where three million businesses actively advertise. This is especially true if you look at the resources available to one Russian troll farm has at its disposal.

In 2015, the New York Times investigated the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg. They reported that the approximately 400 employees, each likely responsible for multiple social media accounts, spent their days churning out pro-Kremlin propaganda, with a budget of roughly $400,000 a month. Those numbers would mean that the IRA would only have need to have spent two percent of its annual budget to buy those 3,000 ads which have just been turned over to Congress.

Facebook itself has admitted that “there is evidence that some of the accounts are linked to a troll farm in St. Petersburg, referred to as the Internet Research Agency, though we have no way to independently confirm” and that it was “possible” that more ads would be found. “It’s a game of cat and mouse,” Elliot Schrage, Facebook Vice President on Policy, said in a blog post. “Bad actors are always working to use more sophisticated methods to obfuscate their origins and cover their tracks.”

Russian corporate records indicate that the IRA hasn’t been active since December 2016 – but a new company called Glasvet, headed by the same general director, is now occupying the same building. Russian media has linked the two companies.

“If Facebook has only identified ads purchased by one of these companies, there needs to be an immediate investigation into activity by everything in this ‘Kremlebot’ empire” Diana Pilipenko, principal investigator on the Center for American Progress’ Moscow Project told Wired. “This may just be the tip of the iceberg”.

Senator Mark Warner, who is leading the investigation into Russian interference, also thinks that the 470 accounts show only a fragment of Russia’s Facebook presence. “By the time the French elections happened in the Spring, Facebook worked with the French and took down 50,000 accounts they felt were related to Russian activity,” he told CNN. “In America, Facebook has only identified 470 accounts. To me, that doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump lambasted the development, restating his position that the Russia investigation was a “hoax”. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also denied the allegations.


The announcement comes after several weeks of bad publicity for Facebook. Last week a study from Yale found that Facebook’s efforts to combat fake news by fact-checking had next-to-no impact, and on Wednesday Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg issued a lengthy apology after Pro Publica found that Facebook’s advertising system failed to prevent ads that targeted users who described themselves as “Jew haters.”
https://thinkprogress.org/facebook-fina ... 53e218339/


Facebook gives Congress 3,000 Russia-linked ads, vows greater transparency

Andrew Couts— Sept 21 at 12:16PM | Last updated Sept 22 at 3:19AM

Facebook plans to overhaul its ad policies to thwart international election tampering.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has turned over to Congress thousands of ads from the social network believed to be linked to Russia‘s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, a reversal from its previous stance.

The move follows the company’s admission earlier this month that it had removed nearly 500 accounts linked to Russia that engaged in disruptive political activity on the social network.

Facebook provided more than 3,000 ads to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which are conducting ongoing investigations into Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The company previously refused to turn over the ads.

In a statement posted on Facebook on Thursday afternoon, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg vowed to improve the company’s efforts to weed out attempts by foreign governments to interfere in the United States’ democratic process and laid out steps the company is taking to achieve that goal.

“The integrity of our elections is fundamental to democracy around the world. That’s why we’ve built teams dedicated to working on election integrity and preventing governments from interfering in the elections of other nations,” Zuckerberg said. “And as we’ve shared before, our teams have found and shut down thousands of fake accounts that could be attempting to influence elections in many countries, including recently in the French elections.”


Zuckerberg added that it “wouldn’t be realistic” to say that they will successfully block all attempts to interfere in U.S. elections. “There will always be bad people in the world, and we can’t prevent all governments from all interference,” he said. “But we can make it harder. We can make it a lot harder. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

At the crux of Facebook’s solution to election interference attempts is greater transparency in the purchase of political ads on the social network. “Not only will you have to disclose which page paid for an ad, but we will also make it so you can visit an advertiser’s page and see the ads they’re currently running to any audience on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook will also bolster its review process for ads, Zuckerbeg said, which he believes will further weed out attempts to meddle in the democratic process through social media ads.

In addition to Facebook, Twitter confirmed on Thursday that it is working with the Senate Intelligence Committee in its investigation into Russian election interference, vowing in a statement to “continue to strengthen our platform against bots and other forms of manipulation.”

The moves by these social media firms to voluntarily strengthen their abilities to combat propaganda and other forms of election manipulation follow calls by Democrats in Congress to impose greater oversight of digital political ads, which, unlike television and radio advertisements, are unregulated by the Federal Election Commission.

Zuckerberg concluded by touting the benefits social media provides in the form of greater capacity for free speech and the ability for citizens and elected officials to connect more easily.

“We will continue working with the government to understand the full extent of Russian interference, and we will do our part not only to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world,” Zuckerberg said, “but also to give everyone a voice and to be a force for good in democracy everywhere.”
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/mark-zu ... integrity/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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