Washington Post wrote:Facebook has shut down a sophisticated disinformation operation on its platform that engaged in divisive messaging ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the company said Tuesday, an escalation of what a top executive described as an “arms race” to manipulate the public using its tools.
Facebook said it discovered 32 false pages and profiles that operated from March 2017 until this May, which lured 290,000 people with ads, events and regular posts on topics such as race, mindfulness and feminism — and sought to stir opposition to President Trump. The company deleted the profiles and notified law enforcement and lawmakers of the activity, as well the real Facebook users who were swept up in the operation.
One of the most popular pages had links to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Kremlin-backed organization of Russian operatives that flooded Facebook with disinformation around the 2016 election, Facebook said. Yet the operators of the newly banned pages, whom Facebook said it was not in a position to identify, were more clever about covering their tracks. Lawmakers and experts were quick to attribute the activity to Russia.
When I was growing up, grassroots political activity was associated with mimeograph paper. Production was limited to several hundred at a time. You passed them out by hand. In an hour you can set up a Facebook page that can be viewed all over the world. We have gone from the scribe to the Gutenberg press, Linotype, mimeograph, xerox, laser printer, and finally off the printed page and onto the internet.
In the internet, the printed word is released from the confines of an individual sheet of paper. Think of it like this: with a computer and a Facebook page, you are one of over 2 billion people with a printing press that can transmit instantaneously to 2 billion people. Of course in reality is the pool is a lot smaller than 2 billion. But think of it in passing out leaflets on a street corner: fake Facebook profiles and pages generated 290,000 hits. Now that's a smart bomb.
The Russians are using the power of that medium. Not as a direct frontal attack. The ad above has no statement of purpose. There is no objectifiable political end, no national chapter, no organizer to contact. Consider the hypothesis that the ad is just as effective as a rallying cry to a Trump voter.
Look: a rallying cry to gather in Times Square the night before the election with nothing other than Trump must be stopped says what, exactly? Is this associated with the Democratic Party? No, but people will associated the rally with liberal Democrats. And a rally in Time Square, two days before the election is preaching to the choir. The idea of this rally is not to move the needle towards the Democrats, but to have Trump voters feels revulsion as they are compared with fascists.
In the early days of ideological warfare, there were genuine ideological spark. Rightly or wrongly, many Americans during the 1930's felt that labor could not get a fair shake under capitalism. Communism was an ideological answer to the unfairness of capitalism. Rightly or wrongly, people believed in the brotherhood of international socialism. So what does a KGB Colonel do with his talents after the fall of the socialist paradise? Something far more cynical. There is no superior economic system or ideological system at the end of a revolution. Their goal is to simply make the United States less strong.
The effective goal of the attack is to make centrist compromise impossible. The easiest way to diminish the United States is to divide us in two. This is a lot cheaper than the arms race.
What is the enemy of this attack? Centrist compromise. The belief that 'the other side' is not the enemy, but rather someone who sees the situation differently, but is nevertheless, an American. I know sometimes there is a lot of stinky grease in the middle of a compromise, but if the country is divided so that politicians must cater only to their base to survive, the grease goes away and the wheels grind to a halt.
Also, stay the hell away from social media as a news source.