On being politically correct

Facebook is taking steps to crack the whip on malicious content generated through fake accounts, purposefully carried out to win a political discourse. On what is called ‘information operations’, Facebook has released a multi-page report by its information team, which explains how misinformation spread out during the 2016 US election and the counter attack initiated from the side of Facebook.

“We have had to expand our security focus from traditional abusive behaviour, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people. These are complicated issues and our responses will constantly evolve, but we wanted to be transparent about our approach,” the report reads.

The information is spread in three ways: targeted data collection, content creation, and false amplification. The data is amplified through fake or inauthentic accounts. The findings in the report say the content is mainly created by manually operated accounts, not to be mistaken as bots. It also indicates a plan to work in tandem with politicians and campaigns to ensure the social network is not misused for such purposes.

The US election being a case study, with French election, Facebook was able to tighten its grip around malicious content generators. “Our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content, or aberrations in the volume of content creation. In France, for example, as of April 13, these improvements recently enabled us to take action against over 30,000 fake accounts.”

The Verge points out the requirement of more steps to fortify the campaign and picks a major flaw in the Facebook’s action against “information operations” – a measure to stop generating malicious content at the source. It writes: “As described in the report, almost all the important elements of disinformation campaigns are outside of Facebook’s control. When the campaigns do venture onto Facebook, the associated posts tend to behave the same way any piece of news or content would. And while similar campaigns continue across Europe, today’s report suggests there’s no easy fix for the problem — or at least not from Facebook.”