THE DISINFORMATION AGE
Durt Fibo, July 11, 2024
With electoral battles still smoldering in Europe and ravaging America, Facebook maintains its position as the nadir of human achievement.
Only 116 days until the U.S. Elections and the nation’s media appears compelled to double its culpability for having made Donald Trump a celebrity then raising him up into the office of President. Pathetically, voters are finding their reliance on social media to be more and more of a vulnerability as those outlets tighten their grips on peoples’ throats while unleashing the hellhounds of professional disinformation mercenaries.
Yet the online platforms (‘don’t call us publishers’) are foremost in racing to create as much havoc as possible. Information is avoided or madly slashed, while incredible nonsense cascades down and drowns frantic scrollers. Complaints appear as posts disappear. But the former cannot keep up with the latter. The enhanced pro-oligarch program employs life-killing algorithms and completely random beatdowns from the force who, since they don’t in fact check facts, we shall call “the Department of Epistemology.”
My own article on the election in France, which I doubt any Facebook employee could find on a map, was “removed” 3 days after it appeared on Facebook. It was written 5 minutes after the polls had closed and reposted from Der Koolschrank, an international publication. The article was merely an account of the French election, verifiably factual, and among the first in the Americas. People do not generally use Facebook to publish original writings – it is, rather, a river of reprints from, and links to, real reportage published elsewhere.
Many more people are losing information and voices as rednecks and wealthy hink tanks devour available space and, yet again, governmental Russian endeavors seamlessly hop into the web’s conga line, kicking up covert disinformation.
Data compiled by the not-for-profit research group AI Forensics through the start of June shows that more than 65% of “unlabeled” ads about political, social and cultural issues were disseminated through Facebook in over 16 countries in the EU with Meta’s willing or unwitting blessings. The AI report overview states that “less than 5% of undeclared political ads are caught by Meta’s moderation system,” and that, of those, 60% don’t even adhere to their own guidelines concerning political advertising., Of the many players, just one Russian-directed interference operation reached over 38 million users in France and Germany, “with most ads not being identified as political in a timely manner.” The May 30th updated report “scrutinizes Meta’s Ad Library, which contains metadata on all advertisements targeting the EU since its expansion in August 2023 to comply with the EU’s new Digital Services Act.” The Russian social media activity in Europe has been influencing five to ten times more people than previously estimated. https://aiforensics.org/uploads/No_Embargo_in_Sight_AI_Forensics_Report_ad7ede416b.pdf
And what of such operations within the United States? By September 2016, the most famous Russian influence factory –the Internet Research Agency- was earnestly at work, running on a monthly budget of over $1.25 million, as attested in the 2018 indictment by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller.
Referring specifically to Facebook ads, Mueller’s (redacted) report detailed a “sweeping and systematic” long-term Russian governmental interference war. But, beyond ads, social media hosts a runaway jungle of personal and other accounts via which Mueller said such agents created and shared “content.”
By 2019 Facebook itself admitted that the Internet Research Agency alone possibly reached up to 126 million people. But that number was their minimal guess.
Cobra-like, flaring his flab up for his newest assault on the U.S. Presidency, Donald Trump staged a rally in Pennsylvania on September 4, 2022, during which he recounted a White House engagement with Facebook/Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Trump declared: “Last week, the weirdo – he’s a weirdo – Mark Zuckerberg came to the White House, kissed my ass all night.” Pulling back from the delirium, we can deduce that Trump was recalling an occasion from two years previously, when, in 2019 the then-President had surreptitiously supped with Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel at the White House, That was actually the second Zuckerberg-Trump summit; the October dinner reported by NBC and other American sniffers followed a meeting the month before, in September. September’s White House meeting of the minds was duly recorded on Trump’s Presidential schedule. When the October dinner was exposed to the public, a faceless spokesperson for Facebook said that “Mark accepted an invitation to have dinner with the President and First Lady at the White House,” but Trump insisted that Zuckerberg had “initiated” the dinner.
Trump’s chronology might have rare merit, as Zuckerberg was in the process of being interrogated by Congress about his policies of allowing false information and blatant lies, particularly in political ads. By October 23 of that year, he was prevaricating before Representative Maxine Waters, who pointed out that he is “willing to step on anyone – your competitors, women and people of color, even our democracy.” By November 21, Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted her assessment of the now exposed White House Dinner: “This is how the government keeps working for giant corporations and the wealthy and well-connected. It’s no wonder that companies like Facebook have been allowed to consolidate economic and political power without any real accountability.”
Much shaken by his near-truth experience, in 2020 a contrite Zuckerberg emailed other Meta brass: “I am the most well-known person of my generation” [helpfully published by Internal Tech Emails]. Boastful, but with reason, for, having set the rules, his subjects must live with them to survive. In these frantic days every page owner, administrator or group commander is but a junior Zuck astride their fiefdom, fighting off invaders and infiltrators by resorting to the same technology instituted by the King, and decimating their own people in the process.
As I wrote on March 5, 2022 (DE PRAVDA?) among all the unconscionable, misbegotten media, Facebook is a paragon of malfeasance. Allowing the bottlenecking of the traffic of information is moronic. Nearly 3 billion people voluntarily creating a global monopoly of publishing is suicidal.