Ad Tool Facebook Built to Fight Disinformation Doesn’t Work as Advertised

Guess Facebook is not taking seriously the attacks on our democracy, shame on them, they really need more oversight, now!

As a member of that sizable group that finds Facebook to be depressing, toxic and vapid it was easy and liberating to delete my account four years ago. It is telling that otherwise socially-conscious people who would never shop Hobby Lobby, eat at Chick-Fil-A or buy gas from Exxon-Mobil continue to give Facebook and Twitter a pass. Social media is this this century's big tobacco.

So you mean to tell me that companies making billions milking the world for its data don't give a hoot about anything but continuing to make money? Get outta Dodge! Look, capitalism can never exist in a pure form. The market must have rules (we like to call these things laws), just like all things regarding humans: we have a little bit of trouble behaving in groups. So, the likes of Zuckerberg, Dorsi, and whatever malevolent cabal heads Google needs strong, new laws to stop their reckless undermining of freedom, including the threat of personal, criminal liability for actively ceding power to foreign actors to conduct espionage & corrupt our democracy. These tech folks are destroying the free world, humming to the bank all the way--it is up to us to say no. So far, we have failed utterly.

"... Facebook reported there were 3.8 million ads in the American library." The Times should have reported the size of the database in megabytes. From the article, it is obvious that researchers want ALL the data, so Facebook should package the database daily and then offer a bulk download option. Sophisticated version control and compression methods should make that doable without completely replicating the database each day.

If you're a citizen basing your vote on some obviously-fake ad placed by a troll farm, then you probably should not be voting anyway. I mean, come on.

No offense to some of you readers, but you really have to be stupid to have originally posted on FB and believe you had privacy....Of course, anything you post on the web can get read. Anything!

And Zuckerberg is a sneaky little man.

Instead of trying to get companies to censor what is on their sites, how about a national education campaign aimed at critical thinking skills. If a narrative too closely appeals to you, fact check it with other sources... if a narrative sounds too good or bad to be true... check it with other sources... the bottom line, no matter what you're hearing/seeing/reading: check with other sources. The problem with Facebook is that they share/sell our personal data... not what they allow users to post. The rest of the problem is on us and our inability to resist things that reinforce our initial conceptions. We just need to be smarter as a society... in general. And that starts by questioning everything... and most important of all: check with other sources.

This has nothing to do with Facebook caring (or not) about the political issue and everything to do with the culture of Silicon Valley. The entire tech industry has been overcome by the notion that the speed of feature delivery is the highest possible virtue and that serious bugs are normal artifacts of that desire and they are to be discovered and fixed as time and resources allow. ("Move fast and break things" used to literally be Facebook's company motto.) It's not so much software "engineering" as it is software "duck and cover".

Let's not be willfully naive: all ads are, in some way, misleading or outright lies. They are designed to separate us from rational decision-making, satisfy media-fueled desires, solve non-existent problems, achieve glamor or social acceptance--the list goes on as do human foibles. The only way to correct this is not with an API. It is to stop using Facebook. I haven't engaged with that platform for many years. I seem to have survived. Give it a try.

Facebook: “This is unfortunately a won’t fix for now.” Arrogantly, Facebook closed the bug report. That's one of the most offensive things a developer can do: Acknowledge a bug, yet close the bug report.

As a college freshman over 2 decades ago, I learned in my first couple weeks of an introductory CS class not to include large amounts of data in a URL. That's what HTTP Post is for. This is a really dumb bug.

"Transparency, it [Facebook] decided, was the best disinfectant." Facebook should extend that "transparency" to its bug reports. All bug reports that do not contain confidential information should be publicly accessible without any registration with the site. That's what open source projects do.

"On two other occasions, the researchers said facebook blocked them from reporting fresh bugs. The reason? they had already reported too many." When problems are ignored it means they aren't bugs, they are features.

Sounds to me like they have no intention of pulling their “best and brightest” off revenue-generating product development. Some B-Team gets to tackle the thorny challenges. Developing an API for browsing a huge database is not trivial. But if they made it their actual priority for a month, this whole mess would be a non-issue. Sadly, they’re content to pay fines and put forward non-solutions. They apparently cannot stomach putting their best people in the roles of fixing what is egregiously broken and dangerous about their product. This speaks volumes about their executives’ corporate ethics and disdain for our country. Their product has become a distribution platform for content aimed at subverting and sabotaging our very democracy. But instead of pausing everything to fix it, they just complain, “Please don’t regulate us! Look: We are spending -some- money on it.” As a citizen, I find this absolutely appalling. Pledging to do better means next to nothing if your heart clearly isn’t in the right place.

Facebook was fined 5 billion $ by the US administration but I read it in the French press . It is nowhere here in the US press.

According to the House Intelligence Committee's own findings, Russians are suspected of buying some 3500 ads on Facebook from late 2015 until early 2017. All told, they spent the equivalent of about $95,000 on this influence campaign. Roughly 25% of the Russian ad campaigns were seen by no one, and those that did get views had very low engagement. The most successful ad campaign the Russians had before the 2016 election garnered only 73,000 clicks, despite being seen 1.3 million times. Most Russian ads run in 2016 had far lower numbers for both views and clicks. The vast majority of engagement with Russian campaigns came in 2017, not during the election. Lastly, many of these ads were incredibly benign looking. That most popular ad I mentioned earlier? A phony organization for the wives of policemen to support law enforcement, called "back the badge". Nothing about the advertising image stands out as overtly sinister. This is a more subtle manipulation, indistinguishable on the surface from American interest groups, aimed at fostering resentment between segments of the American population, rather than blatant partisanship. Ads were targeted indiscriminately. Consider how many ads circulate on Facebook (3.8 million in the American library alone), consider the low engagement and impact of these campaigns and how oblique their political aims were to the election. Consider that a combined $6.5 billion was spent in just 2016 on elections, against Russia's $95,000 over 3 years.

I was always told that starting a runaway train was far easier than stopping it.

clearly regulation is needed through government and industry standards. That way a minimum is set by disinterested parties, and enforced by them too.

This is where the hype of sales droids meets reality. There just aren't enough good software people out there to pull off these stunts. The bigger the company, the more it accumulates second-rate people. Frankly I'm amazed they produced anything. What was produced was just a sop to the politicians.

I have noticed that many of their “top fan” ratings go to trolls. All they have to do is get some real people to read a bunch of the top fan comments on a page and they could catch a lot of these.

No surprise when the fox guards the hen house.

The media has been obsessed over misleading ads and memes circulated by right wingers. The left was just as deep in the bovine fertilizer as the right. That’s probably beating a dead horse by now but let’s see some balanced treatment of the subject. Examples of nonsense left wing ads going around FB are socialist spending items that don’t show all the social spending that we do anyway (more than half the federal budget), materially misleading stuff about guns (2/3 of all deaths are actually suicides, not homicides of others), pictures of young kids in police related deaths when the dead person was actually much older, etc. I expect the same blizzard of nonsense will be a large part of the online experience for the 2020 election.

How about making all posters identify themselves and include a tally of those readers who find the post to contain mis-information. If the number of misinformation indications for an individual poster exceeds a lifetime limit, they lose their re-posting privileges for a period of time. This would create a situation where if the re-poster is not sure of the accuracy of what they post (or re-tweet) then it's in their best interests to not re-post it. Any posts that exceed the 'mis-information' threshold can be reviewed automatically by FB or whomever for its' accuracy and an appeals process instituted by FB, et.al..

Facebook is like the employee who comes fresh to a new job like a house afire and turns into a headache within 6 months. Work habits degrade as you watch, trust fades like light snow on a 40 degree morning, and they require constant monitoring. What’s his name and his staff are overmatched and irresponsible. The company cannot monitor itself and I cannot see a federal organization even able to parse all the problems with solutions reasonably soon. It is a mess. The Trump government is in the same boat as Facebook. No controls or ideas to solve the complaints.

So, the average FB user, exposed to potentially phony ads and other content, disseminated by bad actors in Russia or others foreign and domestic, is supposed to access a flawed "library" of ads in order to try and determine which ones are credible or nefarious? That's not a solution. That's a bad joke. Facebook should be keeping the foxes out of the henhouse instead of cataloging which ones got in. Same for Russian bears. But, that would mean turning away the ad revenue those foxes generate. Not gonna happen. A public campaign to make us all aware that we will be the target of phony information might help. A warning that pops up every day on one's FB feed - "The political content you see on Facebook may be from sources that are attempting to spread misinformation. You are their target. Be aware of that and don't believe everything you see." Smarter hens hopefully.

I find it hard to believe that a company like Facebook can't figure out how to weed out those scurrilous issue ads. They could tip another election. And what good is it to be able to research where the ads came from if they've already appeared in people's feeds? How many people are going to do that research (even if they could), especially if they are already inclined to believe these outrageous claims? There has got to be a better way, Facebook. You have the resources and the know-how. Find the will.