> Facebook has removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts run by the Russian government-connected troll farm and election interference squad the Internet Research Agency
This looks like a fairly small amount of accounts.
Small # of accounts, but massive amounts of followers/viewers. Kylie Jenner has a "fairly small amount of accounts" (ie one) on Twitter, but a single tweet can send a company's stock into the red[0].
Don't these 'troll' accounts mostly have fake followers though? What reach could 76 accounts with mostly fake followers/likes really have on the world?
They most certainly arent anywhere near Kylie Jenner level so Im not sure what that has to do with this.
But I guess no one involved (media, FB) wants this story to be any less newsworthy so I doubt we'll ever have an answer...
Yes, it is likely there are hundreds of thousands of accounts, not just a few dozen. Over time, we'll see. Twitter and all the rest have also come out with "it was just a few accounts, see, we've even gone and deleted them". But it's not that few.
Edit: Also, those few accounts pack a punch.
> 1.08 million users followed at least one of the Facebook Pages, and 493,000 users followed at least one of the Instagram accounts. The accounts had spent a combined $167,000 on ads since the start of 2015
That's a lot of influence and a fair bit of money spent on so few accounts. And across the whole Internet Research Agency as discussed by Facebook,
> 126 million people had seen the propaganda group’s Facebook posts and another 20 million had seen its Instagram posts.
Just an order of magnitude guess. It could be tens of thousands, it could be millions, I'm just an outsider looking in. But it seems clear that it is at least a couple orders of magnitude more than just the 70 they found and publicized so far.
This is not how it works. The goal of these accounts was to build a following to be able to influence more people. A page with a couple of hundreds likes or followers will have much more impact than a million accounts with no followers. Building audiences to influence people is hard and takes time. It is much more probable that there are around 70 accounts than millions. Sorry to be that blunt but do you know anything about this matter?
Do you know anything about this matter? The scope of this is still largely unknown, unless you have some information the rest of us don't.
Influence can be local. Generic-looking pages (i.e. not locale specific in the content they post) or accounts are often followed by people only from a specific small city and surrounding areas (10^4 people, say). Is it so hard to believe that accounts such as these were used by the IRA?
They have different types of accounts for different purposes some are just used to comment or authenticate to 3d party sites and to comment there. They also serve as feeder accounts for the "core" accounts that are actually trying to build up followers.
How dare you dismiss the possibility that there are billions or trillions of Russian accounts? Clearly you underestimate the limitless power of arch-villain Putin.
I'm american and remember some high profile movies that featured them. Then again, I'm almost 30. I thought it was common knowledge among many who the IRA were, even among americans.
id say middle age and older people would. they were shown in various movies during the 90s but yea. younger people probably think of the IRA savings account.
I find amusing the "troll" label applied to it. Trolling in my books is someone taking the piss out of someone else or a situation. We're talking about far greater reach here with devastating impacts.
There's certainly some moments that fit this label perfectly, like when Trump announced that he was going to form a joint taskforce with Russia to secure American elections from hackers.
Are we ever going to see any of the controversial posts and ads that supposedly influenced the US election? I don't see anything US politics or election related in the samples they showed.
I disagree.....considering the political and "news" climate we live in today, "finding" and "shutting down" "Russian trolls" seems to me like an absolutely brilliant strategy to get the public and especially the media back on your side.
Excitement drives clicks, and Russia is the US's biggest boogey-man du jour (what happened to the pesky North Koreans and Muslims by the way, why don't we hear anything from them anymore?) that we need to government to protect us from, so this campaign should be a big winner I'd think.
It remains to be seen whether these scandals will have any real effect in the long run. Facebook grew to be a behemoth, now it seems almost "too big to fail".
People can exert a lot of influence with just one account, and in this case it’s about 270 so far. You’d be surprised at how effective Sybil attacks are with far fewer than a dozen accounts, never mind hundreds. When those accounts build reputation, often assisted by more accounts, it’s even more powerful. Still, the biggest advantage is that you get to probe your audience multiple ways, then just go with what gains traction. The reputation of any one account doesn’t matter, it’s a “team” effort.
So while you or I might care about what we say, try to build a reputation, and in general say things in accordance with what we believe, they don’t have to. It’s a radically different proposition, and devastating when done well. Even being discovered can be its own kind of “win” if it creates distrust and instability within the network itself. You can undermine faith in said network by exposing it as essentially corrupted, albeit by you.
I don’t know if you looked at the samples or not, but out of 6 samples only 2 can be considered remotely political. Sure, one uses a photo of Putin with a toast “let’s drink for politics”. At the stretch we could consider every “thanks Obama” meme a political one.
I think this is a distraction maneuver by Facebook to direct away attention from the latest events.
I suppose you're right, not necessarily between the two parties but between US citizens and each other, for which the parties are sometimes used as a proxy - you see lots of promotion of black rights groups with fringe views and far-right groups with thinly or completely unveiled racist views. Just little tricks that will hook a small number of people, but make the overall picture you see on TV look much worse than it is on average.
But there is none of that in these samples provided. It’s just memes and and garbage “viral” content a-la buzz feed.
I know there were other samples posted before that had more of what you are talking about. But I’m strictly speaking about the current batch and the article in question and screenshots from that article.
I’d imagine Facebook would cherry pick the most offending pieces to show off. And whatever evidence is currently presented seems weak at best.
None of that looks harmless to me. And also, buzzfeed-style posts are hardly harmless - I think you'd find a number of people who honestly believe that buzzfeed-style posts are a harbinger of the downfall of humanity. Regardless of any hyperbole, I do think "buzzfeed-style posts" are very harmful, and I while do think that these posts by Russian operatives can vaguely resemble buzzfeed-style posts, I think they are far more harmful.
Yeah, I always thought IRA was the main acronym for the "Irish Republican Army". Weird that they used IRA in this article to mean something else. Has the main association changed?
Currently, the association is for the "Internet Research Agency", which is the formal company name for a purported Russian based professional trolling firm.
Good point. Similar age group I am guessing, but this is also a US-centric interpretation. The Irish Republican Army was probably more recognisable by their TLA worldwide back in the 70's and 80's.
This looks like a fairly small amount of accounts.