[dexen]

Why is Mozilla, of all orgs, performing foreign activism and reporting on Twitter users in hopes of getting them banned? "We want to do good", sure, but that's two bits of a stretch here.

Nothing in the article as posted indicates that the "disinformation influencers" were nefarious actors. For all the description given, it might have been grassroots citizens action, only labeled "disinformation" by officials or government-aligned sources. The end result is Mozilla making arbitrary choice between two opposing camps of political activists - and reports on Twitter users along those lines with clear hopes of getting them banned.

I'd understand the point if the activism was directly related to open internet, to freedom of expression, interoperability of services, ease of access and so forth - if there were concerns closely related to Mozilla's core mission. However nothing in the article nor in the linked PDF seem to allude to any of such concerns. It feels like a small group of Mozilla employees[1] ran this research and reported on users for their own private reasons.

[1] "in-house activists" might be a more charitable characterization

[harikb]

The article is blaming Twitter for being callous with its trending algorithms being abused with some coordination between larger number of folks. I think this is very much Mozilla’s business, just as much as any campaign in the West.

The researchers are based in Kenya, writing about Kenyans. They just happen to be employed by Mozilla. Sorry I don’t get why that is a problem?

[dexen]

>callous with trending algorithms >abuse with some coordination

I take umbrage with those characterizations.

The practices described (pre-arranged release of information, voicing mutual support in coordinated manner, agreed-upon language and form) have for decades been the hallmark of professional marketing and journalism. Back when print and broadcast media were the top game, those methods were used by the small groups of legitimate journalists and marketers.

Twitter correctly recognizes coordinated release of information as signal of particularly important and valuable content. People organically coordinate release of information for it to get its full due impact and attention. People also organically ask their friends and business contacts to chip in with an upvote or reblog (or whatever is the equivalent on Twitter). Calling Twitter's or users' behaviors "callous" or "inauthentic" when it's the regular people - that is way off the mark.

My uncharitable read of it is - this whole venture reeks of gatekeeping for the old-guard legitimate journalism.

[_djo_]

Your characterisation assumes that all those involved are real people, when there is blatant evidence of bot activity. Not only that, but in both Kenya and South Africa various official and media investigations have uncovered paid disinformation by political actors that is quite clearly not legitimate, authentic, or 'grassroots' in any way.

At best it's astroturfing, but in most cases it's gone beyond that.

[didibus]

> Nothing in the article as posted indicates that the "disinformation influencers" were nefarious actors

People getting paid money to perform coordinated repost of content sent to them by anonymous sources?

Fake accounts used to amplify and retweet the messages?

What else are you looking for? It's like they told you someone stole money at gunpoint and you said you don't see anything indicative of theft.

[ceilingcorner]

Mozilla has transformed into an activist organization over the last ~decade, with predictable consequences for their actual products and engineering.

[uniqueuid]

Tongue in cheek but:

I really like their activist products such as container tabs, privacy enhancing technologies and reduced tracking (compared to Chrome, Safari etc).

[modo_mario]

I think he might be talking about other kinds of activism

They also do things like give a quarter million to black artists to make art about the effects of AI on systems of oppression. Half a million to broadband towers in the american south. Money for wetland restoration.

This may all seem neat and fine to do if they have that kind of money to hand out but these things come around the same time of having had a large swat of firings of people working on their projects like the Servo team, people working on firefox, etc. (The board also expanded and mitchell baker notably had her compensation increased by quite a lot)

[volta83]

Right.

I sponsor Rust through patreon.

I asked many times how can I donate money to mozilla with the guarantee that the money is used for Rust / servo ?

The answer was that this was not possible, so I never could donate through any official channel.

TBH, mozilla does too much random stuff for it to be attractive as a donor.

[the_why_of_y]

These 2 points are quite unrelated. The developers were laid off by Mozilla Corporation, while the projects you find questionable were funded by Mozilla Foundation, and for tax reasons it's very difficult for Mozilla Foundation to give money to Mozilla Corporation.

[modo_mario]

>and for tax reasons it's very difficult for Mozilla Foundation to give money to Mozilla Corporation.

I'm aware but as far as I know it's the other way around. The foundation extracts revenue from it's subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation. When in a state of decline and faced with the option of axing development that might hamper or reverse this decline i'd expect there to be an option for the foundation to reduce the amount of revenue it extracts. Especially since what it actually gives away seems so little when compared (which makes me look weird at the mentioned compensation again)

[nateabele]

Fair, but there's a difference between creating tools that one may choose to opt into on an individual basis, and attempting to arbitrate truth on a societal level.

[justaman]

Without this activism, they could not compete with the big players in tech. At its essence, this activism is advocating for an alternative to the privacy unfriendly or in this case disinformation that is largely driven by "rage-clicks". It creates a conversation about the future of the information age outside of the business centric motive actions shown by say google.

[the_why_of_y]

Mozilla Foundation has always been an activist organization. They started by writing an entire manifesto about it, and it's by no means limited to developing a web browser product.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

[commandlinefan]

> Mozilla making arbitrary choice between two opposing camps of political activists

And Mozilla itself has hardly been politically neutral in the past few years - if anything, I'm more immediately skeptical of anything that Mozilla asserts as true than anything a blue-check twitter account owner in Kenya does.

[gorwell]

"It feels like a small group"

You're right, it's only about 5% of the population, but they occupy administrative roles inside organizations and reshape them according to their fundamentalist beliefs. They are convinced they are doing good and have moral authority. As such, they have no qualms about ostracizing or firing dissenters. People are terrified of that and go along with it for fear of retaliation, so it seems larger than it is.

Taking administrative roles with an intolerant belief structure and chilling effect on speech is how the Successor Ideology is so effective despite being small in number.

[thunkshift1]

I think mozilla is trying to draw a line that separates it from privacy invading tech giants.. while still taking billions to host their tech in its browsers

[deft]

Mozilla is wasting its limited funding fighting random individual boogeyman rather than develop software that helps protect our freedoms. It's really sad.

[tclancy]

What software would that be? There are not technological solutions to social problems.

[ipaddr]

Decentralized platforms. Firefox OS. A phone app store. There are many technology inequalities caused by major platforms controlling content. A youtube replacement, a private facebook,open source AI. Create a different type of search engine...

Plenty to solve.

[aj3]

Education is societal problem and can be solved by technological means. Developing free, lightweight and portable browser is one of the solutions necessary to make knowledge more available, therefore this tech addresses social problem.