Facebook Hates Right-Wing Fun
Facebook has published a blog post questioning the potential affects of social media on Democracy. Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebooks Product Manager of Civic Engagement, brings to light (i) examples of misinformation and ‘fake news’ being spread on the social media platform, mentioning the supposed foreign influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as a situation closer to home: ”…in Australia a false news story claimed that the first Muslim woman to be a Member of Parliament had refused to lay a wreath on a national day of remembrance. This led people to flood her Facebook Page with abusive comments.” The false news story occurred when Kim Vuga, of the Love Australia or Leave party, accused Labour MP Anne Aly of refusing to lay a wreath during the 2017 ANZAC service in Wanneroo(ii), which is part of Aly’s electorate. "ANZAC SPOILER! You really have to ask the question. What the hell are they doing in our country?", Vuga said. In reality, Aly had asked somebody to represent her laying the wreath, as she was attending another service in Ballajura at the time. Aly’s situation emphasises the potential consequences of relying on hearsay.
Ms.Vuga received this information after a man named Gary messaged her, and Vuga neglected to fact check before exposing her 18,000 followers to the misleading information. But social media is not Australia’s only source of Fake news.
Last year, at the height of the gay marriage plebiscite discussion, a tweet was posted of a homophobic poster in Melbourne’s Heffernan Lane.
The poster was titled ‘stop the fags’, and featured discredited information about the rate of abuse Gay parents perpetrate towards their children. The media frenzied, with Women's Weekly claiming Melbourne streets were ‘plastered’ with the posters, naming it a campaign.(iii) Channel 10 featured an image of the poster on a bus stop on their nightly news program.(iv) In reality, the poster in Heffernan Lane is the only verifiable example of this ‘campaign’.(v) There were no other posters spotted around Melbourne, and Channel 10 went as far as to photoshop the Bus stop poster featured on their program(vi), later apologising for this action. The original Blog post by Facebook does raise some interesting questions though, and the social media giant has been looking into these issues for a while, Chakrabarti citing a report detailing how some use social media as an ‘information weapon’.(vii)
The report observes a few major features of ‘online information operations’ that have been attempted on Facebook, one of which is ‘False Amplification’.
The False Amplification category is described as “coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with
the intent of manipulating political discussion"
The authors claim they detect said activity by “analyzing the inauthenticity of the account and its behaviors”, and not by the content said accounts are publishing. Facebook then goes on to cite potential examples of false amplification, including:
Coordinated or repeated comments, some of which may be harassing in nature
Coordinated likes or reactions
Creation of groups or pages with the specific intent to spread sensationalistic or heavily biased news or headlines, often distorting facts to fit a narrative.
Creation of inflammatory and sometimes racist memes, or sometimes manipulated photos and video content.
Most regular Facebook users have likely been exposed to some or all of these examples, particularly if one is on the Right side of the political spectrum and follows pages and personalities accordingly. Various social media platforms including Facebook have been accused of behaving in a biased manner towards right wingers, sometimes resulting in banning right wing figures - Milo Yiannopolous’s twitter ban being an obvious example.
Though in many cases, including Milo’s, the moderators of said platform will state ideology isn’t to blame for the ban, universal standards against harassment being the justification.(viii)
For this reason, Facebooks targeting of described False Amplification arouses suspicion. While Facebook may be genuine about targeting anybody who engages in the listed examples of False Amplification, regardless of ideology, right wingers will likely be disproportionately targeted.
Last year, a popular meme page requested its followers to troll another page: ‘Help Refugees’.
The request was simple, everybody was to comment ‘fuck refugees’ on one of ‘help refugees’ posts.
Within just a few hours, there were so many hundreds of ‘fuck refugees’ comments it was hard to see any other responses to the post. This example would certainly fit into the False Amplification category. It features coordinated and repeated comments which could be construed as harassing, and could also be defined as a racist or inflammatory meme. The actions of the meme page and the individuals commenting are of course inflammatory, and there is no legitimate effort for discourse, but that’s not to say such actions are unjustified.
The targeted page, help refugees, is also not attempting to open any legitimate discourse, and the content is mostly centered around slogans.
Images of adults and children with shirts reading ‘choose love’ fill the page, as well as refugee children, in an attempt to evoke sympathy from the public.(ix)
One post features a stencil of Paddington Bear with the words ‘migration is not a crime’.(x) Those who are aware of the consequences of mass migration understand the danger of summarising the issue with a light-hearted slogan.
In Germany, on New Years Eve 2015-16, there were mass sexual assaults, including some rapes, committed by men of North African appearance.
A leaked police document from 2016 estimated 1200 women were sexually assaulted, with at least 2000 men involved. (xi) These attacks were following over 1.1 million asylum seekers arriving in Germany in 2015, many from North African countries. Similarly, Sweden has experienced an increase in reported sex offences correlated with their enormous increase of refugee intake. Refugee intake:
source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.REFG?end=2016&locations=SE&start=2007
Reported Sexual Offences:
source: https://www.bra.se/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statistics/rape-and-sex-offences.html
There have also been a number of gang rapes occurring in Sweden over the past few years, with three occurring over the course of a month at the end of 2017, at least one of which was committed by Muslim immigrants. (xii) Another statistic worth noting is the number of sexual assaults committed by strangers:
In Sweden over 60% of sexual assault perpetrators in 2016 were completely unknown to the victim. For comparison, the ABS found that in Australia only 27% of sexual violence experienced by females since the age of 15 was committed by strangers. (xiii) To summarise: The help refugees page are not at risk of being targeted by Facebook because their content is not inflammatory, despite that one could argue their proposed policies have disastrous consequences.
Instead, Facebook is likely more interested in targeting trolls like the ‘fuck refugees’ ilk for their inflammatory language. Facebook appears to be going down a path of ‘zero tolerance’ for any content considered to be inflammatory, targeting trolls and politically incorrect memes accordingly.
Progressive pages are able to spread their drivel with quantifiably disastrous affects under the guise of ‘love’ and suffer no consequences, but should a few young rightists collaborate for some harmless mischief they will suffer bans.
Why not let us have our fun? It’s not as if our politics are causing gang rapes.
Sources: i: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/effect-social-media-democracy/?frame-nonce=bd5e374778 ii: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/anne-aly-a-target-of-false-news-warns-about-the-growing-threat-of-social-media-echo-chambers-20180123-h0mqfi.html
iii:https://www.nowtolove.com.au/news/latest-news/melbourne-streets-plastered-with-homophobic-posters-40220 iv: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/channel-10s-marriage-equality-photoshop-fail/news-story/eec41164908a945eb413e28d3434ae84
v:https://twitter.com/danlmcg/status/898867240522493953 vi:http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/channel-10s-marriage-equality-photoshop-fail/news-story/eec41164908a945eb413e28d3434ae84 vii:https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/facebook-and-information-operations-v1.pdf viii: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/07/21/what-it-takes-to-get-banned-from-twitter/?utm_term=.e2169ab01cdd ix: https://www.facebook.com/pg/HelpRefugeesUK/photos/?ref=page_internal
x: https://www.facebook.com/HelpRefugeesUK/photos/a.123267671367248.1073741830.111893659171316/451469148547097/?type=3&theater
xi:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year's_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany
xii: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5197675/Hundreds-protest-Sweden-series-gang-rapes.html xiii: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4906.0Chapter3002012
