Screenshot from the Guardian.
By Sara Bloomberg
Yesterday, the Guardian published details about a loophole used by state actors around the world to push fake engagement on Facebook: specifically, creating Pages that look like regular user profiles. Today the Guardian profiled two examples of blatant “coordinated inauthentic behavior” utilizing this loophole that Facebook repeatedly ignored in favor of prioritizing its resources and attention on the US and Western Europe.
Since at least 2018, people close to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández created over one thousand fake Pages to boost fake engagement in support of Hernández. Facebook reportedly did nothing for 11 months, and subsequently ignored repeat offenses. But the Hernández administration started waging a disinformation war on social media as early as 2015 in the wake of corruption scandals:
“Although the activity violated Facebook’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – the kind of deceptive campaigning used by a Russian influence operation during the 2016 US election – Facebook dragged its feet for nearly a year before taking the campaign down in July 2019.
Despite this, the campaign to boost Hernández on Facebook repeatedly returned, and Facebook showed little appetite for policing the recidivism. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, referred to the return of the Honduras campaign as a “bummer” in an internal discussion in December 2019 but emphasized that the company needed to prioritize influence operations that targeted the US or western Europe, or were carried out by Russia or Iran.
Hernández’s Page administrator also returned to Facebook despite being banned during the July 2019 takedown. His account listed his place of employment as the Honduran presidential palace and included photos taken inside restricted areas of the president’s offices.”
The problem is twofold: Facebook dragged its feet on enforcing its own policies against coordinated manipulation and then failed to keep violators from returning after being banned.
In Azerbaijan, a state-backed harassment campaign targeting journalists and opposition leaders was allowed to operate for 14 months before Facebook took action in October 2020. Within six months, the campaign was operational again.
“The trolls take up their targets’ time and energy, and they frequently make false reports that can result in journalists or bloggers having their social media accounts frozen, said Mehman Huseynov, an Azerbaijani blogger who was imprisoned for two years over his work exposing corruption.
“We can’t fight this,” Huseynov said by WhatsApp message, just two days after he had been again detained by police who he said attempted to hack into his phone. “[The] only thing we can do is just to block … But it takes a lot of time.”
One of the difficulties for Huseynov and other opposition bloggers and activists is that Facebook has not translated all of its tools and instructions into Azeri, making the process of reporting abuse or regaining access to frozen accounts especially onerous. Huseynov relies on assistance from international NGOs but said that it was difficult for less-established bloggers who don’t have connections with such groups.
Still, the existence of Azerbaijan’s state-backed troll farms was documented in English-language scholarship dating back to 2014 and a 2018 report by the US-based Institute for the Future. Indeed, the researcher said that they had repeatedly raised the issue with Facebook staff at conferences since 2012.
“The relevant people at Facebook have known about this for years and years,” they said. “They should have known better and they should have paid more attention.”
There’s clearly language and cultural barriers to moderating content in dozens of countries, but Facebook moved with the speed of thick molasses in smaller countries like Azerbaijan and Honduras even after it was alerted to problems.
Facebook’s founding ethos was “move fast and break things.” With 3.3 billion monthly users across its platforms, Facebook moves a slower these days but keeps breaking things.
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