You Can’t Have Fake Social Media Accounts and Democracy, Too

 

YOU CAN’T HAVE FAKE SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS AND DEMOCRACY, TOO

‘COORDINATED INAUTHENTIC BEHAVIOR’

By: Randy David - @inquirerdotnet

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:25 AM September 27, 2020

Last Sept. 22, the head of Facebook’s Security Policy — Nathaniel Gleicher — announced that, following a thorough investigation, Facebook took down two separate networks for violating FB’s policy on “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” One of them is based in the Philippines, and the other in Fujian, China.

The Filipino network, consisting of 57 FB accounts, 31 Pages, and 20 Instagram accounts, has been traced to the Philippine military and police. Facebook claims: “This network consisted of several clusters of connected activity that relied on fake accounts to evade enforcement, post content, comment and manage Pages. This operation appeared to have accelerated between 2019 and 2020… Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found links to Philippine military and Philippine police.”

The information posted on these accounts and pages is almost singularly focused on the operations of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its affiliated organizations. But it also includes threatening comments against critics of the Duterte administration and political activists in general.

One post, for instance, lists down the schools that supposedly serve as the “recruitment basin” of the CPP-NPA in Central Luzon, as follows: “University of the Philippines in Clark, Bulacan State University, and the Holy Angel Academy (sic) in Pampanga.”

…The PNP said it will investigate. AFP spokesperson Major Gen. Edgard Arevalo said that Chief of Staff Gen. Gilbert Gapay asked Facebook to restore the private accounts of promilitary “advocacy” groups, in particular the “Hands Off Our Children” (HOOC) page.

The HOOC page, according to the US-based The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab, is being managed by Army Capt. Alexandre Cabales. A 2008 PMA graduate, Cabales is the chief of the Army Social Media Monitoring Center. According to Rappler, Cabales’ FB account is “among the administrators of a private Facebook group linked to HOOC’s page.”

The HOOC presents itself as an independent organization of concerned parents whose children joined militant groups. On its face, there seems nothing wrong in similarly situated parents sharing information, experiences, and advice about their “lost” children. What is objectionable is when the organization allows its page to be controlled and used by the military for the latter’s own propaganda. As the DFRLab puts it: “It may be more closely linked to the Civil-Military Operations Regiment than it publicly lets on.”

…CIB encompasses a broad range of online behavior. But central to the concept is the use of fake accounts. When multiple accounts act in concert on the same issues, as though prompted by one conductor, there is reason to dig deep into their online activity, their ownership, and management.

…The advent of the internet—of social media platforms in particular—paved the way for the decentralization and de-hierarchization of communication. Little did we expect that the same tool could be used with more insidious effect by those who control political and economic power.

This “social dilemma,” as the Netflix documentary describes it, is one that internet ethicists are trying to sort out. But, try as they may, ethical discernment cannot be built into algorithms, and artificial intelligence cannot replace human consciousness. We still need to fight these battles in the real world.

public.lives@gmail.com

Read more: https://opinion.inquirer.net/133948/coordinated-inauthentic-behavior#ixzz6wgayMORi

“Coordinated inauthentic behavior” or CIB in social media is a very serious problem with dangerous and corrosive effects for democracies—CIB fosters fake news, ignorance, lack of critical thinking, mob action and rule, propaganda, political manipulation, demagoguery, and authoritarian populism, among others.

Today democratic governments are constrained to undertake the regulation—guided by democratic principles and values—of social media in order to preclude and inhibit the exploitation of very powerful communication technologies by authoritarian and self-serving governments for the purpose of the deception and manipulation of the populace.

“You can’t have fake news and democracy, too.”

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/07/politics.html