Facebook 'Likes' Are a Powerful Tool For Authoritarian Rulers, Court Petition Says (qz.com) 63
A Cambodian opposition leader has filed a petition in a California court against Facebook, demanding the company disclose its transactions with his country's authoritarian prime minister, whom he accuses of falsely inflating his popularity through purchased "likes" and spreading fake news. From a report: The petition, filed Feb. 8, brings the ongoing debate over Facebook's power to undermine democracies into a legal setting. The petitioner, Sam Rainsy, says that Hun Sen, the prime minister, "has used the network to threaten violence against political opponents and dissidents, disseminate false information, and manipulate his (and the regime's) supposed popularity, thus seeking to foster an illusion of popular legitimacy." Rainsy alleges that Hun had used "click farms" to artificially boost his popularity, effectively buying "likes." The petition says that Hun had achieved astonishing Facebook fame in a very short time, raising questions about whether this popularity was legitimate.
Re:is all legitimate! And no Russians on Slashdot! (Score:4)
"Making Again Good for America" and his support is entirely grassroots and real!
now, my views as a finnish person may not have much weight in this discussion but in my experience trump does authentically have higher popularity until you get up to category of +60 year old women who overwhelmingly would've preferred clinton of the males in my own age group I am yet to find the first one telling they'd have liked clinton over trump
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:is all legitimate! And no Russians on Slashdot! (Score:4, Funny)
"now, my views as a finnish person "
I had a Nordic girlfriend once, don't know which nation exactly, but during sex she always yelled: "I'm not finnish!"
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't know any 60+ women who like Trump then you are extremely out of touch.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If he meant, men his age in Finland, then that has very little to do with the people generally posting about Trump; pro-Trump posting on Facebook is going to have a lot more people from the US than Finland for a whole bunch of reasons. These include simply differences in the size of the populations of each country, US people more likely to focus on their own politics, and Trump being generally unpopular almost everywhere outside the US http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/u-s-image-suffers-as-publics-around [pewglobal.org]
Re: (Score:3)
You're drunk right now, aren't you? I love Finland and Finnish people, but they are drunk almost all the time.
In your experience, do you realize that there are actually data that shows you have it completely wrong? Among women, Trump is most popular with women over 65.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... [fivethirtyeight.com]
http://college.usat [usatoday.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be really fair, does anyone believe Trump is popular in Finland?
Re: (Score:1)
Exactly. Trump didn't win: Clinton lost. People feel betrayed by career politicians. It's the basis of a most fitting and famous quote from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (part of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series): "The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that
Re: (Score:2)
In the US, Trump lost the popular vote by millions. He was less popular than Clinton.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not convinced Putin is a fool, but whenever topics related to Russia come up we see lots of people with high user IDs making lame pro-Russian arguments.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of people have different opinions than I do. Some of them are frequent Slashdot posters. These are people who seem to show up just to make really lame arguments (lamer than most of the people who disagree with me) that just don't have the right style.
Westerners are exposed constantly to the most sophisticated mind-influencing material ever, largely in the form of advertisements. We've developed a limited amount of immunity to it. There's a difference in style that people who are either Westerner
Re: (Score:2)
Shouting "treason" isn't how you fight foreigners, it's how you delegitimize your political opponents. Sometimes they might be illegitimate traitors. But most of the time the traitor-shouters just want an excuse for getting rid of their political opponents. Domestic politics has limits. War doesn't.
If your opponents are traitors, you can spy on them, entrap them and imprison them. You can overturn elections, censor the press and take any measures you need to defend against a foreign threat.
To save us
Re: (Score:2)
Um, no. Finding evidence on people who broke the law and convicting them is normally considered a good thing. Nobody's talking about censoring the press.
You don't know what Mueller is finding out. Neither do I. The fact that some top Republicans are bad-mouthing the investigation and trying to make it look illegitimate is suspicious. The fact that you're already predicting what Mueller will find with certainty is also suspicious.
If the President needs to be investigated, by all means let's invest
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What political scandal would that be? You appear to be saying that there is a very large Democratic political scandal, but I have failed to find one. Could you be more specific?
Re: (Score:2)
You didn't notice that the DNC rigged the primary to put up literally the only person in the US who could lose against Donald Trump? Because the primary was rigged. But we're talking about the *other* very large Democratic political scandal, 50 times bigger than Watergate.
The Obama Administration spied on the Trump campaign without any evidence to do so.
The information used to justify spying was from a dossier and the dossier came from the Russians and the Clinton campaign.
There was no basis for a le
Re: (Score:2)
The DNC favored the mainstream candidate. I don't think Sanders would have fared any better. No primaries were rigged. Clinton did better in the primaries than she did in the caucus states, which I'd figure would be easier to rig. Clinton got more delegates than Sanders even not counting superdelegates. At least the Democrat nominee wasn't anybody like Trump.
And then you start going way beyond the evidence. You claim the information used was from a biased dossier. It was used, but apparently used
Re: (Score:2)
Steele was fired in September 2016 for being unreliable, his information was used in October 2016 to get a FISA warrant without the judge being told the source was fired for being unreliable.
What's it called when you use fake information and lie to a judge to get a warrant? List who committed the crime this instance:
James Comey
Loretta Lynch
Rosenstein
Sally Yeats
Andrew McCabe
Bruce Ohr
Re: (Score:2)
You don't know that, unless you are hacking into the investigation. The Nunes memo said that the warrant application did not say certain specific things about the dossier. IIRC, "source fired for being unreliable" was not in the memo. The Nunes memo did not give any specifics about anything that was in the application, except that the dossier was attributed to a "named individual", whatever that may mean. Nunes supplied no reason to believe the dossier was presented as unbiased.
Was Steele fired for
Re: (Score:2)
I forgot about this thread. Where was I? OK Steele said he'd stay quiet and not talk to the media. Then he talked to the media. Then the FBI fired him. After that, the FBI used his dossier to justify a FISA warrant. Anyway, that's all been out for a while. The new news is that the big indictment didn't find any collusion between the Russians and Trump. Nope. No Russians were indicted for acquiring the DNC emails for WikiLeaks - The original accusation of Russian interference.
Which one fed more mis
Re: (Score:2)
The Russians were involved in trying to affect the 2016 election. That's clear now. The MSM got that right. There will probably be other indictments in Mueller's investigation, so we're going to have to wait and see.
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election" https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2... [fb.com]
"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."
Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?
The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organiza
Re: is all legitimate! And no Russians on Slashdot (Score:2)
Slashdot had a far more sophisticated and robust moderation system and rather less censorship than most other news-related forums. I suspect information warriors from many different organizations use it as an R&D battleground.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: is all legitimate! And no Russians on Slashdo (Score:2)
It's not a conspiracy, it's an observation.
If you believe information warfare is not happening on many fronts today, you're either dense or (more likely) willfully ignorant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Good morning, Agent Smith! How's the weather in Fort Meade today?
Btw, in case you didn't notice it broham, *you* are the only one talking about dirty foreigners.
Re: (Score:2)
What Facebook needs... (Score:3)
Standing and Jurisdiction (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
> but when DNC and RNC do it, it's just campaigning
As long as it's in their own elections and they don't lie about who's footing the bill, indeed it is.
Re:Standing and Jurisdiction (Score:5, Insightful)
"When Russians buy ads it's "meddling", but when DNC and RNC do it, it's just campaigning."
Congratulations, you understood the law perfectly!
Re: (Score:2)
Technically speaking the RNC and DNC do not buy ads. The people really buying ads are the campaign donors, the corporations and the lobbyists. The lobbyists are way more cunning than people think, they pack the RNC and the DNC itself with consultants who must be paid millions and this is stolen from the campaign donations of the corporations. Think about that, the thieves are stealing from the thieves who pay the thieves to pay the bribes to make thievery legal and blocking it illegal. A bunch of emails dem
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Except what this article is about and the main thing Russia is accused of is not buying ads, but buying manufactured presence on social media sites, which is not simply failing to disclose the source of a political ad buy (which, yes, is illegal), but, in fact, fraud, although I suspect fraud laws are poorly written to handle things like buying likes and impersonating someone on social media, so it may or may not be technically illegal for local political parties to do depending on the locality and the cour
Fishing expedition (Score:3)
Somebody is simply using the courts to try to find out dirt on their opponent.
Just throw it out (Score:2)
One of the valuable lessons from Ukraine is that it's almost always "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." If you want to accelerate the process to finding a good leader, just send weapons to both sides and let nature take its course until the aggressive, lawless fucktards on both sides annihilate each other leaving the meeker folks to inherit the Earth.
As designed, not a bug. (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook 'Likes' Are a Powerful Tool For Authoritarian Rulers
...Facebook, (...) whom he accuses of falsely inflating his popularity through purchased "likes" and spreading fake news.
Well, Facebook is designed to be just that: a paid propaganda conduit enabling corporate customers (you know, the ones who actually pay Facebook) to get their kool-aid into the heads of billions of unwitting consumers. What else would motivate them to collectively pour billions of dollars into a service like Facebook? Follow us on Facebook, little people! Hammer your brain with our name, make it look like we’re the most popular and let us see everything about you, all in a single click!
And why think that politicians wouldn’t do the exact same thing when they regularly employ the same marketing agencies and the same mass propaganda techniques as commercial entities?
Isnt that everywhere? (Score:1)
German crowd 'like' a man. 1934. Decolorized (Score:3)
https://imgur.com/a/7BVhN [imgur.com]