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Ukraine Says Big Tech has Dropped the Ball on Russian Propaganda (msn.com) 150

Posted by EditorDavid from the loosed-lips dept.
The Washington Post reports: In the frantic first weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. tech companies that control the world's largest information hubs sprang into action. Responding to pressure from Western governments, social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube banned or throttled Russian state media accounts, beefed up their fact-checking operations, curtailed ad sales in Russia and opened direct lines to Ukrainian officials, inviting them to flag Russian disinformation and propaganda to be taken down.

As the war grinds toward its sixth month, however, Russian propaganda techniques have evolved — and the tech firms haven't kept up.

Ukrainian officials who have flagged thousands of tweets, YouTube videos and other social media posts as Russian propaganda or anti-Ukrainian hate speech say the companies have grown less responsive to their requests to remove such content. New research shared with The Washington Post by a Europe-based nonprofit initiative confirms that many of those requests seem to be going unheeded, with accounts parroting Kremlin talking points, spewing anti-Ukrainian slurs or even impersonating Ukrainian officials remaining active on major social networks. As a result, researchers say, Kremlin-backed narratives are once again propagating across Europe, threatening to undermine popular support for Ukraine in countries that it views as critical to its defense....

With big state media accounts suspended or muffled, researchers say Russian leaders and influencers have shifted to the semiprivate messaging app Telegram to direct information campaigns via swarms of smaller accounts.
The Post reports that Google-owned YouTube hasn't returned emails for almost two months, according to the deputy head of the Ukrainian government's Strategic Communications and Information Security center. And the Post notes that researchers found LinkedIn "removed fewer than half of the posts that Ukrainian officials flagged as examples of Russian propaganda justifying the war....

"On the positive side, the researchers found that Facebook had removed all 98 of the posts the Ukrainian government and its partners flagged as containing anti-Ukrainian hate speech, though many of the accounts responsible remained active."
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Ukraine Says Big Tech has Dropped the Ball on Russian Propaganda More

Ukraine Says Big Tech has Dropped the Ball on Russian Propaganda

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  • They didn't drop the ball (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday July 17, 2022 @11:40AM (#62709874)
    They caught it and ran it into the opposing teams end zone. Russian propaganda is great for engagement and that's all those companies care about. All they care about is eyeballs on ads. Don't set fire to the entire world to get them.

    I've said this before but what makes corporations so terrifying is how corporate bureaucracy creates a whole bunch of little evil decisions that individually don't seem that bad which add up to utterly horrifying decisions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      The whole problem in the end is that in corporations no one's actually practically responsible for "the end product". CEOs technically should be, but really really aren't.

      • The key problem is that corporations are intelligence without any kind of conscience. You can outsource your conscience because "if I don't do it, someone else does" plus "I have to do it, I have a responsibility". At the same time, acting without any sense of responsibilty beyond the bottom line is considered a good thing and leads to promotions and bonuses.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      Nah, it's just business as usual for modern media. They exploit and plaster everything with news about a topic for a while then it just seem like everybody forgot about it. Then they just move to the next big thing.

      How many times have you seen the same thing over and over for a week or a month on news platforms without ever seeing a follow up afterwards?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        kinda like how those "migrant caravans" seem to only start travelling when we get close to november every 2 years...

      • How many times have you seen the same thing over and over for a week or a month on news platforms without ever seeing a follow up afterwards?

        Not often since Paul Harvey's show. P.T Barnum said "You can fool some of the People all of the time, all of the People some of the time, but you can't fool all of the People all of the time"; seems to me that the news media has figured out you just have to fool enough of the People, enough of the time and shout squirrel if they start thinking too much. Often it's not what they publish as much as it's what they don't that tells you the most.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          When you hear "the media isn't talking about x" you can all but guarantee that x is a load of horse shit. What they don't publish, they don't publish because it's not worth publishing.

      • That's because their audience tires of it and moves onto the next thing. For months, the Ukrainian genocide took about the vast majority of air time on CNN. But then we had a string of (larger than normal) mass shootings, the US Supreme Court turned us into a theocracy and made the idea of separation of church and state into a solemn mockery, the January 6th hearings happened, et cetera.

        There's not much to cover in a grinding war of attrition. The biggest win for Russia so far is that all of the "never

  • private wealth != government (Score:3)

    by PJ6 ( 1151747 ) on Sunday July 17, 2022 @12:18PM (#62709946)
    It sounds like someone's complaining that big tech is acting like a business.

    Don't like the decisions private wealth makes? Stop electing people who believe business should control government and not the other way around.

    • Re:private wealth != government (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday July 17, 2022 @03:14PM (#62710296)

      It sounds like someone's complaining that big tech is acting like a business.

      Nah, more like calling out companies on their bullshit pretending to care.

      Big Tech: "We stand with Ukraine!"
      Ukraine: "Block these guys spreading propaganda and hate:"
      Big Tech: "We... err... will... are... experiencing technical difficulties updating our filters right now but we'll get onto it soon our dearest Ukrainian friends with whom we stand!"

      • Honest question: has Ukraine been 100% honest since the beginning of the hostilities? If Ukraine is allowed to spew BS, then why not Russia?

        Also, honest question, how do you know what is true, and what is not? How do you know anything more than what Russian/Ukrainian/USA sources tell you?

        • Honest question: has Ukraine been 100% honest since the beginning of the hostilities?

          Of course not.

          If Ukraine is allowed to spew BS, then why not Russia?

          I think you don't understand the nature of propaganda or geopolitical politics. There is no such thing as neutral in the eyes of anyone. Neutral means you support someone else enough not to care about our cause. In war and politics a side is chosen and the message is supported. This isn't new to tech, this is how things have happened for well over 100 years.

          If you want to claim you support Ukraine but then don't carry their messages, then you're a hypocrite, the honesty of the message is irrel

        • There's a difference between lying to save your (someone's) skin, and lying to keep on murdering. If your moral compass fails to deal with that, you may need a check-up...
  • This wouldn’t be okay for even the US government to do, why would YouTube do this for another government?

    • This wouldn’t be okay for even the US government to do

      The US government works closely with social media to get certain posts removed.

      What is okay or not is entirely up to the social media owners themselves to decide. Not for you. If you support freedom of speech then you have to support the freedom of Youtube to take down anything anyone regardless of who they may be based on Youtube's own judgement.

      • No, it is not. Author-publisher is a business arrangements. Section 230 confers protections for carriers but not the publishers. If Youtube starts making editorial decisions then every youtuber should be able to sue them for the lost revenue and the breach of contract.

  • Ukraine is finding out that the truth is not what "Big Tech" strives for, it's engagement at any cost. Engagement translates into more advertisements served which translates into profit. All the large tech companies are yoked themselves to be slaves to the whims of shareholders and as a result, nothing is more important than profit. Seriously, they would be pushing Russian propaganda themselves if they thought it would increase profits.

    Publicly traded corporations embody many of the Rules of Acquisition [fandom.com].

  • Was it the big tech/media or was it that people in general stopped giving a shit? The next shiny thing distracted everyone and now they are like, we don't give a shit. It's not big tech, it's not media. Big tech and media are vultures, if the general public wanted to be hammered daily with Ukraine v. Russia .. they'd gladly oblige. At this point though, humans with their intrinsic ADHD have moved on to the next shiny thing.

    • At this point though, humans with their intrinsic ADHD have moved on to the next shiny thing.

      It's not that people have ADHD. It's that government manufactures the next shiny thing to be distracted by, and then has big tech push the hell out of it, including how you should think about it. You can't really blame the majority of the populace for falling prey to what is essentially a giant refined group mind control system.

  • While I can understand Ukrainian position - they are at war with Russia and fighting for survival - the same is not true for the rest of the West. As such, censoring of Russian propaganda is simply incompatible with our values - key one is being freedom of speech.

    • While I can understand Ukrainian position - they are at war with Russia and fighting for survival - the same is not true for the rest of the West. As such, censoring of Russian propaganda is simply incompatible with our values - key one is being freedom of speech.

      You might be surprised to find out that most if not all of the EU has nothing like the American freedom of speech protection. I think the UK does but that's about it. They also are no longer in the EU. In France, for example, people are always facing serious criminal charges and time in prison for saying things like they don't like Muslims very much.

      • That is a gross exaggeration. You are probably thinking of hate speech and I'll give you that EU has made hate speech illegal. See: https://ec.europa.eu/info/poli... [europa.eu]

        And for general info on hate speech see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998 expands on the UDHR,

    • Russia is at war with more than Ukraine. It is at war with the rules-based international order and may well continue by invading other countries.

      Russia Today, the Russian TV propaganda channel has been removed from Australia and banned by EU, Canada, Germany, Gibraltar, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and UK but not the US. The reason for EU's ban is "They are not independent media, they are assets, they are weapons, in the Kremlin's manipulation ecosystem,"

    • People who state the facts about the situation are called "Russian trolls" even here, the USA government and media made a propaganda blitz to garner support for tens of billions in aide. Such people are ignorant of all the western failures that lead to this disaster. But let's skip all that and go to the present:

      The truth is after the attempt to take whole country, Russia is succeeding in its original goal to get the remaining two out of three territories in east Ukraine. With that Russia gets the resour

  • let's face it - what we have is not stopping of propaganda, just ensuring that we ONLY get to hear one side, propaganda or not.

  • The POTUS is clearly playing both sides, trying not to offend either (but obviously, mainly Russia).

    But you know, in the past the USA has certainly taken stronger action when others were oppressed.

    Making deals as we watch Ukraine slowly die.

    In recent history, a lot of people worldwide have criticized the USA's over the top involvement in "disputes". How do you like us now? I guess we're "winning"?
  • ... they've brainwashed the incense in the US into doing their bidding for them.

  • But (Score:2)

    by zkiwi34 ( 974563 )
    The have definitely picked up the Ukraine propaganda. So much unfiltered junk posted as truth.

  • Big tech companies pulled into the wars in which the United States is neutral. With a more wired world it seems all wars are now local, not some war afar. And as a previous comment said, big tech companies (surprise, surprise) acting like a corporation only in the news media business.

    An interesting, if morbid thought, is if big tech had been around in World War 2, before the United States got involved: Would the Americans be as neutral and isolationist?

    Josh K.

  • The same big tech that can't find a way of stopping displaying adverts for knives to 13 year old boys? If only there was some way of identifying a customer's age - like by their submitted birthday perhaps - but it's just too difficult for the advertising AI to figure out. Thanks Nick Clegg, I hope the money is worth it you scum bag.
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