Social Media and Social Control: how Silicon Valley serves the US State Department

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.

by Morgan Artyukhina 

Part 6 - Bad actors

Fast forward to August 2018: along with other social media platforms with whom it shares tips and information, Facebook has begun targeting voices from, and in defense of, nations targeted by the U.S. State Department for regime change. However, it’s not just Russians any more: some of the voices silenced in the semi-regular sweeping round of bans include Cubans, Venezuelans, Iranians, and Chinese as well. Frequently, these bans coincide with elections in the U.S., though Facebook typically avoids citing election interference in its press releases, giving the media free reign to speculate.

Standard fare is for tips on “inauthentic content” to come from one of two places: the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) or cybersecurity firm FireEye. These firms are anything but impartial and independent.

The first such tip came in August 2018 in a report by FireEye on Iranian and Russian “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s tsar of Cybersecurity Policy and former neocon think tanker. FireEye expressed “moderate confidence” in its findings, with TechCrunch noting at the time that “the Iranian networks were not alleged to be necessarily the product of state-backed operations, but of course the implication is there and not at all unreasonable.”

The U.S. State Department’s Iran Action Group later cited the Facebook and Twitter takedowns in a September 2018 report titled “Outlaw Regime: A Chronicle of Iran’s Destructive Activities,” in which it attempted to lay out the ideological groundwork for its present offensive against Iran. Curiously, the State Department’s report didn’t mention FireEye’s report.

The sweeps soon became regular, following a standard pattern. Another takedown in May 2019 saw Twitter and Facebook cooperate to cull “more than 2,800 inauthentic accounts originating in Iran,” according to Twitter Site Integrity Chief Yoel Roth, as well as 51 accounts, 36 pages, seven groups and three Instagram accounts on Facebook, according to Gleicher. The tip came from FireEye. Sputnik News noted the shady nature of the move, with Facebook admitting it never looked at the FireEye report before acting – a report that expressed low confidence in the researchers’ findings.

In a previous takedown in February, Facebook and Twitter again shared intel, this time from the DFRL, showing the accounts were involved in “attempted influence campaigns” by Iran, Venezuela and Russia. However, on a conference call with reporters, Gleicher was forced to admit that Facebook couldn’t actually tie any of the activity to the Iranian government, saying only “we can prove and feel confident” in their origins, without providing further evidence.

Source, links:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-control-how-silicon-valley-serves-us-state-department/263267/

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