Facebook Engagement-For-Hire Economy Has Generated More Than 100 Million Fake Likes

After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week confirmed allegations that the company had sold at least $100,000 of ads to a Russia-backed troll farm – igniting a firestorm of liberal sanctimony as pundits like Rachel Maddow proclaimed that they had finally found the “smoking gun” proving that Russians had swayed the election in President Trump’s favor – researchers at the University of Iowa have pulled back the curtain on the seedy underbelly of Facebook"s illicit influence-peddling economy.

In a study reported by USA Today, the researchers described a thriving ecosystem of websites that allow users to generate millions of fake "likes" and comments. Working with a computer scientist at Facebook and one in Lahore, Pakistan, the team discovered a thriving community of 50 sites offering free, fake "likes" for users" posts in exchange for access to their accounts, which were used to falsely "like" other sites in turn.

The results have been staggeringly effective:

“The scientists found that these “collusion networks” run by spammers have managed to harness the power of one million Facebook accounts, producing as many as 100 million fake "likes" on the systems between 2015 and 2016.”

Why is this a problem? The answer is simple economics. As USA Today explains, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to favor posts that garner a lot of likes, amplifying their visibility and possibly driving legitimate engagement. Many social media “influencers” rely on their followings to justify marketing partnerships with brands and other lucrative deals.

And in what the researchers described as a recent development, the scammers have found a way to “turbocharge” the process by automatically looping in third-party applications like Spotify. Previously, this process had to be done manually in resulted in far fewer likes.

After joining the community, users who are in good standing can essentially generate likes and engagement on demand.

“When you become part of this network, you can say ‘Give me likes on this post and as soon as you request it, you get thousands of likes on a specific post,” said Zubair Shafiq, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who documented the automated networks.”

“Users think it’s relatively benign, but actually they’re handing over full control of their Facebook account,” said Shafiq.

“They can also access all the information that’s available on your profile, see your posts, get your friends list, even read your private messages. We can"t tell if this information is being collected and sold to others,” he said.

In another example of the company’s penchant for dissembling, Facebook told USA Today it had stamped out the type of activity described in the research. The company added that it is investigating smaller-volume techniques that could be used for a similar purpose, and said it would take every action necessary to ensure that all activity on its platform, which the company claims has more than 2 billion monthly active users.

But an independent investigation by USA Today promptly confirmed that Facebook’s claim was bulls---.

“However at least some similar techniques still function as USA TODAY was able to join one of the networks and get 50 likes on a post to a newly-created Facebook page within one minute.

The services operate outside of the United States but hide their locations. They also disguise the fact that people who use them are engaged in activity prohibited by Facebook.”

Compounding the ridiculousness of Facebook’s denial, USA Today also found that the sites operate relatively openly.

“The sites operate openly, and researchers found them by entering a Google search for phrases such as "Page Liker." Among the 50 so-called collusion networks listed researchers listed was djliker.com, which described itself as "a social marketing system that will increase likes, comments and increase visits to pages.”

The sites rely on a “freemium” business model, profiting off of ads posted on their sites, but also from subscription fees from power users.

“Their business model is basic: They make their money by posting ads on their sites and also selling "premium" services that allow users to get even more "likes" than they allow their regular users. Some also allow users to create fake comments that can be added to the post of their choice.”

The research will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Internet Measurement Conference in London in November. Nektarios Leontiadis, one of the study’s authors, is a threat research scientist at Facebook.
 

Germany Passes "Orwellian" Anti-Free-Speech "Facebook Law"

The writing has been on the wall for months, but German lawmakers have now passed a controversial law under which Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies could face fines of up to €50 million ($57 million) for failing to remove hate speech.

As AP reports, the measure approved is designed to enforce the country’s existing limits on speech, including the long-standing ban on Holocaust denial. Among other things, it would fine social networking sites if they persistently fail to remove illegal content within a week, including defamatory “fake news.”

“Freedom of speech ends where the criminal law begins,” said Justice Minister Heiko Maas, who was the driving force behind the bill.

Under the law, social media companies would face steep fines for failing to remove “obviously illegal” content — including hate speech, defamation, and incitements to violence — within 24 hours. They would face an initial fine of €5 million, which could rise to €50 million. Web companies would have up to one week to decide on cases that are less clear cut.

Aside from the hefty fine for companies, the law also provides for fines of up to 5 million euros for the person each company designates to deal with the complaints procedure if it doesn’t meet requirements.

Social networks also have to publish a report every six months detailing how many complaints they received and how they dealt with them.

Maas said official figures showed the number of hate crimes in Germany increased by over 300 percent in the last two years.

But human rights experts and the companies affected warn that the law risks privatising the process of censorship and could have a chilling effect on free speech.

“This law as it stands now will not improve efforts to tackle this important societal problem,” Facebook said in a statement.

“We feel that the lack of scrutiny and consultation do not do justice to the importance of the subject. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure safety for the people on our platform,” the company said, noting that it is hiring 3,000 additional staff on top of 4,500 already working to review posts.

In an interview with Breitbart London, the CEO of Index on Censorship, Jodie Ginsburg, said:

"Hate speech laws are already too broad and ambiguous in much of Europe. This agreement fails to properly define what "illegal hate speech" is and does not provide sufficient safeguards for freedom of expression.

"It devolves power once again to unelected corporations to determine what amounts to hate speech and police it — a move that is guaranteed to stifle free speech in the mistaken belief this will make us all safer. It won"t. It will simply drive unpalatable ideas and opinions underground where they are harder to police — or to challenge.

"There have been precedents of content removal for unpopular or offensive viewpoints and this agreement risks amplifying the phenomenon of deleting controversial — yet legal — content via misuse or abuse of the notification processes."

A coalition of free speech organizations, European Digital Rights and Access Now, announced their decision not to take part in future discussions with the European Commission, saying that "we do not have confidence in the ill-considered "code of conduct" that was agreed." A statement warned:

"In short, the "code of conduct" downgrades the law to a second-class status, behind the "leading role" of private companies that are being asked to arbitrarily implement their terms of service. This process, established outside an accountable democratic framework, exploits unclear liability rules for online companies. It also creates serious risks for freedom of expression, as legal — but controversial — content may well be deleted as a result of this voluntary and unaccountable take-down mechanism.

"This means that this "agreement" between only a handful of companies and the European Commission is likely in breach of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (under which restrictions on fundamental rights should be provided for by law), and will, in practical terms, overturn case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the defense of legal speech."

Writing for Gatestone Institute, British commentator Douglas Murray noted that this assault on "racist" speech "appears to include anything critical of the EU"s current catastrophic immigration policy." He wrote:

"By deciding that "xenophobic" comment in reaction to the crisis is also "racist," Facebook has made the view of the majority of the European people (who, it must be stressed, are opposed to Chancellor Merkel"s policies) into "racist" views, and so is condemning the majority of Europeans as "racist." This is a policy that will do its part in pushing Europe into a disastrous future.

Janice Atkinson, an independent MEP for the South East England region, summed it up this way: "It"s Orwellian. Anyone who has read 1984 sees its very re-enactment live."

The Mainstream Is Circling The Wagons: "They're Coming For All Of Us...It's An Orchestrated Attack Against Truth"

Via Mac Slavo of SHTFPlan.com,

Within hours of the election of Donald Trump the mainstream media, their politico counterparts and social media operatives began spreading the narrative that the President was only elected as a result of the dissemination of fake news. The term itself became a rallying cry for everyone from major search engines to massive social media websites who said they would create fact checking teams within their organizations to ensure only legitimate news and information would be listed on their respective platforms. Soon, the leftist media began spreading lists, none of which were backed with any actual evidence, of supposed “fake news” purveyors and Russian propaganda websites. The lists included some of the most highly trafficked non-mainstream websites and aggregators around the world. As these Silicon Valley behemoths and popular news organizations mobilized, so too did mainstream advertising agencies, one of which quickly pulled advertising from the purported king of fake news, conservative leaning news organization Breitbart.com.

The battle was clearly on. And to this day, it continues in earnest. Legitimate news is being buried in feeds and search engine pages, while the effort to directly attack the revenue of alternative media websites continues to expand.

Several weeks ago Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com penned an alert in which he reported that a shadow organization had contacted him with an offer to either help them take down Infowars founder Alex Jones, or be destroyed. Adams, being a long-time proponent of free speech and liberty, took to the internet to expose them instead. Naturally, the skeptics laughed it all off as another conspiracy theory.

Except just days after Natural News posted the warning, Infowars was suddenly dropped by one of the world’s largest online advertising agencies, reportedly costing the network some $3 million in revenue. And within a week of that attack, the largest search engine in the world delisted some 140,000 NaturalNews.com pages from their search results.

While this may seem like no big deal for the average reader today, what these recent actions demonstrate is that a conglomerate of traditional news media, big business and political operatives are actively working to suppress the reporting of information that runs counter to the mainstream agenda.

First they come for the purveyors of truth and information that has remained hidden from the masses for decades. Next they will come for those who publicly discuss their views and and ideas on social media and other forums. And while you may not fall into any of these two categories, make no mistake, as SGT Report warns in the following must-watch report, one day they will come for you, too. 

They’ll be coming for all of us… Because this is an orchestrated attack against truth… I cannot imagine living in a time in the United States of America where this is allowed to stand…

As of this morning Google has reinstated NaturalNews.com, though the original reasons provided by Google, which claimed this was a technical issue involving a small number of outdated pages on the website, were unable to be duplicated by numerous well known SEO websites and cyber sleuths. Curiously, as Health Ranger Mike Adams notes in his statement on the censroship, the very same technical issues actively exist on mainstream websites like CNN and Huffington Post, though their pages have yet to be delisted in the same manner as Natural News.

Based on the evidence, we are hard pressed to find any legitimate reason for why Mike Adams’ 140,000 pages would have been delisted, save for the fact that this was a direct attack against his alternative viewpoints on health, politics and a number of other issues. And though Google as an organization may not have been fully aware of the reasons behind the delisting, someone had to push the button. That the button push came just days after the aforementioned warning Mike received to either play ball or be destroyed is highly suspicious.

There is a concerted effort to shut down views and ideas that run counter to the status quo. Today it has come in the form of silencing the most vocal critics. Tomorrow, they may try to silence you.

Mike Adams discusses the delisting and reinstatement of his website on The Common Sense Show: