Who is Manipulating Facebook? - Smarter Every Day 215

Facebook is a great way to connect. People plan events there; you can sell things. People tell me that if they advertise on Facebook, they actually get more business. But any time you combine two billion people in one location, people are going to try to exploit that for money, power, and influence. This is the third video of a series I'm doing on social media manipulation. Today we're going to be looking at the kinds of manipulation that happens on Facebook. Then we're going to go to Facebook and talk directly to the people that are trying to fight it. Because of how big and how global Facebook is, this is a very complicated issue. So we're going to start right here so that you can understand how serious this issue is.

So this is Renee DiResta. She has studied social media manipulation for years. And we're going to talk about Facebook, right?

Okay.

Do you have specific examples of things you've seen on the platform, Facebook, where people have tried to manipulate others in this coordinated inauthentic behavior?

It's such a global platform that it's a global problem. So you have things like the genocide in Myanmar through the spreading of misinformation about particular ethnic minorities, and that was—

To be clear, you're saying actual people died as a result of misinformation.

That seems to be the case, yeah. It appears that accounts, fake accounts, tied to the military were used to create, foment hatred against an ethnic minority. You hear genocide and Facebook, and you're like, "What‽" I mean, the confirmation bias might start creeping in, and you start thinking weird things. But before we get out the pitchforks, let's think about this. Most social media platforms don't have a good handle on manipulation, but this specific thing is very unique from an engineering perspective. Think about Myanmar, a country where over 100 languages are spoken. People see anything they distrust or dislike, they think it's Russia. They think it's a foreign government. And we try very hard not to play into that, and not to help with that. So on the one hand, it's important that people know the techniques, but on the other hand, you don't want to be hyperbolic about what you're seeing. And you want to be as factual and specific as possible, so that people don't jump to conclusions and you don't feed into that.

And they don't freak out.

Right.

Thank you so much. You've given me a ton to think about.

Thank you! I really appreciate it.

I feel like this coordinated inauthentic behavior thing that's happening on social media, I think this is, like, one of the big challenges of our day. I mean, this isn't just a Facebook or YouTube or Twitter issue, or even Reddit; this is a Hotels.com issue, an Amazon.com issue. This is a big problem and we have to develop countermeasures in order to combat this stuff. My whole point in this social media manipulation series was first, to educate about what the problem is and hopefully arm you with a little bit of knowledge, so that when you're on the Internet, you can protect yourself.