Almost a month after AIW published this story about how some 500 inauthentic Facebook pages targeted Berlin-based independent online news platform Meydan TV, little has changed. While all of the pages that targeted Meydan TV remain active, someone else has taken notice.
On April 13, The Guardian published this story explaining how Facebook allowed state-backed harassment campaigns, target independent news outlets, and opposition politicians on its platform.
The story mentions the case of Azad Soz (Free Speech) and how the post shared on March 4 about two men sentenced to eight months received over 1.5k comments. It analyzes the top 300 comments and discovers that 294 out of 300 comments were inauthentic Facebook pages.
Just like in the case of Meydan TV.
The Guardian cites Sophie Zang’s work during her time at Facebook, working for the team tasked with “combating fake engagement, which includes likes, shares, and comments from inauthentic accounts.” During her research, Zhang uncovered “thousands of Facebook pages- profiles for businesses, organizations, and public figures – that had been set up to look like user accounts and were being used to inundate the Pages of Azerbaijan’s few independent news outlets and opposition politicians on a strict schedule: the comments were almost exclusively made on weekdays between 9am and 6pm, with an hour break at lunch,” writes The Guardian journalists Julia Carrie Wong and Luke Harding.
Wong and Harding also mention the platform’s response mechanism. “The company’s vast workforce includes subject matter experts who specialize in understanding the political context in nations around the world, as well as policy staff who liaise with government officials. But Azerbaijan fell into a gap: neither the eastern European nor the Middle Eastern policy teams claimed responsibility for it, and no operations staff – either full-time or contract – spoke Azerbaijani.”
But the story of Facebook and Azerbaijan is not the only one that The Guardian identified loopholes with. “The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff. The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small, and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea, and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.”
Honduras
The administration in Honduras relied on astroturfing to attack government critics. Sophie Zang discovered how Juan Orlando Hernandez – the authoritarian leader – “received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook pages” that were set up to look like Facebook user accounts. Very similar to what happened in Azerbaijan, in the case of Azad Soz and Myedan TV. And just like it was in the case of Azerbaijan, in the case of Honduras, the platform took nearly a year to respond.
Russia
During 2016 US election, Russia’s Internet Research Agency set up Facebook pages to “manipulate individuals and influence political debates” pretending to be Americans.
Facebook’s intervention was much faster in the case of Russia targeting US elections, likely the result of “Facebook’s prioirty system for protecting political discourse and elections,” wrote Wong, in another story in The Guardian.
As a result of this kind of cherry picking, Facebook’s response mechanism worked faster in the Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Ukraine and Poland but not in countries where similar inauthentic behavior was spotted such as Azerbaijan, Mexico, Honduras, Paraguay, Argentina and others. The difference in response rate was as quick as 1 day in the case of Poland and as long as 426 days in the case of Azerbaijan.
Many others were left uninvestigated at all. Among them, Tunisia, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Albania.
Back in Azerbaijan, at the time of writing this post, pages that targeted Meydan TV remain, and even if they are removed, nobody knows how long it will take Facebook to respond, next time, such behavior is spotted.