Facebook announced Tuesday night that it had removed 652 pages, groups and accounts linked to Iran for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” — including the sharing of political material — and had also removed other pages tied to Russian military intelligence services.
In a statement, the social network said the activity originating in Iran and the activity sourced to Russia were not related. It also said it was not aware of any activity from the Russia-based accounts that targeted American users.
Facebook said it had not concluded its review of the material and declined to say how or why the state-backed actors were behaving the way they did. But it said it has informed the British governments, as well as the U.S. Treasury and State departments because of ongoing sanctions against Iran.
“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.
Facebook said the actions to remove the pages, groups and accounts Tuesday morning resulted from four investigations — three involving Iran and one involving Russia. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Social Media Giant Facebook Has Reportedly Developed A Hidden System To Assign “reputation Scores” To Users, Rating Their Trustworthiness According To Multiple Factors. This System, Reminiscent Of The Chinese Government’s “social Credit System,” Came To Light In A New Report By The Washington Post.
A previously unreported user rating system has been discovered to be in use at Facebook, where each Facebook user is assigned a trustworthiness score on a scale. The Washington Post reports that this system was developed by Facebook over the past year so that Facebook could measure the trustworthiness of users in order to pick out malicious actors on the platform.
Tessa Lyons, the product manager in charge of fighting fake news on the Facebook platform, said that the reputation assessment system was developed as part of Facebook’s methods to crack down on misinformation. Facebook previously relied on user reports to determine if misinformation was being spread, but some users began reporting information that they didn’t agree with as untrue, leading to issues for Facebook moderators.
Lyons said that it was “not uncommon for people to tell us something is false simply because they disagree with the premise of a story or they’re intentionally trying to target a particular publisher.” Lyons said that the trustworthiness score between zero and one isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a users trustworthiness, but rather the score is one of a thousand new behavioral measurements that Facebook takes into account when reviewing reported content. – READ MORE
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