We’re sharing a detailed, end-of-year update on our progress against adversarial networks that we found and removed for different policy violations around the world: Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB), Brigading, and Mass Reporting.
We removed four CIB operations — from China, Palestine, Poland, and Belarus. In our November CIB report, we included a deep-dive research assessment into the China-based network and specific threat indicators to facilitate further research into this COVID-19-focused activity across the internet.
Last year, we launched a pilot research platform — built with CrowdTangle — where we're sharing data with independent OSINT researchers and scholars who study influence operations. We'll be expanding this archive to more researchers over the next several months.
As part of expanding our network disruption efforts to emerging threats, including from authentic groups, we took two separate enforcement actions under two new security policies.
Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Vietnam for repeatedly and falsely reporting activists and government critics for policy violations to Facebook in an attempt to silence them.
Under our Brigading policy, we took down a network linked to the anti-vaccination movement called V_V which targeted medical professionals, journalists and elected officials in Italy and France to harass them across the internet, including on our platform.
> We must recognize with clear mind the butterfly effect, broken windows effect, and snowball effect triggered by this event, and the unprecedented challenge that it has posed to our online opinion management and control work.
> All Cyberspace Administration bureaus must pay heightened attention to online opinion, and resolutely control anything that seriously damages party and government credibility and attacks the political system ...
Interesting to search for "Daszak" on ycombinator itself, who was used early on as a Chinese propaganda mouthpiece.
Check the lab-leak discussions and when you wonder about a user, check if they were dormant/hacked accounts re-activated, or created in late 2019. Check how knowledgeable they are about Nuclear Engineering and how they all moved to Germany or Canada as a foreign student. Check if they know specific details about Asia/HK/China to counterargument. Check if they show up with negative comments if Tesla or Amazon is discussed. Check the order of comments in these threads to spot a pattern. Check if the top comment addresses the issue, or proposes a derail or invokes whataboutism. Check for how long you feel like reading the top comment thread, before clicking away. Check which comments were flagged. Check how long the article remained on the frontpage.
Snowden's data, however, does not describe a troll-farm to influence public political opinion in another country, like, say, Russia did when promoting Brexit on the English internet.
It is very likely they do this though. But they seem to focus on amplifying truths and correcting the record. PR opinion on Uyghur concentration camps has exploded, just order Reddit frontpage by most popular posts. Does not look entirely natural. But those concentration camps likely do exist, the media without access to intelligence agencies just was not writing about them.
And of course, the US being an exporter of culture, European countries follow suit. Nasty, when the views exported are the result of an information-warfare attack.
> Just before breakfast on the morning of March 4, Private Albert Gitchell of the U.S. Army reports to the hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of the cold-like symptoms of sore throat, fever and headache. Soon after, over 100 of his fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms, marking what are believed to be the first cases in the historic influenza pandemic of 1918, later known as Spanish flu. The flu would eventually kill 675,000 Americans and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world, proving to be a far deadlier force than even the First World War.
> A REPORT ON ANTIMENINGITIS VACCINATION AND OBSERVATIONS ON AGGLUTININS IN THE BLOOD OF CHRONIC MENINGOCOCCUS CARRIERS. By FREDERICK L. GATES, M.D. First Lieutenant, Medical Corps, U. S. Army. (From the Base Hospital, Fort Riley, Kansas, and The Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, New York.) (Received for publication, July 20, 1918.) ... An officer in Group II had reacted severely to the typhoid and paratyphoid vaccinations developed a severe local and general reaction, with headache and malaise, after the first injection of 750 million cocci ... From this time on, a small number of the men in each group reported some local or general discomfort following the vaccination. The symptom most frequently mentioned was a "feverish sensation" often accompanied by headache, which was sometimes severe enough to cause loss of sleep.
> When the United States entered WWI in April 1917, the fledgling pharmaceutical industry had something they had never had before: a large supply of human test subjects. During the war years of 1918 to 1919, the U.S. Army ballooned to 6 million men, of which 2 million were sent overseas. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments. ... According to a 2008 National Institute of Health paper, bacterial pneumonia was the killer in a minimum of 92.7% of the autopsies of those who died of so-called “Spanish flu” between 1918 and 1919.
> Vaccination is one of the most successful immunology applications that has considerably improved human health. The DNA vaccine is a new vaccine being developed since the early 1990s. Although the DNA vaccine is promising, no human DNA vaccine has been approved to date. ... Briefly, as a DNA vaccine carrier, bacteria are divided into two major groups: non-pathogenic bacteria and attenuated pathogen bacteria. The attenuated bacteria that have been studied as the DNA vaccine carrier include Salmonella spp., Yersinia enterocolitica, Shigella spp., and Listeria monocytogenes. Pathogen bacteria target the mucous membranes as their infection route and as a result, they are suitable for mucosal administration. However, the main disadvantage includes the likelihood of causing infection, particularly in infants and immunocompromised patients.
There is misdirection for content-boosting. Twitter has put some features in place to make this more involved, such as asking you to read an article before retweeting it, or making the follower- and like-count inexact.
Basically they just search Twitter for conversations or views which are in line with their objective, then they boost it by retweeting and liking. Not many people see their retweets, but many more people now see the "organic" tweet, due to increased engagement numbers.
A secondary effect to this boosting is that Twitter users are social-reward trained to focus their Tweets more on the issue the attackers want to promote. Every time they post a controversial or flaming Tweet, they gain followers and likes. Every time they take a nuanced stance, they lose a noticeable amount of followers. After a while you have trained an organic propaganda source, with a legit following, parroting your propaganda.
Another is diversion building, which exposes a lot of people to strong emotions and polarization. You take a Tweet that many people saw and is controversial "The Oscar awards are racist" then you create the counter-narrative, lots of Tweets and comments with small number of likes and close to zero retweets, where you state that the Oscars are colorblind. Then sit back, and watch American culture and politics eat itself.
So it is more than just getting eyeballs to some pre-written Tweets. They enflame and convert.
State-linked information-warfare offense and defense is part of the US military.
US analysts should have more information than even Twitter has. When they find an enemy operation, they could tip of Twitter and let them discover, remove, and unveil the entire network.
If you can show an obvious US state-linked propaganda network on Twitter, you too, can get US propaganda censored.
These smaller and blatant networks seems to be what the US experimented with decades ago. Offensive and defense now should be very strong. Twitter being a US company surely contributes to that strong position.
Oxygen therapy is generally safe, but has some known side-effects. These include a dry or bloody nose, tiredness, lung burn, and morning headaches.
The benefits of oxygen therapy in patients with COPD outweigh the modest risk of burn injury associated with home oxygen use. However, with the increasing number of patients being prescribed oxygen, health care professionals must educate and counsel patients regarding the potential risk of burn injury.
Patients with lung disease experiencing difficulty breathing can be treated with oxygen therapy. This involves the delivery of "extra" oxygen by a face-mask or through small tubes placed in the nose called nasal prongs. This extra oxygen can have concentrations as high as 100% pure oxygen. The concentration of oxygen in normal air is only 21%. The high concentration of oxygen can help to provide enough oxygen for all of the organs in the body. Unfortunately, breathing 100% oxygen for long periods of time can cause changes in the lungs, which are potentially harmful.
For your other conspiracy theories I need to prepare more data than just a simple academic search. For instance, are you aware that Bill Gates blocked open-sourcing the Oxford vaccine? Do you know why his wife divorced him? When dealing with possible misinformation, it is needed to keep an open mind. If you just say: it is 100% impossible for Bill Gates to have been involved in the pandemic-planning, pancorona-vaccine program which moved to China, and any coverup where he had more information about COVID than the public, but choose not to share for ulterior motives. Then it will remain a 100% no matter what. That's dogma, and it is misinformation for everybody else.
> Surely it is obvious to them that nobody would ever fall for it or treat it in good faith.
This says a lot about you, and makes me suspicious about your posts.
You either assume that someone with a different view is lying, that they don't even believe in their own views, because these are obviously wrong.
Or you are unable to treat posts in good faith, suspecting a commercial incentive.
So, you can not contribute anything to this community. If you disagree, it is because you disagree with liars. And who treats something in good faith, when they suspect the other person is not acting in good faith?
Your suspicion should make you conclude that you have nothing of value to contribute and should look for a community where everybody agrees or promises to act in good faith.
You are not my audience. I consider you a lost cause after you calling me a neonazi troll. It is time the general public sees this evil inhumane activism without being obscured by anti-racism or anti-fascism.
When the general public sees you equating trolling a memorial page (a digital mourning service) as:
> anything remotely incriminating
And others write about "maybe public shaming helps" to stop the spread of fake news, then that should make them pause and question how this movement and its targets have devolved.
Your audience is left-progressive centrists. Just by standing still, they have moved closer to the far-right. You could find ways to improve that. For instance, by vastly distancing yourself from this evil. But you are not able to see it as more than something remotely incriminating, defending it, and then charge the centrists with racism.
You are the marxist troll here, unable to view criticism. But following my observation, that would be like expecting an alt-right neonazi to see the errors of their views.
You don't get the benefit of "good intentions" and "moral high-ground" anymore. Stop claiming it. Left up to you it will degenerate into evil like this.
You can shove your dog whistle up your loose asshole, listen if it still makes a sound when you type. Should make it easier to locate.
Good to highlight this. I became aware of the evils of the "alt-right" when they started trolling suicide memorial pages.
This is a similar attack coming from the polar side of the political spectrum. You cannot claim the moral high-ground after this.
If the pro-vaccine left does not distance itself from this ugly evil within their midsts, it should go a similar route as the alt-right did, in the eyes of the public: a terrorist and fascist organization.
Should really make you pause the next time someone on Twitter points to a target and says: do your thing.
Saw this around big data, but now painfully realizing there will be an entire generation of tech literates who will fail to understand the newer generation.
Like this generation sold out their parents on Facebook, the new generation should show us how it is done, not the other way around. They will not get off our lawn, no matter how hard we yell, no matter how silly this doubleyou-doubleyou-doubleyou-dot thingy sounds.
Of all things, I am sure that this discussion thread did not add value to this community conversation, and as such, serves as spam. Apologies, and let's hope Google bot finds ways to ignore low-information content in a threaded forum. Maybe they could even locate the exact post which caused the derail, and apply some authority penalty on its author.
No, I used common sense, but I actually have the quantitative data that poster was asking about. Right now, I am doing exact keyword matches and trying to find myself. Will get back to you when my analysis is done.
> You seem to be confusing the concepts of 'Google have made their tech more profitable' and 'Google have made their search capability better'.
No, you are confused. Try to Google the article I was talking about. It talks of perceived value to the user. What value would you lose without access to Google maps, search, youtube, gmail, etc.?
Google made their tech more valuable. That sounds like an improvement to me.
> Google have made their search capability better
If you want an explanation for this obvious statement (and not be demanded to ask in return how capitalism works), I suggest you first try to code a simple search engine. I think a 100-line Python script with some imports would do. Only this would make talking about capabilities possible.
> This presumes that the metrics they optimize for are intended to represent usefulness to actual users and not, say, ad revenue. Even if they do intend to optimize for usefulness, this doesn't mean that they have metrics that accurately represent that.
They have multiple levers, of which user search quality is a big set. There is always trade-offs and a balance that must be found, which aligns with company vision and strategy. Having these levers allows business-decision makers to direct focus top-down (on a certain set of users, on producing great ad numbers, etc.).
It is clearly hard and important to design these levels and find the right balance, given a rapidly changing company and user-base. So a lot of expertise and power is invested to measure the right things, and to find the right balance (an incorrect/risky balance should also be adjustable with other levers).
So for me: either Google is trying really hard, but essentially failing. Or they have the best of the world, with all the right context, designing these levers. While hard and sometimes wrong, I do not expect to contribute anything which may improve their lever settings. If someone does know, Google would like to hire them.
So while true, that accurately measuring things with proxies, is really hard, and sometimes done wrong at companies. I do not think Google gets this wrong, or at least, gets this to be the best of breed. If their metrics still cause long-term search engine quality loss, would show them to not know what they are doing. I think they do know very well, better than me at least.
I would agree too that the balance of levers right now is in line with Google's strong market position. Search engine quality could take a small hit, if justified with extra adsense income. But when search engine quality noticeably start going down, then all other metrics will suffer. You should have teams with sole focus on improving quality. Other teams will have to realize that favoring their lever over the search-engine-quality lever must lead to worse outcomes for Google in general.
About product searches, I myself was not able to do this satisfactory 15 years back. It improved. But need to stop viewing things as a single lever, a single metric. To say search has become "worse" in general, is to exactly fall into the trap of not accurately measuring and losing too much nuance/details for competing objectives.
> lmfao. so you're telling me "quantitatively" that google search results have gotten better, without citing any data at all, but with an appeal to common sense and "technological advancement"?
Yes. If that sounds so unacceptable or strange to you, I suggest you try it. Works really well when reasoning about unavailable data, or researching a field with slow peer-review process.
> what if i told you that search is an adversarial problem
Then I get an adversarial reaction and a downvote from you.
> it's possible for google's tech to be getting better slower than the aggregate tech power used to game google search is getting better? is this not a patently obvious possibility?
Yes, that's plausible. Should be measurable quantitively too. Can you cite some data on this? :)
We could compare to the available data on the quality of (HTML) e-mail spam filtering over the years, which all have kept up. Like pg said: Spam is solved, when skilled spammers start creating content which does not look, feel, or talk like spam. So webcontent-spammers still are on the first 2 pages of Google, but with content not classifiable as spam/content farm.
> which benefit google's interests rather than their users.
One of Google's interest is their user. But perhaps not the type of user you are. Studies have shown the value that the tech of Google is delivering its users per year. This value was in the thousandths, and this value has risen. Meanwhile, Google makes about tens of dollars per user per year, less for technical users which don't click ads or block these.
> it's not some kind of gotcha impossibility for google's tech to get much worse over time
It really is, no way to mince it. Google search is funded by Google ad tech. Google ad tech has improved ML by a ton. To say Google tech is getting worse, is to totally overlook deep learning revolution, word2vec, transformers, BERT, etc. etc. etc. To state that, is to reveal the truth that you are ignorant of major technological advances in the past decade, only looking at the issue from the viewpoint of a single atypical Google-search user. What would you even do with quantitive SEQ data?
Do you really think it is possible that Google runs an implementation test of a new ranking model, and deploys it, while all measurements, human labeling, and user tests show it is doing worse? Of course not! Only if you think you are smarter, could you think that Google search changed and has gotten worse.
If Google does ML like the rest of the industry, all model changes move up their designed levers, or these changes are not committed. So if Google was unable to improve search, then Google would have looked exactly like 2008 Google. The fact that it does not, shows either you or Google is wrong. If I had to make a bet...
These sites are easily detected as clones. How Google reacts is part of the adversarial game theory.
For StackExchange clones, their tactic seems to be to push them to a secondary index. Hellban them, but keep them visible to the creators. You never start over, and try again with smarter duplicate evasion. You just see your site wither to insignificance, with sometimes a temporary bump to confuse you/annoy you/keep you uncertain about which changes helped. But sometimes this strategy can make it seem Google can't detect this, especially when using very specific keywords only found on StackExchange, there just may not be a better 18 pages than a duplicate page with a different "related questions" section.
Official documentation underranking some random site is nearly always a temporary anomaly (or makes some sense, in the case of very verbose documentation, like W3C docs). If structural, nudge Google along with some reports. If malicious, these are the sites that Google is likely to completely nuke. All authority and investment gone. Any part of the spammer's link network contributing to artificial authority also exposed. Makes more economic sense to pick softer targets and spend more energy on staying hidden/not overdoing it, never sure of the threshold.
> Does anyone have any actual statistics or quantitative data on the quality of Google search results?
Google has. They use this data expertly to improve search. Common sense and technological advancement tells us that, quantitatively, Google search has become better year over year, for all their relevant metrics/cost functions.
And likely, exactly because it has become better for all its users in aggregate, it has to become a bit worse for a certain group of power users. There, we can only rely on anecdotes and personal experience, but these tell us it actually has gotten worse.
Similarly, the web can become both worse and better. The really useful articles today are better researched, multi-modal, solid web of links, internet-first. Spam has also evolved. And "top 10 ways to do X"-McContent outranks better articles, because that is what the majority of Google users wants to see and clicks on. They truly have a better experience, while others' experiences suffer. It depends on what you measure.
They asked for searching tips, not how to solve the problem of internet search. I have a few ideas for that too though.
Agreed on the miserable experience. Do you have any ideas on how to attack this? Perhaps Google started out with the right experience, but ads eventually toppled it. Perhaps Google never hit on the right experience. What gives?