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Michigan terror plot: why rightwing extremists are thriving on Facebook
The platform provides tools for radicalization and coordinated violence, and critics say it’s been slow to ban dangerous groups More
Social network says accounts tied to Turning Point USA sought to influence conversations by flooding news articles with comments More
Facebook has announced significant changes to its advertising and misinformation policies, saying it will stop running political ads in the United States after polls close on 3 November for an undetermined period of time.The changes, announced on Wednesday, come in an effort to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming election “by fighting foreign interference, misinformation and voter suppression”, the company said in a blogpost.Facebook’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, had previously defended the controversial decision not to factcheck political advertising on the platform, but in recent weeks Facebook has begun to remove political ads that feature dangerous and misleading claims.In early September, the company pledged to stop running new political ads one week before 3 November, the day of the United States elections, to prevent last-minute misinformation. Now it will also disallow political advertising entirely following election day “to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse”.In other words, Facebook will not allow new advertisements starting one week before 3 November, and immediately after polls close it will stop running all political advertisements indefinitely. The company did not give a timeline for if or when political advertising would return.The new policies mark important progress toward protecting elections, said Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of dozens of nonprofits and human rights groups advocating for democracy.“We are seeing unprecedented attacks on legitimate, reliable and secure voting methods designed to delegitimize the election,” Gupta said. “These are important steps for Facebook to take to combat disinformation and the premature calling of election results before every vote is counted.”Others said the change is too little, too late. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the changes “performative”. The internet freedom group Fight for the Future said in a tweet the change “isn’t going to fix the problem at all”. The group noted that Facebook’s recent decision to allow content from private groups to appear in newsfeeds will increase misinformation and negate any positive changes that come from an advertising ban.“Facebook is banning political ads but at the same time they’re tweaking their algorithm to go into overdrive recruiting people into groups where they’ll be spoon-fed manipulation and misinformation,” Fight For the Future said.Facebook is again making performative changes to try to avoid blame for misinformation on its platform. The problem isn’t the ads themselves. The problem is Facebook’s refusal to regulate its ads, change its broken algorithm, or take responsibility for the power it’s amassed. https://t.co/OkkyM1PtML— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 7, 2020
Facebook is seeking to avoid another political disaster after it was found that Facebook was used by Russian operatives in 2016 to manipulate the United States elections.Since then, Facebook has hired thousands of people working on safety and security surrounding elections and has worked on more than 200 elections around the globe, “learning from each” and making “substantial progress”, the company said.Executives at Facebook, including Zuckerberg, reportedly became increasingly alarmed at language from Donald Trump suggesting the president would not participate in a peaceful transfer of power. Trump has also been accused of encouraging violence when he told white supremacists to “stand back and stand by” and encouraged supporters to “go to the polls” and “watch very carefully” at the first presidential debate.The company also said it will be removing calls for people to engage in poll watching that use “militarized language” or suggest the goal is to intimidate voters or election officials.Zuckerberg has previously expressed concern about challenges posed by the surge in mail-in ballots this year due to the pandemic.“I’m also worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country,” he said.Facebook said it would respond to candidates or parties making premature claims of victory, before races were called by major media outlets, by adding labels and notifications about the state of the race. More
China is well on its way to becoming a cashless society. More than 600 million Chinese already use Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay to pay for much of what they purchase. Between them, the two companies control approximately 90% of China’s mobile payments market, which totaled some $17 trillion in 2019. A wide variety of sectors throughout China have since adopted Blockchain to pay bills, settle disputes in court and track shipments. The Chinese government understands that, via Blockchain, the issuance of its own cryptocurrency is an excellent way to track and record the movement of payments, goods and people.
Beijing Wants to Rewrite the Global Rulebook
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The unsexily named Digital Currency/Electronic Payments (DCEP) is intended to be used by anyone around the world to purchase anything. It has the potential to revolutionize the global payments system. Assuming it succeeds, many other countries will want to emulate it. Some other governments have already launched similar initiatives, but not on the scope or scale of the DCEP, which promises to be the first global digital currency.
Digital Wallets
What appears to have spurred the Chinese government to actively pursue the DCEP in 2019 was the birth of an organization that also has the potential to revolutionize the global payments system, the Libra Association. Libra is a grouping of more than two dozen organizations creating the world’s first Blockchain-derived global payment system, specifically founded on best practices in regulation and governance. Its stated objective is to transparently bring access to financial services to billions of people who either have limited or no access to the existing global banking system.
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Given that it is an American-led initiative that will use the US dollar to determine its benchmark value, Beijing viewed Libra as an attempt to establish US dominance over the global cryptocurrency marketplace. It previously viewed other cryptocurrencies as a threat to its own hegemony over capital controls in China.
Although its motivations to counter the US are clear enough, much remains unknown about the DCEP. One has to wonder just how much focus it will have on transparency, governance or best practices. It will not be available on cryptocurrency exchanges, nor will it be available for speculative purposes. Embracing Blockchain and creating a DCEP ecosystem will give the Chinese Central Bank unprecedented power over capital movements — certainly in China, but also around the world.
Like Alipay and WeChat, the DCEP will require a digital wallet, but it will not require a bank account. Commercial banks will issue the digital wallets, but no internet connection will be required to conduct transactions via the DCEP. All that will be required is that a phone has battery power. While a certain degree of anonymity will be present with the DCEP, the Chinese Central Bank will still be able to track who spent or received funds, when, where and from whom. The Chinese government calls the concept “controllable anonymity” and will rely on Big Data to identify behavioral characteristics of the individuals and businesses using DCEP. Doing so will help the government identify money laundering, tax evasion and terrorist financing. It will, of course, also permit a higher degree and quality of state surveillance of Chinese citizens and citizens of any other country that may use it.
Since the Chinese government will be the first to launch a global digital currency, it will gain a considerable lead over the world’s nations and provide it with the ability to perfect its surveillance capabilities in China and around the world for any country that chooses to adopt the DCEP. It will also help to internationalize the yuan and simultaneously create less dependence on the US dollar. So, the Chinese government intends to stay a step ahead of the competition, enhance its ability to monitor its citizens, broaden its soft power and increase China’s appeal to other countries while countering the supremacy of the US dollar in the process.
Alternative System
By issuing the DCEP, the Chinese government hopes that demand for yuan reserves will follow, facilitating a digital version of the yuan as a global alternative to dollar reserves, especially in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) member nations seeking to modernize their financial sectors. It could also help internationalize China’s e-payment systems, which are not used outside of China. In the absence of an American cryptocurrency, which seems to be a long way off, doing so could in theory make the DCEP the cryptocurrency of choice among BRI (and other) countries.
Such an alternative system may be particularly appealing for countries under US sanctions, which may wish to avoid using the US dollar entirely, or for countries or businesses engaged in trading, investment or lending with Chinese companies. But the yuan remains not fully convertible, with just 1% of international payments using it. That could have a significant impact on the government’s implementation strategy. In addition, the Chinese government is attempting to centralize what is a decentralized technology by requiring that all “nodes” using the Blockchain register with the government and provide information about their users.
While the Chinese people are accustomed to having their government pry into, and try to control, their private lives, most of the world’s population wants nothing of the sort. It remains to be seen just how broadly the DCEP will be adopted, or whether it will turn out to be a net positive for the nations that choose to use it, but having the first-mover advantage will surely serve Beijing well. Despite its apparent flaws, if it also helps to bring some of the world’s poorest nations with the least access to basic and global financial services on par with the world’s developed nations in that regard, Beijing will have done much of the world’s population a great service in the process.
*[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
A militia-promoting father and son duo of fake news publishers and a Trump-connected social media consultant are linked to pages which promote the idea of an American civil war with material presented in a way that appears to be an effort to sidestep Facebook’s fact-checking system.Comments on their Facebook pages and other materials obtained by the Guardian show that some rank and file Donald Trump supporters are enthusiastically receiving the message that they should prepare for violence against their perceived political enemies in November.The network is comprised of websites owned and operated by Dino Porrazzo Sr and Dino Porrazzo Jr, whose company, AFF Media, is headquartered in Pinon Hills in California. The pair have been running rightwing websites since at latest 2013, according to DNS website records.The Porrazzos now run a network of websites that enthusiastically promote Trump, and far right anti-government militias like the Three Percenters, and offer distorted versions of current events. One of their Facebook pages, “Prepare to Take America Back” (PTTAB) at the time of reporting had 794,876 followers. Analysis with social media metrics tool Crowdtangle shows that over the last three months PTTAB posts have been shared over 141,000 times, and on average 9,600 times a week.At that time, the page’s header featured the logo of the Three Percenters, a decentralized group that the ADL calls a “wing of the militia movement”; a group of armed men in tactical gear; and a modified copy of the US presidential seal.In general, the page promotes conspiracy theories and criminal allegations about Democratic party politicians, liberal celebrities and leftist protesters, some of which – like persistent claims that Hillary Clinton will be imminently arrested – overlap with aspects of the so-called “QAnon” conspiracy theory movement.The page makes free use of political memes, but many posts link to a small cluster of rightwing websites designed to appear like news outlets. Increasingly, over the course of 2020, the page has been warning of a stolen election, and suggesting this will lead to civil war.Repeatedly in September, the page linked to a story on the website Right Wing Tribune, headlined “Radical Left Prepares For ‘Mass Public Unrest,’ ‘Political Apocalypse’ And Possible Civil War Should Be Expected If Biden Loses [Opinion]”, with Facebook captions including “the left wants war”.The story had a limited basis in fact, in that a number of progressive groups had met in early September to discuss the prospect of civil unrest and political violence after the election with a belief that the violence they were anticipating would be coming from Trump supporters and the far right.Nevertheless, the Right Wing Tribune piece concluded with a conspiracy theory: “These groups are heavily focused on removing President Trump from office as well as different scenarios which all lead to a second revolution in which they control our nation as a “New America”.”Similarly distorted stories warning of a “siege of the white house”, peppered the page throughout September and warnings of a post-election civil war were posted over the last year.Last November, the page linked to a site called Flag and Cross, and a story which it described as an “excellent opinion piece”, entitled “Winning the New Civil War (OPINION)”.The piece claimed on the basis of antifascist protests and comments by Democratic politicians that, “We have many strong indications that this is a hot war”.The transparency page for PTTAB discloses that PTTAB is managed by Southern California-based AFF Media Inc, and that the Vici Media Group “partners with this page”.According to California records, AFF Media was incorporated on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, 20 January 2017; in other documents, Dino Porrazzo Jr is listed as CEO and CFO, and Dino Porrazzo Sr as secretary. But the Guardian has discovered that the Porrazzos are further involved in running a dizzying array of interconnected sites and social media pages. The Annenberg Public Policy initiative lists two of their websites on its “Misinformation Directory” of “websites that have posted deceptive content”.One of the listed sites is Right Wing Tribune. But all of the other sites linked to by the PTTAB Facebook page also appear to belong to AFF, with similar design, shared bylines and shared source code.This is not some dark corner of the Internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans.Becca Lewis, Stanford UniversityThe Porrazzos have been previously reported as having links to the Three Percenters, a decentralized, national militia movement that the Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes as anti-government extremists.Their online empire is large. Another Parazzo site, Flag and Cross is listed as the administrator of another Facebook page, United States Constitution, which has 1.2 million followers.A Guardian review of that site’s content shows a similar pattern of linking to Porrazzo-connected websites, and warnings of civil war stretching back to the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.Becca Lewis researches online extremism and disinformation at Stanford University. In a telephone conversation, she said that the page and the associated websites represented a sophisticated effort to skirt Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.“It seems as though they are being very strategic in their messaging so as to not be shut down,” Lewis said, adding that viewing the ostentatious labeling of opinion as an effort to sidestep fact-checking is “absolutely a reasonable assumption”.In June, Heated reported that climate change deniers were exploiting the same loophole to “make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it “opinion”. In August, NBC reported that Facebook had systematically relaxed its fact-checking rules for conservative outlets and personalities.In a telephone conversation, Dino Porrazzo Jr asserted that PTTAB had had “zero fact-check violations”, characterizing his websites as “opinion websites based on fact”. Asked if they were fact-checked at all, Porrazzo said “no”, but added: “I don’t work at Facebook”. Asked if he thought that there really was a civil war coming, Porrazzo accused the Guardian of “writing a hit piece to get me thrown off Facebook”, and then ended the conversation.Facebook Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Porrazzos also have links to Republican officials.The registered agent for the company is an elected official in California, Ensen Mason, who was elected as San Bernardino county auditor-controller in California as a nonpartisan candidate, but who is listed as a member of the San Bernardino Republican party.In an email, however, Ensen Mason said that in relation to the Porrazzos, his accounting firm’s role “is strictly limited to accounting services and registered agent”.The Vici Media Group, meanwhile, is run by Patrick Mauldin, who is a social media consultant for the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians, and his brother, Ryan.The company was hired in 2016 by one-time Trump campaign manager and recently-resigned campaign consultant, Brad Parscale, to be part of the team that was widely credited with winning Trump the election. In June, Patrick Mauldin was identified as the creator of a fake Joe Biden site that was compared in New York Times reporting to “disinformation spread by Russian trolls”.In an email, Ryan Mauldin disavowed the Porrazzos’ publishing output, writing, “Vici Media Group was engaged for a small, non-content-related project by the managers of the page.”Mauldin added, “We have no input on the content published by the various sites or the comments made on that content. We are not working for the Trump campaign.”Mauldin did not immediately respond to attempts to further clarify the nature of their work for the Porrazzos, and to clarify New York Times reporting as recent as June 2020 that said Patrick Mauldin was on a retainer for the Trump campaign, and considered a “rising star”.Porrazzo refused to specify the nature of AFF’s relationship with Vici Media Group.Meanwhile, the content of the Porrazzo pages does appear to trigger extreme responses among users. Hundreds of user comments on the page’s posts suggest the use of violence against perceived political enemies. On a 5 September post linking to a Right Wing Tribune article suggesting that Democrats will foment civil war if Biden loses, one user commented, “a short civil war with the democrats and those who support socialist policies will go a long way to help Make America Great Again”.Another connects civil war to their belief that a Trump loss is impossible, writing “If [Biden] wins, it’ll be from fraud on an industrial scale, and the lesson that’ll have to be taught for that will necessarily be no less industrial.”Many welcome the prospect of armed conflict – one writes “That’s fine with me open season on democrats!”. Another deployed accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse as a positive example, writing “I think it will be more whining, crying, rioting, looting and a lot of Kyles protecting their cities, towns and neighborhoods.”Asked to comment on the site’s apparent reach, and the nature of its community, Lewis, the extremism researcher, said: “This is not some dark corner of the internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans that are stoking this.”On links to the Trump campaign, she said that the distorted content and the violent user comments formed a kind of “feedback loop”, and that “Trump and his campaign staff have been masters at exploiting these feedback loops”.On Tuesday night, meanwhile, following the Guardian’s outreach to the Porrazzos and Facebook that day, Dino Porrazzo announced on Twitter that he “HAD TO DELETE A FEW ARTICLES I WROTE TODAY BECAUSE THEY WERE DEMED FALSE BY BASEMENT DWELLING LIBERAL FACT CHECKERS”. More
The legal battle between Washington and Huawei resumes this week when a Canada-based senior executive at the Chinese state-backed telecommunications firm reappears in a Vancouver court on Monday claiming the effort to extradite her to the US should be thrown out.Huawei will claim an abuse of process, arguing the US government has provided Canadian authorities with partial and misleading evidence in an effort to show finance officer Meng Wanzhou tried to circumvent US sanctions on Iran 10 years ago.Meng, the daughter of the company’s founder, will appear in court on Monday for the first time in months after the Canadian government ordered her to remain in Vancouver until her extradition is settled.The Chinese government has condemned the US extradition drive as nakedly political. Huawei’s drawn out legal fight aims to show the US government it has no hope of securing Weng’s extradition for many years, and increase political pressure on the Canadian government to acknowledge its justice system is being used as part of Donald Trump’s trade battle with Beijing. The US government allege Meng breached US sanctions by covertly trading with Iran using a Huawei front company Skycom.Two Canadian citizens – Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur – have been arrested in China in what is seen as a tit for tat reprisal. It is unlikely the pair will be released unless Canada takes the unusual step of intervening in the extradition.Lovring’s wife has called for Meng’s release. Chinese diplomats in Canada have also warned relations between the two countries are worsening due to the episode.In the new court papers, Meng’s defence team will argue that the US government committed a fraud by providing Canada with a misleading record of the case against her when they sought her arrest on fraud and conspiracy charges in Vancouver in December 2018.The US government claims the 48-year-old finance officer misled an HSBC executive in August 2013 about Huawei’s relationship with a Skycom subsidiary accused of violating American economic sanctions against Iran.According to prosecutors, HSBC rested on her false assurances to continue financing Huawei, using dollar transaction, placing the bank at risk of prosecution and fines by the US.Court papers submitted by Meng’s lawyers claim the US government only provided Canadian authorities with 4 of the 16 slides used by her at a powerpoint presentation to reassure HSBC. The full set of slides, her lawyers claim, show she told HSBC bankers about Huawei controlling the Skycom bank account in Iran.As a result HSBC had the information it needed to assess the risk of financing Huawei.The allegation is one of three lines of attack the Huawei chief financial officer’s lawyers plan to pursue in the coming months to convince the British Columbia Supreme Court justice overseeing the case that Meng’s rights have been violated.Meng was detained in December 2018 after flying to Vancouver from Hong Kong en route to a business conference in Latin America. She will also claim after she was arrested at Vancouver airport she was subject to a three-hour interrogation without lawyers.The preliminary hearings today come ahead of a fuller hearing in February next year and will determine the legal defences that Meng’s lawyers will be entitled to mount to resist her extradition. More
TikTok
The Chinese-owned app is seeking an injunction against Trump administration order that would ban downloads from 11.59pm on Sunday More
The long-awaited Facebook Oversight Board, empowered to overrule some of the platform’s content moderation decisions, plans to launch in October, just in time for the US election.The board will be ready to hear appeals from Facebook users as well as cases referred by the company itself “as soon as mid- or late-October at the very latest, unless there are some major technical issues that come up”, said Julie Owono, one of the 20 initial members of the committee who were named in May, in an interview on Wednesday.“The board is paying attention, and is, of course, aware of the worries around this election and the role that social media will play,” said Owono, who is also the executive director of the digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières. “When we launch, we will be ready to take requests, wherever they come from, and from whoever they come from, as long as it’s within our mandate.”The launch will come at a time of intense scrutiny and pressure for the company that has lurched from controversy to controversy since it was used by Russia to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election. The consequences of Facebook’s failures in addressing hate speech and incitement, which have for years been linked to violence in several countries and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, have become increasingly apparent in its home country in recent months. During a summer of civil unrest in the US, Facebook was linked to the growth of the violent Boogaloo movement and a militia’s “call to arms” on the night two Black Lives Matter protesters were shot and killed in Kenosha, Wisconsin.The limits of the oversight board’s mandate have been a key point of controversy since the independent institution was proposed by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2018. The board’s initial bylaws only allowed it to consider appeals from users who believe that individual pieces of content were unfairly removed, prompting criticism from experts, including Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies online speech regulation.“We were told this was going to be the supreme court of Facebook, but then it came out more like a local district court, and now it’s more of a traffic court,” Douek told the Guardian. “It’s just been steadily narrowed over time.”Crucial areas where Facebook exercises editorial control include the algorithms that shape what content receives the most distribution; decisions to take down or leave up Facebook groups, pages and events; and decisions to leave certain pieces of content up.The board would be considering “leave up” decisions as soon as it launched, Owono said, but only if Facebook referred a case to it. She said technical and privacy challenges had delayed the launch of a system for Facebook users to appeal “leave up” decisions, but that one would be available “as soon as possible”.Facebook’s decisions to leave certain content up, such as its decision not to remove a post by Donald Trump threatening Black Lives Matter protesters that “when the looting starts the shooting starts”, have become as controversial, if not more so, than its decisions to take certain content down.Owono said “checks and balances are needed everywhere”, including across the aspects of Facebook not included in the oversight board’s mandate, and she expressed some optimism that the institution was “agile” enough to change and adapt. Her own concern over Facebook’s “inaction” on hate speech and incitement was a major factor in her decision to join the board, she said.“The unwillingness to deal with these problems is leading increasingly to governments around the world, particularly in Africa, saying that to curb incitement to violence, they need to cut off the internet entirely,” she said. “For me it was important to be part of an institution that would be able not only to say whether or not Facebook’s decisions are in line with their community standards and international law, but also whether Facebook’s inaction is, because we will be able to look at content takedown but also content left up.”Asked whether she agreed with Facebook’s decision to leave the Trump “looting-shooting” post up, Owono demurred, noting that the board at the time had been in its earliest stages. When Owono was asked for her personal opinion, a PR representative interjected to refer to a statement the board issued at the time, which noted that the board had significant work to do before it could begin considering cases.That work has included making sure all board members are fully versed in Facebook’s community standards and international human rights law and getting technical training on the case management tool that will allow board members to receive and consider the appeals, Owono said.The tool was built by Facebook engineers with considerable input from oversight board members, according to a person familiar with the matter. One detail requested by the board members was to format user-submitted appeal statements with line numbers, so they will look similar to legal filings. At launch, it will be available in 18 languages, though that number includes both US and UK English and two types of Spanish.Owono said she wanted to ensure that the board’s work and decisions reflected both the diversity of Facebook’s users and the “diversity of the impact and where those impacts are occurring”, noting that a large majority of Facebook’s users are outside of the US.“There will be many other elections at the end of 2020 in which the role of platforms will also be scrutinized and should be scrutinized as well,” Owono said, including a general election in Myanmar on 8 November. “If we receive requests related to these elections, we’ll also pay the same attention and make the decisions that are being asked from us thoroughly and in accordance with international law principles.” More
