Russia and Social Media

Recently, it has come out that there was involvement of Russian based "troll farms" for social media, that created fake, and/or inflammatory content for Facebook, and Twitter that were meant to instill anger and aggression. The idea behind the content was to sway the public's feelings towards a certain candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Just today, CNN reported that Facebook estimates that 126 million people could have been exposed to the content. the content came from a Russian-government linked troll farm called, the Internet Research Agency. It is currently unclear how many people of that 126 million actually saw the content and whether they were affected/influenced by it.

This is a troubling statistic that is made even worse by the fact that some of the content is said to be violent and was targeted towards certain social and political groups. It is troubling because of the fact that so many people could have been influenced by these posts, or at least exposed to them. It demonstrates the capability that social media has to influence people, and not necessarily for the better. And it brings up the question of how closely should the content on social media be monitored and removed from the site. According to the second CNN article linked, "Facebook's terms of service prohibit content that is 'hate speech, threatening, or... incites violence,'" but even with this rule in place and teams on the job, they were unable to find and remove these posts. They did respond and said they were hiring thousands of additional people for their content reviewing teams.

I don't want to take a stance on whether they should be removing content in the first place, because that is a very deep discussion and is outside the scope of what I want to talk about in this post (that and I already did a post that touched on this topic a bit). However,  even with thousands of new team members, it is still extremely unlikely that would be able to catch all of the content on Facebook that violates the terms of service in this regard. So, we as consumers of social media, should be mindful of what we are seeing on social media and what is being discussed in it.