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After being banned, some militant pages returned with different names. We are back! the leader of one such organization said after relaunching on the platform last month. Help us rebuild share and invite friends.

Posted on October 9, 2020, at 8:53 p.m. ET

A day after the FBI disclosed that organized armed extremists coordinated on Facebook to hatch a terrorist plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, multiple pages that encourage political violence were still active on the social network.

An examination by BuzzFeed News and the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan watchdog group, found at least five such pages on the platform as of Friday morning. Those pages, which in some cases appear to be simply rebranded versions of previously banned organizations, use Facebook to recruit and to promote objectives that at times call for violent uprising.

Facebook announced in August that it was banning right-wing militant, anarchist, and QAnon groups after a series of violent crimes were tied to organizations that used the platform. Since then, the company has removed thousands of groups, and this week announced it had banned all accounts, pages, and groups tied to QAnon, the collective delusion that alleges that a secretive government cabal is kidnapping children.

Despite Facebooks efforts, some of those pages have escaped removal despite incorporating words such as militia or minutemen in their names or web addresses; others were created after Facebook removed their original groups or pages and appear to have avoided detection by making small changes to their names.

The Michigan Liberty Militia, for example, was banned from Facebook in August. On Sept. 11, it reappeared under a page with new, slightly altered moniker MLM Michigan liberty minutemen and marked its return with a picture of a flag bearing two hatchets, the Liberty Bell, and two assault rifles.

We are back! read a post on the page posted at 8:59 a.m. and signed by the groups leader, Phil Robinson. Help us rebuild share and invite friends.

A Facebook spokesperson said Friday that its work to remove violent content and extremist organization pages is ongoing.

We remove content, disable accounts, and immediately report to law enforcement when there is a credible threat of imminent harm to people or public safety, the spokesperson said.

That person added that the company had removed three pages identified to it by BuzzFeed News because they violate its policies, but noted that some of them had not been active recently.

While Facebook has taken a harder stance against violent organizations that have used the platform for years to organize and grow, the continued existence of Michigan extremist groups underscores the difficulty the social networking company is having in moderating content. And even as it attempts to show that it is doing more ahead of a contentious 2020 presidential election, Facebook is still falling short, according to its critics.

This is yet another example of Facebook's ongoing moderation failures despite ample warnings from researchers and journalists, making clear that the company is either unable or unwilling to remove militia and extremist movements from their platform, said TTP Director Katie Paul, whose organization was able to locate three Michigan extremist pages still on Facebook as of Friday morning. This comes after months of highly publicized statements from Facebook that it is removing these groups, yet we are still able to identify them with basic searches.

Since August, Facebook said it has removed more than 6,500 Pages and Groups tied to more than 300 Militarized Social Movements.

Although there are other social networks that prove more welcoming to such organizations, none have anything remotely close to the enormous reach of Facebook. For that reason, many organizations, reluctant to abandon the platform, have found ways around the ban, creating new pages with different names to avoid being linked to previously removed pages and groups.

In other cases, Facebook has been slow to remove pages that have clear links to calls for violence.

In late August, for example, members of a militant group called the Kenosha Guard used the platform to organize a confrontation with protesters demonstrating against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. During that event, a 17-year-old gunman allegedly shot and killed two protesters and injured another.

The Kenosha Guard event page, which had been flagged by users 455 times prior to the events of Aug. 25, was not removed from Facebook until after the shooting.

And although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially took credit for removing the event page, BuzzFeed News later revealed it had been deleted by the events organizer.

On Thursday, unsealed federal and state charging documents detailed how a right-wing militant group in Michigan known as the Wolverine Watchmen used the platform to connect with one another and help plot to kidnap and possibly kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over what the conspirators believed was government overreach in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

An FBI affidavit filed this week indicates that the group, separately identified by the Michigan attorney general, had been attempting to obtain the addresses of local law-enforcement officers, and a member of the Wolverine Watchmen at the time expressed concern to the bureau that the group planned to target and kill police officers.

Facebook said Friday that it began proactively communicating with law enforcement about the Wolverine Watchmen at least six months ago, and the group was removed from the platform on June 30 as part of a sweep to ban what it called a violent US-based anti-government network.

Yet despite this work, not only are Michigan extremist pages still active on the platform, according to TTPs Paul, but Facebooks recommendation algorithm appears to continue directing users to like other pages if they are already following one.

On Friday morning, for example, the platforms algorithm recommended multiple pages for militant groups to a reporter examining a different organizations page, including one for an organization called West Michigan Guardians, which describes itself as a constitutional militia.

TTP found three other pages, including Michigan Minuteman Platoon, which had not posted since last year. Another, Great Lakes Light Infantry, identified itself as a militia group and used photos of children in camouflage clothing to promote its cause.

A fifth page, MCM Standing Together, Defending Together, which had its original page removed in a purge over the summer, returned to Facebook on Sept. 21. The new pages URL features the phrase MichigansConstitutionalMilitia and is liked and followed by 50 people.

Originally we were not going to rebuild the page on FB however YOLO, a page administrator posted on the date it was created.

The pages most recent post, a meme of a soldier and the Statue of Liberty holding a gun, appeared on Sept. 24.

Its been a tough year, the text on the meme reads. But our way of life is worth fighting for.

Read the original:
Even After The Plot To Kidnap Gov. Whitmer, Michigan Militant Groups Continue To Thrive On Facebook - BuzzFeed News

With help from Eric Geller, John Hendel, Nancy Scola and Carmen Paun

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DNC CTO talks disinformation: The DNCs chief technology officer said the party is seeing as much disinformation from domestic sources as from foreign ones, which she called deeply troubling.

Meanwhile, on the RNC: The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee are sourcing Americans answers on whether social media companies are trying to help Joe Biden win the election and whether Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is out to make the president lose.

5G experimentation: The Defense Department is doling out another $600 million in grants to test 5G applications, with the help of private telecoms like AT&T and Nokia, at military bases across the country.

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Critically important but commonly misunderstood: Todays antitrust laws are comprehensive, vigilantly guarding against anti-competitive conduct and problematic mergers. These laws, designed to root out misconduct, have cultivated economic growth since their enactment. WATCH: Antitrust Explained in 60 seconds.

DNC CTO: THE LIES ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE COUNTRY Nellwyn Thomas has a lot on her plate. As chief technology officer for the Democratic National Committee, shes responsible for improving its tech workflow, protecting it from hackers, countering disinformation operations, and providing IT and security advice to dozens of state parties and hundreds of campaigns. But what worries her the most right now, my colleagues at Morning Cybersecurity report, is the rise of domestic disinformation operations that rival or exceed the scope and efficacy of foreign activities, such as Russias infamous 2016 interference. The threats were seeing at this point are just as much domestic as they are foreign, and that is deeply troubling, Thomas said on Thursday during an Institute for Security and Technology webinar.

President Donald Trump and members of his administration and reelection campaign have relentlessly pushed false claims about the security of mail-in voting, the extent of voter fraud and the overall integrity of the 2020 election. That is incredibly difficult to combat, when its not just about China or Russia or Iran, but about other Americans, Thomas said. And so that is certainly an area that we're very focused on and very concerned about.

Because a major goal of disinformation campaigns is to discourage participation in the democratic process, voter suppression goes hand-in-hand with more traditional election security issues such as cyberattacks and social media propaganda. Thomas has directed the DNCs tech team to document instances of potential voter suppression at polling places in order to make sure that we can track those, remediate them and in some cases litigate them after the fact. These things are related, she said, and all part of a common thread of outside actors, foreign and domestic, trying to undermine trust in our electoral processes and trust in our democratic politicians.

TRUMP HQS TWITTER ACCOUNTABILITY SURVEY The Trump camp has launched a survey to take American voters temperature on alleged GOP bias by Twitter. The Official Twitter Accountability Survey poses (somewhat repetitive) questions about whether the platform purposefully silences conservatives; fact-checking posts amounts to free speech violations; social media companies are trying to help Joe Biden win the election; and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wants Trump to lose.

All about that consent: While the survey seeks to reaffirm Trumps longstanding accusations that tech platforms discriminate against conservatives, another goal seems to be getting the greenlight to robocall voters. Survey participants consent to receiving autodialed and automated calls and texts from groups affiliated with the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. and the Republican National Committee.

Sound familiar? The White House similarly created an online tipline last year where people could share stories of suspected political bias by social media companies, an effort that raised privacy advocates hackles by requesting a host of personal information.

PENTAGON ANNOUNCES MORE 5G TESTING AT MILITARY BASES The Defense Department on Thursday announced another $600 million in grants set to test next-generation wireless applications at five U.S. military bases in Utah, Washington, Georgia, California and Nevada, which the department calls the largest full-scale 5G tests for dual-use applications in the world. This is part of its ongoing 5G experimentation.

The testing will focus on a range of 5G uses including augmented and virtual reality applications as well as how to develop systems that will let the military dynamically share its 3.1-3.45 GHz band airwaves, now used for airborne radar systems, with the commercial sector. (Thats under study at Hill Air Force Base in Utah.) Companies like AT&T and Nokia are helping with efforts at the bases. The Pentagon holds a vast store of 5G-friendly airwaves, which the wireless industry has long sought to tap in some fashion.

Looking ahead, the department will begin testing on seven more military bases in the coming year, Michael Kratsios, the Pentagons acting undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told reporters.

FACEBOOK: WE WORKED WITH THE FEDS ON MICHIGAN KIDNAP PLOT The social network helped tip off federal law enforcement to six militia activists alleged kidnapping conspiracy targeting Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the company said Thursday. "We proactively reached out and cooperated with the FBI early in this ongoing investigation," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement, adding that Facebooks outreach to the feds here started more than six months back.

The social network is named three times in the unsealed FBI affidavit, which said the suspects communicated via private Facebook pages and encrypted group chats about their planned attack on the governor, whose pandemic-related shutdowns had angered right-wing activists. (Its unclear whether the encrypted communications occurred on any Facebook platforms.)

One July 28 post to a private Facebook group read, in part, "We about to be busy ladies and gentlemen... This is where the Patriot shows up." That was particularly ominous because, the feds say, the suspect had earlier that day been heard on a phone call narrowing down attack sites to Whitmer's western Michigan vacation home and official summer residence.

WITH TECHS HELP, MONEY POT FOR VACCINES FOR POOR COUNTRIES GROWS Leading tech and media companies are among the contributors to a global fund set up to pay for lower- and middle-income countries coronavirus vaccines when they become available. The Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment has secured about $1.8 billion of its initial fundraising goal of $2 billion by the end of the year, Gavi said. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, gave $30 million, while the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok contributed $5 million, which were matched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with $5 million. (The Gates Foundation had separately put in $106 million.)

The recipients: The funding will support the procurement of safe and effective coronavirus vaccines for 92 countries eligible for the AMC. Those include all economies with gross national income per capita under $4,000, plus other World Bank International Development Association-eligible economies, among them countries in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Gavi said. At least $5 billion more will be needed next year to procure doses as they become available.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was named board chairman for The Business Council, a learning, networking and best-practice sharing organization of top global CEOs, succeeding Nike President and CEO John Donahoe. The Competitive Carriers Association has welcomed several new members in 2020, including SpaceX, Cisco, Fujitsu, Rakuten and Samsung; more here.

A message from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

In recent years, some politicians have pushed for changes to antitrust laws that seek to break up companies across industries simply because of their size; essentially penalizing success. Such changes would leave government enforcers with too much control, allowing them to pick winners and losers in our economy. This would strip away consumers power in the market, cripple innovation, and undermine job creation and economic growth. WATCH: 60 second explainer on Americas antitrust laws.

ICYMI: Facebook has banned the U.S. marketing firm that was behind a campaign to disseminate deceptive political content on behalf of Turning Point Action, a political advocacy group for young conservatives with ties to President Donald Trump, Steven reports.

Becoming an ex-Bezos: The Inside Story of MacKenzie Scott, the Mysterious 60-Billion-Dollar Woman, by Stephanie Clifford.

Twitter trouble: A federal judge in California has ordered that Twitter reveal the identity of an anonymous user who allegedly fabricated an FBI document to spread a conspiracy theory about the killing of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who died in 2016, NPR reports.

Trump vs. World, the Sequel: What would four more years of Trump look like for China, trade, democracy and other issues? Read POLITICOs special report on how a second term could reshape the globe.

New privacy controls floated as CCPA improvement for consumers: Privacy-minded companies and consumer groups are testing a new, simpler way for people to exercise their rights under Californias landmark Privacy Act, Katy Murphy reports. They hope [it] will eventually be widely used, honored by companies and enforced by the attorney general.

QAnon and on: A Facebook Ban Won't Stop QAnon, WIRED reports.

M&A freeze?: While much remains uncertain about the federal governments ambitious case against big tech, at least one outcome seems highly likely: Tech giants wont be able to buy their way to growth anytime soon, WSJ reports.

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TTYL.

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What's top of mind for the DNC's chief technology officer? - Politico

KARACHI: In sharp reaction to the governments decision of banning TikTok, a video-sharing social networking service, social media celebrity Hareem Shah on Saturday slammed the restriction and called it a move to divert the publics attention from real issues, such as wheat flour crisis.

As you all know that TikTok has been banned and the reason thats been given for it is behayai (vulgarity or indecent content). I think thats not a solid reason. Its an entertainment app. If theres criminal content on it then the administrators [those who run it] of the app block it themselves, the popular TikToker said.

Instead of banning it, they [the government] should identify those who are involved in criminal or vulgar acts so that they could be punished and behayai is eliminated. In the US they banned the app by giving a solid reason, which was their national security. If there is a national security issue in Pakistan, then its right. But vulgarity is not a reason. I will give you an example: when your fingernails grow big you cut your nails, not the entire hand, she maintained.

Calls for imposition of Islamic system if vulgarity needs to be controlled

Ms Shah received a volley of questions from journalists and answered all of them with poise and understanding at a press conference on Saturday held at the Karachi Press Club to elicit her opinion on the governments ban on TikTok app.

There are different institutions such as the Censor Board in Pakistan who can do this job well. You will find people with a positive attitude to life as well as those with a negative one everywhere. If you look at it, then there is material on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram too which is not good for the countrys reputation. India and the US had issues with China so they banned the app. If you are out to put an end to vulgarity you need to enforce the Islamic system (Islami qanoon nafiz karein) in the country.

In reply to a question, she said TikTok brought out talents of people; how could one snatch that from them. According to her, behayai is something that makes a person move away from imaan. Behayai contains many things.

Answering a question, she said behayai committed by man or woman, either way, was condemnable. Women compared to men have become the focus of attention more if something bad happens. Who is raping women? Men. This is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and [yet] a woman cant go out with her children. Why cant you talk about that? What recently happened on Motorway, when a woman was raped, was done by men.

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2020

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TikTok star terms ban move to divert public attention from issues - DAWN.com

Twitter said on Friday it will remove tweets calling for people to interfere with the U.S. election process or implementation of election results, including through violence, as the company also announced more restrictions to slow the spread of misinformation.

Twitter said in a blog post that, from next week, users will get a prompt pointing them to credible information before they can retweet content that has been labeled as misleading.

It said it would add more warnings and restrictions on tweets with misleading information labels from USpolitical figures like candidates and campaigns, as well as US-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers or that get "significant engagement."

Twitter, which recently told Reuters it was testing how to make its labeling more obvious and direct, said people will have to tap through warnings to see these tweets. Users can also only 'quote tweet' this content, as likes, retweets and replies will be turned off.

Twitter says it has labeled thousands of misleading posts, though most attention has been on the labels applied to tweets by USPresident Donald Trump. Twitter also said it would label tweets that falsely claim a win for any candidate.

The company announced several temporary steps to slow amplification of content: for example, from Oct. 20 to at least the end of the U.S. election week, global users pressing "retweet" will be directed first to the "quote tweet" button to encourage people to add their own commentary.

It will also stop surfacing trending topics without added context, and will stop people seeing "liked by" recommendations from people they do not know in their timeline.

Twitter's decision to hit the brakes on automated recommendations contrasts with the approach at Facebook, which is amping up promotion of its groups product despite concerns about extremism in those spaces.

Social media companies are under pressure to combat election-related misinformation and prepare for the possibility of violence or poll place intimidation around the Nov. 3 vote.

Reuters has reported that Republicans are mobilizing thousands of volunteers to watch early voting sites and ballot drop boxes to find evidence to back up Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud.

On Wednesday, Facebook said it would ban calls for poll watching using "militarized language."

Thomson Reuters 2020

Should the government explain why Chinese apps were banned? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

Read more:
Twitter Imposes Restrictions, More Warning Labels Ahead of US Election - Gadgets 360

Facebook on Thursday said it is cracking down on private groups where hate or misinformation is shared among members.

The move comes amid a wider crack down on malicious and false content at the social networking giant which has led people to turn to private groups of like-minded members who can share content that is not available to the wider Facebook community.

"People turn to Facebook Groups to connect with others who share their interests, but even if they decide to make a group private, they have to play by the same rules as everyone else," Facebook vice president of engineering Tom Alison said in a blog post.

Alison said Facebook's community standards "apply to public and private groups, and our proactive detection tools work across both."

Facebook uses artificial intelligence to automatically scan posts, even in private groups, taking down pages that repeatedly break its rules or that are set up in violation of the social network's standards.

More than a million groups have been taken down in the past year for violating hate policies, according to Alison.

In the past year, Facebook has removed about 1.5 million pieces of content in groups for violating its policies on organised hate, with 91 percent of those posts found by automated software systems, according to Alison.

Over that same period, the leading social network has taken down about 12 million pieces of content in groups for violating policies on hate speech, 87 percent of which was found proactively.

Facebook last month said it has removed hundreds of groups tied to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and imposed restrictions on nearly 2,000 more as part of a crackdown on stoking violence.

The moves, which were made across both Facebook and Instagram, were against accounts tied to "offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organizations and QAnon," the social media platform said in a blog post.

Under rules tightened on Thursday, administrators or moderators of groups taken down for rule-breaking will be temporarily blocked from forming new groups at Facebook.

People tagged for violating social network standards in groups will need to get moderator or administrator permission for any new posts for 30 days, and if what is cleared for sharing continues to break the rules the entire group will be removed, according to Alison.

Facebook will also start "archiving" groups that been without administrators for a long time, meaning they still exist but don't appear in searches and members can't post anything.

And, to promote getting information from authoritative sources, Facebook will no longer show health-themed groups in recommendation results.

Facebook has been struggling with hoaxes and misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, seeking to give users well-sourced information about the health emergency.

Is Android One holding back Nokia smartphones in India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

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Facebook to Curb Private Groups Spreading Hate, Misinformation - Gadgets 360