Facebook and the dilemma of coordinated inauthentic behavior
Yesterday, Facebook released a “threat report” on what it calls “influence operations” on its platform. The company defined influence operations as “coordinated efforts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic goal”—an apparent reference to the kinds of activity that Americans heard about during the 2016 election, from entities such as the Russian “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency, which used fake accounts to spread disinformation about the election and to generally cause chaos. In its report, Facebook says it has uncovered evidence of more than 150 coordinated inauthentic behavior campaigns in more than 50 countries since 2017, and breaks down some of the details of these operations over that period. In addition to noting that Russia is still the leading player in this kind of campaign (at least the ones that Facebook knows about), the company describes how dealing with these kinds of threats has become much more complex since 2016.