Silicon Valley helps Putin win the information war: why Facebook is blocking independent media

While the Kremlin machine sows fakes, propaganda and twists information, independent media disappear from the radar. Russian propaganda is again “raising its head” with the help of Silicon Valley, reports CODA.

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"Your account has been blocked."

“You cannot post or comment on posts for 3 days.”

"You can't go live for 63 days."

The list of restrictions imposed by Facebook on Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi is endless. "I've been blocked and I'm losing my audience and people are losing vital information," says Karimi, who covers Afghanistan from exile in France.

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Over the past month, Karimi sent numerous messages to Facebook, but received no response.

And so last week, Karimi fought his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media at a reception hosted by Facebook's parent company Meta at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

The festival is one of the industry's key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak directly to major tech companies.

Karimi found a Meta employee and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are affected by Facebook's ill-conceived policy that seems to indiscriminately stigmatize all references to the Taliban as hate speech, and then sums up removing them. He explained that Facebook is an important platform for people stuck in the information vacuum imposed by the Taliban, and that blocking these votes benefits the Taliban themselves first and foremost. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to continue. Karimi did this twice, but never got a response.

Another, working for an independent TV channel in Georgia, says her newsroom has lost 90% of its Facebook audience since they began covering the war in Ukraine. Their TV channel "Formula" has made countless attempts to contact Meta, but to no avail.

“Facebook pages for real independent journalism are dying.”

“We went from 2 million followers to 200,” says Salome Ugulava, editor-in-chief of Formula. The sharp drop in viewership was due to a warning received from Facebook after its algorithm labeled a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “hate speech.”

This seemingly technical error resulted in the channel losing 90% of its audience, but also a portion of its income. “Monetization has been suspended. This is a severe punishment,” Ugulava said.

A similar picture was observed on the Tbilisi opposition TV channel Mtavari, when it published a story about the Azov battalion standing guard over Mariupol. Facebook removed the story, arguing that it contained “a call for terrorism.” Despite all the controversy surrounding Azov, only the aggressor country classifies them as a terrorist organization.

“We were already under constant attack from the Georgian government troll farms, but after the invasion, Russian-backed organizations also started reporting on us. The Azov incident was one of many,” Nika Gvaramia, director general of the channel, said.

Gvaramia says many of the Ukraine-related stories that Mtavari posted in early March were taken down by Facebook in early April, weeks after they were first posted and viewed by millions of people. The Mtavari team has good reason to believe they are being reported by Kremlin-backed accounts.

“The worst thing is that there is no warning mechanism, no obvious criteria for these removals, and it takes weeks to contact Facebook. Pages of true independent journalism on Facebook are dying,” Gvaramia said.

One deletion was followed by others. Mtavari engagement fell from 22 million in March to 6 million in April. The team has good reason to believe that this is the influence of the Kremlin's propaganda machine.

For a small country like Georgia (population 3,5 million), the consequences of these trials are life-changing. Like many countries outside the West, Facebook has become a national virtual public square, a place where people gather to discuss and talk about the future.

This debate is existential in Georgia: 20% of the country's territory is already occupied by the Russian Federation, and many fear that an invasion of Ukraine will push Georgia further into the arms of Moscow. Kremlin-funded disinformation campaigns are putting intense pressure on independent media reporting on the situation in the country. While media outlets like Formula TV and Mtavari disappear from people’s Facebook feeds, the very ideas of liberal democracy are disappearing from public debate.

And such cases cannot be counted. Journalists are losing their voice. And this is happening not only because of the repression by their governments, but also through the policies created in Silicon Valley that help the oppressors of free speech to spread their disinformation.

“Silicon Valley is helping Putin win the information war. This is madness and it must stop,” says a Russian journalist who did not want to be named for security reasons. “But we don’t know how to tell Facebook about this because it’s impossible to talk to them directly.”

At the same time, analysts say that what is happening in Ukraine shows that Facebook's systems are completely unsuitable for waging an all-out information war.

None of this is new

Meta has previously been accused of promoting hatred and disinformation around the world, from Nigeria to Palestine to Myanmar, where the company has been accused of fueling the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. And experts in regions like the Middle East and Africa point out that while tech platforms can't adequately handle the content crisis around Ukraine, in this case they generated a faster and stronger public response than in places like Syria or Ethiopia. .

With each new crisis, Meta made new promises to better take into account all the cultural and linguistic nuances of posts around the world. The company even introduced a serious-sounding human rights policy last year that focused on these issues. But there is little evidence that anything really changes in practice. Facebook does not disclose how many moderators it employs, but it is estimated that around 15 people are involved in reviewing content created by Facebook's nearly 000 billion users worldwide.

“It's like putting a beach hut in the path of a massive tsunami and expecting it to become a barrier,” one moderator said. He and others with access to the moderators said the war in Ukraine is the latest evidence that Facebook's content moderation model is doing more harm than good.

Facebook moderators have 90 seconds to decide if a post is allowed or not. From Myanmar to Ukraine and beyond, they deal with incredibly vivid images of violence or highly contextual statements that don't usually follow Facebook's rules about what's allowed and what's not. A system in which posts live or die depending on the quick decision of an overworked, underpaid, and often traumatized individual takes a toll on the mental health of moderators. But it also harms the health of the information ecosystem in which we live.

“The brunt of this war falls on the outsourced moderators, who have repeatedly sounded the alarm,” says Martha Dark, director of Foxglove Legal, a UK-based non-profit technical justice group that addresses issues of abuse of Facebook content moderators around the world.

“Despite Facebook’s size and enormous profits, Ukraine has shown that Facebook’s systems are completely unsuited to waging an all-out information war,” Dark says. — Nobody says that moderating a war zone is an easy task. But it's hard to shake the feeling that Facebook isn't making a serious effort to expand and fix content moderation, because that would eat into the company's profits. It's just not enough."

The company has deplatformed some of the most prominent sources of Russian disinformation, such as Russian state broadcasters. It is impossible to know what impact some of these measures have due to the company's lack of transparency regarding its actual day-to-day content moderation decisions. But the real power of Facebook, which is arguably the most powerful communication tool in the world at the moment, lies in reciprocal post exchanges, and this is where so much misinformation thrives.

Special marks for Russian media

It is worth noting that the social network is trying to fight propaganda. Facebook began tagging Russian media accounts controlled by the state, reports Correspondent. Now in the publications of RIA Novosti, Russia Today (RT), Ruptly and Sputnik a label has appeared: “This publication is controlled by the Russian state.”

As explained in the management of the social network, media outlets that are under partial or full editorial control of the authorities are considered state-controlled media.

“To identify such media, Facebook conducts research and uses a specially designed rating system,” the statement said.

At the same time, such publications are identified using the definitions and rules of the social network, as well as on the basis of verification of owners, managers, funding sources and processes that help ensure the independence of the editorial policy.

“In the transparency section of the page of an organization that we have identified as state-controlled, a corresponding label will appear. We will be assigning these labels to organizations around the world on an ongoing basis,” Facebook executives added.

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“We can no longer cover the war,” says Georgian journalist Salome Ugulava. “Our subscribers don’t see us in their feeds.”

It's not just Facebook: Twitter is facing similar accusations of doing a terrible job of policing its platform from "inappropriate content" when it comes to Ukraine.

“You are failing,” tweeted journalist Simon Ostrovsky, who covers Ukraine for PBS Newshour. “Hundreds of puppet accounts attack every tweet that contradicts the Kremlin version, while you block the genuine accounts,” he wrote.

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