Ideological wars are being fought and the weapons of mass production are fake news stories, fake Facebook profiles and fake "likes".
Facebook recognises its fake news problem and has published a paper outlining its plans to tackle it by rooting out the source: “organised actors [governments or non-state actors]” whose aim is “to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome”.
The paper coins the term “information operations” as the online actions taken by these groups or individuals with the aim of manipulating public opinion but what Facebook is really talking about is propaganda with a social media twist.
Facebook says it already is and will continue to put resources into detecting fake accounts, astroturfing, co-ordinated “likes” (including the use of bots) and other forms of false amplification.
That said, Facebook was keen to point out that it had analysed information operations throughout the 2016 US general election and found that “the reach of the content spread by these accounts was less than one-tenth of a percent of the total reach of civic content on Facebook”.
