Facebook Exposes France's Abuse of Facebook's Terribly Unsecure Platform

[Jimmy Higgins]

link

Facebook accused people linked to the French military on Tuesday of running a covert online influence operation targeting parts of Africa. It is the first time Facebook has publicly linked a campaign like this to individuals connected to a Western military.

The deceptive tactics allegedly used, which include using Facebook to pose as locals in the targeted countries, mirror misinformation campaigns run by the Russian government.

Facebook staff told reporters on a press call Tuesday that the company could not say if the operation was directed by the French military itself -- they only said it was run by "individuals associated" with the military.

According to Facebook, the operations targeted the "Central African Republic and Mali, and to a lesser extent Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Cote d'Ivoire and Chad."

Yeah, nations shouldn't be using social media, period!

On the other hand, should Facebook be bragging about calling out France's abuse of Facebook's shitty platform? A platform so insecure that you can open up a Group and get hundreds of "people" magically into it in a couple days?

There is talk about breaking up Facebook. I mean seriously? Break up Facebook would do what exactly? It is the very platform of Facebook that is the problem. They are trying to remove fake stories on a platform, much like stewards using spoons to get water out of the Titanic. The whole thing is riddled with viruses, scams, fake people. And Facebook has shown absolutely no interest in fixing any of it... because it'd be bad for the bottom line.

So yeah, fuck France for social manipulation on Facebook. Fuck Facebook even more for creating such an unprotected platform that allows such things to be done with ease! And fuck Congress for continuing to ignore the problem. Facebook doesn't need to be fixed. It needs to be closed and reconstructed from the ground up. It amazes me just how much insecurity we apparently are okay with, from phone, email, to social media.

 

[barbos]

But France are the good guys! democracy and shit.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There's no way we are going to stop it.

 

[J842P]

There's no way we are going to stop it.

Yeah. I don't see any solution that doesn't involve some Chinese-level control of the internet.

 

[bigfield]

There is talk about breaking up Facebook. I mean seriously? Break up Facebook would do what exactly? It is the very platform of Facebook that is the problem. They are trying to remove fake stories on a platform, much like stewards using spoons to get water out of the Titanic. The whole thing is riddled with viruses, scams, fake people. And Facebook has shown absolutely no interest in fixing any of it... because it'd be bad for the bottom line.

For a lot of people, Facebook is the only social media app where all of their friends and family maintain an online presence, so they stay on Facebook even though it's an abusive, malignant platform. This is because Facebook uses its massive market dominance and anti-competitive practices to suppress their competitors before they get big enough to offer a viable alternative for people to switch to.

For example, when Facebook discovered that Snapchat was rapidly gaining users, they developed a Snapchat clone (Instagram) to prevent Snapchat from growing into a viable competitor to Facebook:

As Cory Doctorow explains it:

Through Onavo, Facebook discovered that it was losing market share to Snapchat, an app that — like Facebook a decade before — billed itself as the pro-privacy alternative to the status quo. Through Onavo, Facebook was able to mine data from the devices of Snapchat users, including both current and former Snapchat users. This spurred Facebook to acquire Instagram — some features of which competed with Snapchat — and then allowed Facebook to fine-tune Instagram’s features and sales pitch to erode Snapchat’s gains and ensure that Facebook would not have to face the kinds of competitive pressures it had earlier inflicted on Myspace and Orkut.

The story of how Facebook crushed Snapchat reveals the relationship between monopoly and surveillance capitalism. Facebook combined surveillance with lax antitrust enforcement to spot the competitive threat of Snapchat on its horizon and then take decisive action against it.

Facebook has also successfully created a walled garden. Facebook does not allow their other apps to read to post content on Facebook. This makes it difficult for people to gradually move away from Facebook, since Facebook's ex-users can't access their Facebook network of family and friends using their chosen Facebook alternative.

Adversarial interoperability has played an outsized role in the history of the tech industry: from the founding of the “alt.*” Usenet hierarchy (which was started against the wishes of Usenet’s maintainers and which grew to be bigger than all of Usenet combined) to the browser wars (when Netscape and Microsoft devoted massive engineering efforts to making their browsers incompatible with the other’s special commands and peccadilloes) to Facebook (whose success was built in part by helping its new users stay in touch with friends they’d left behind on Myspace because Facebook supplied them with a tool that scraped waiting messages from Myspace and imported them into Facebook, effectively creating an Facebook-based Myspace reader).

Today, incumbency is seen as an unassailable advantage. Facebook is where all of your friends are, so no one can start a Facebook competitor. But adversarial compatibility reverses the competitive advantage: If you were allowed to compete with Facebook by providing a tool that imported all your users’ waiting Facebook messages into an environment that competed on lines that Facebook couldn’t cross, like eliminating surveillance and ads, then Facebook would be at a huge disadvantage. It would have assembled all possible ex-Facebook users into a single, easy-to-find service; it would have educated them on how a Facebook-like service worked and what its potential benefits were; and it would have provided an easy means for disgruntled Facebook users to tell their friends where they might expect better treatment.

Facebook would become vulnerable to "adversarial interoperability" if its various services belonged to different companies and were forced to communicate over the open web using publicly-documented interfaces that could be implemented by anyone.

Source for quotes:
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

 

[J842P]

For example, when Facebook discovered that Snapchat was rapidly gaining users, they developed a Snapchat clone (Instagram) to prevent Snapchat from growing into a viable competitor to Facebook:

A nitpick, Instagram is not a Snapchat clone, and Facebook did not develop it. Facebook purchased Instagram when it realized how popular it was becoming.

However, a lot of features were added to Facebook (and Instagram) that were similar to SnapChat. The distinguishing feature of SnapChat was that your shared images/videos only exist for a short time.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

There's no way we are going to stop it.

There are a number of issues I brought up, which definitely can be addressed through standardizing social media platforms. Granted, we don't want the Federal Government doing that alone, or it'll be developed using Cobol, punch cards, and vacuum tubes.

 

[bigfield]

For example, when Facebook discovered that Snapchat was rapidly gaining users, they developed a Snapchat clone (Instagram) to prevent Snapchat from growing into a viable competitor to Facebook:

A nitpick, Instagram is not a Snapchat clone, and Facebook did not develop it. Facebook purchased Instagram when it realized how popular it was becoming.

However, a lot of features were added to Facebook (and Instagram) that were similar to SnapChat. The distinguishing feature of SnapChat was that your shared images/videos only exist for a short time.

You're right, but I didn't mean to suggest that FB developed it from scratch - they just developed the features (such as Instagram Stories) that made it do the same things that Snapchat does.

 

[bigfield]

There's no way we are going to stop it.

There are a number of issues I brought up, which definitely can be addressed through standardizing social media platforms. Granted, we don't want the Federal Government doing that alone, or it'll be developed using Cobol, punch cards, and vacuum tubes.

Standardisation isn't really necessary.

Many social media platforms already provide HTTP APIs (application programming interfaces accessible over the web) that allow third party applications to read and write content on that platform. For example, Facebook provides the Graph API. The problem is that these social media platforms are very choosy about which third party applications are authorised to use these interfaces.

Facebook will only allow an application to use their API after they've approved it, and they won't approve any application that allows users to access Facebook from a Facebook-alternative platform. If they did then someone would just do what Facebook did to MySpace: build a better app and pull all of Facebook's content.

Reddit, on the other hand, is much more permissive. You can get third party apps for Reddit, such as BaconReader, which have the same access as the official app.

In both cases it's the same standard: an HTTP API. The API's themselves are not standardised, though, They shouldn't be, and they don't need to be, because it's relatively easy for developers to build an adaptor for each and every social media platform they want to connect to. Having said that, there are already standards for how to architect an HTTP API, such as JSON:API, but none of these standards are suitable for every use case.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I meant standardization for security. IE, you shall do this to prevent that. Though, I suppose that is more of a regulation is you are shalling.