Group items tagged

As violence continues to escalate, so too do fears that armed groups who oppose the military coup are positioning themselves to join the fray.

In a statement on Twitter, the U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar, Thomas L. Vajda, denounced what he described as "horrifying" bloodshed and called for "an immediate end to the violence and the restoration of the democratically elected government." "These are not the actions of a professional military or police force," Vajda said. "Myanmar's people have spoken clearly: they do not want to live under military rule."

This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour," wrote the bloc's delegation to the country.

"A failed state in Myanmar has the potential to draw in all the big powers - including the US, China, India, Russia, and Japan - in a way that could lead to a serious international crisis," he wrote on Twitter.

We’ve seen Russian actors intentionally use content posted by innocent Americans. We see other people post and share content from Russian campaigns. It doesn’t mean they’re actually connected. In fact, most times they’re not.

Influence operations are essentially weaponized uncertainty.

One of the most effective countermeasures in all of this is an informed public.

And there are so many opportunities to leverage that complexity to run a perception hack. A perception hack is an attempt to create a perception that there is a large scale influence operation when in fact there is no evidence to support it.

It’s our job to keep this debate as authentic as possible by putting more information and context out there. We can force pages that are pushing information to disclose who is behind them

We are living through a historic election with so many complex pieces to monitor. The piece that I and my team can help with is that we can make sure we secure this debate.

My counterpart at Twitter says I call him more than his mother does. We’re spending lots of time and exchanging information to try and stay ahead of this.

Between 2016 and next week we’ll have worked to protect more than 200 elections across the world. It’s critical to focus on next week, but we also have to remember Myanmar has an election five days later.

after the military in Myanmar used Facebook to stoke the murder of the Rohingya people, Haugen began to worry that this was a playbook that could be infinitely repeated — and only because Facebook chose not to invest in safety measures, such as detecting hate speech in poorer, more vulnerable places. “The scale of the problems was so vast,” she writes. “I believed people were going to die (in certain countries, at least) and for no reason other than higher profit margins.”

After a trip to Cambodia, where neighbors killed neighbors in the 1970s because of a “story that labeled people who had lived next to each other for generations as existential threats,” she’d started to wonder about what caused people to turn on one another to such a horr

ifying degree. “How quickly could a story become the truth people perceived?”

she points out is the false choice posited by most social media companies: free speech vs. censorship. She argues that lack of transparency is what contributed most to the problems at Facebook. No one on the outside can see inside the algorithms. Even many of those on the inside can’t. “You can’t take a single academic course, anywhere in the world, on the tradeoffs and choices that go into building a social media algorithm or, more importantly, the consequences of those choices,” she writes.

In that lack of accountability, social media is a very different ecosystem than the one that helped Ralph Nader take on the auto industry back in the 1960s. Then, there was a network of insurers and plaintiff’s lawyers who also wanted change — and the images of mangled bodies were a lot more visible than what happens inside the mind of a teenage girl. But what if the government forced companies to share their inner workings in the same way it mandates that food companies disclose the nutrition in what they make? What if the government forced social media companies to allow academics and other researchers access to the algorithms they use?