(2017-10-13) Crafting Projects Islam And Russian Propaganda Data For Democracy

Crafting projects, Islam, and Russian propaganda – Data for Democracy. We spent last Friday night combing through Jonathan Albright’s dataset of posts from five Russian-linked Facebook pages, trying to track down related Instagram accounts.

Muslim Voice was a fake account removed from both Facebook and Instagram. However much of their content survives on the group’s Pinterest page, which seemingly was used to harvest authentic content posted by other users. Muslim Voice’s pins are often focused on messages of Muslim empowerment or religious devotion, but scratch the surface and you’ll find the kind of divisive, polarizing content that’s a staple of Russian disinformation efforts.

But we were most surprised by what happened to our researchers’ personal Pinterest feeds after viewing Muslim Voice’s pins — Pinterest’s recommendation engine started serving up right-wing talking points and posts in Russian.

This happened fast. After a couple of searches one Friday night, the feed was transformed. And it isn’t just Pinterest — for example, these are the type of algorithms that Facebook uses to suggest flat-earth and homeopathy groups to anyone who joins a “vaccine-hesitant” (anti-vax) group on their platform. (conspiracy theory)

As we learn more about the massive scale and scope of Russia’s operations in the US in 2016 (election), it’s important to note that they are exploiting systemic flaws in the platforms we use to socialize and share ideas. Russian influence is a serious issue that we need address, but the social media platforms’ obsession with user engagement is an even bigger problem. Design flaws like these, baked into features like content recommendation engines, leave us vulnerable to future attacks.