Missing archives in Kashmir & monopolized political content on Facebook in Brazil
We hope your week is going well. In this issue we have more updates from the Facebook Papers that show internal discussions raising concerns about large scale monopolized production of political content related to Brazil on the platform.
In another update, we bring you Rest of World's story on how Russia is using social media platforms and disinformation campaigns to advance its interests in Sudan. While the government is yet to take any action, platforms such as Facebook should improve monitoring of such content, suggests the author.
In a rather upsetting update from Kashmir, journalists speak about the vanishing of newspaper archives. They observed that articles critical of the government are being erased from their sites.
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The latest top stories
Facebook Papers: group monopolized content in 2018 Brazilian elections (Estadão)
During the 2018 Brazilian elections, a small group of accounts and pages monopolized the production of political content on Facebook. According to internal documents of Mark Zuckerberg's company obtained by Estadão, the country suffered from the action of so-called “superproducers”, users who publish a high volume of content – in the archives and Brazil is cited as “the most recent great democracy to face a frightening eruption of disinformation and hatred on Facebook.”
"One of the 28-page documents has an internal publication dated October 13, 2018 in which company researchers discuss problems related to elections in different countries – in the file, there is a topic called “lessons learned in Brazil”. The company claims that on October 7 of that year, the day of the first round of the country's presidential elections, 18.4 million political publications were created by 6.7 million profiles or pages on the platform. However, 35% of this material was published by just 3% of accounts – that is, 6.4 million political posts were generated by just 201,000 accounts." -- Por Bruna Arimathea, Bruno Romanie Giovanna Wolf, authors, Estadão
Kashmir’s vanishing newspaper archives (Coda Story)
In a long-troubled region of India, articles critical of the national government are being erased from the websites of local news outlets. Journalists believe that pressure from New Delhi is to blame
“Our website was hacked multiple times in past years and, because of that, we would lose some of our previous data. When there was an uprising in 2016, our website got hacked and when our technical team finally managed to recover it, after a few days, some of our recent coverage, critical of the government, was missing." -- Sajad Haider, Editor, the Kashmir Observer.
"These archives are records of history. It is very frightening to see this kind of erasure." -- Anuradha Bhasin, editor, Kashmir Times
Why Russia is using Facebook to launch disinformation campaigns in Sudan (Rest of World)
Over the past four years, Russia has used many tools and tactics to advance its interests in Sudan. But in recent years, Russia has also started to tap the power of social media platforms, to influence and sway public opinion in Sudan through disinformation campaigns, and to generally polish its image by highlighting humanitarian activities in the country. The government has taken no action, and with elections approaching, Russia stands to directly influence the country’s political direction for its own benefit.
"The Sudanese government has not commented officially on these interventions or opened an investigation into the removed Russian pages.... Given the degree of international meddling through social media, platforms such as Facebook should improve and expand monitoring of the Russian intervention in Sudan. One way to do this is to collaborate with local partners. For example, the local media venture Beam Reports has a fact-checking section that could be linked with Facebook to speed up and expand the process. Doing so will enable the platforms to better understand the local context and improve content moderation." -- Mohamed Suliman, researcher, Northeastern University’s Civic A.I. Lab
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