China's Biggest Propaganda Agency Buys Ads on Facebook and Twitter to Smear Protesters in Hong Kong

China’s largest state-run news agency, Xinhua News, is buying ads on Facebook and Twitter to smear protesters in Hong Kong, a new tactic being used to influence how the rest of the world perceives the pro-democracy demonstrators.

An estimated 1.7 million people in Hong Kong, roughly a quarter of its population, took to the streets on Sunday to denounce Beijing’s attempts to interfere in the semi-autonomous territory. But China has amassed soldiers across the border in Shenzhen and appears to be stepping up its propaganda efforts online through paid ads on Facebook and Twitter, as well as unpaid content on platforms like YouTube.

Xinhua News currently has five different Facebook ads that directly relate to the unrest in Hong Kong, and all of the ads started running on Sunday, August 18. One of the Facebook ads addresses Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directly, calling on her to “fly to Hong Kong to see what the true facts are.” Pelosi has been critical of the Chinese government’s suppression of the demonstrators and called Beijing’s actions “cowardly.”

The anti-Pelosi Facebook ad uses viral video from an Australian traveler who was recently inconvenienced at the Hong Kong International Airport. Protesters helped shut down the airport over the course of two days, demanding freedom and apologizing to travelers for disrupting their flights. The Australian traveler, who appears to have given an interview to Chinese state media, told pro-democracy demonstrators they should “get a job” and even said they should “know their place,” though the latter isn’t featured in the Facebook ad.

The Australian traveler also said that “Hong Kong is a part of China,” something that’s controversial because Hong Kong currently operates under a “one country, two systems” arrangement. That arrangement allows Hong Kong to temporarily maintain democratic laws and traditions until the year 2047. That year is obviously well within the lifetimes of many young protesters, and has contributed to the young-old divide in the region. Some elderly Hongkongers have been the most outspoken against the protests, something that becomes clear in the pro-Beijing Facebook ads.

Another Facebook ad from Xinhua claims that Hong Kong’s economy is suffering over the protests and insists that the public wants someone to “restore order.” The ad shows pro-Beijing demonstrators calling for an end to the violence, heavily implying that it’s the protestors who have caused the most harm.

In reality, Hong Kong police have been the ones causing the most violence on the ground, shooting “nonlethal” rounds at point blank range, and firing tear gas regularly into crowds of non-violent protesters. One woman recently lost an eye after being shot by police, leading some allies to wear a bandage over their own eyes in a sign of solidarity. Xinhua’s propaganda video has also been posted to YouTube, though it’s unclear if the propaganda agency is buying paid ads on the platform.

Another propaganda ad from Xinhua focuses on the economic situation in Hong Kong. The ad shows photos of empty shopping malls with a caption that, yet again, calls for “order” to be restored—an ominous declaration from an authoritarian government like China’s, which currently holds anywhere from 800,000 to 3 million Muslims in concentration camps.

Xinhua is also promoting Twitter posts that suggest the violence is being perpetrated by the protesters and claims, again, that “order should be restored.” There’s obviously a pattern to all of this and Beijing wants to control the narrative by insisting that “order” is more important than democratic rights. And it’s no wonder why, with so much money at stake.

Another Chinese state media outlet, CGTN, even posted an embarrassing anti-democracy rap video to Twitter over the weekend that ends with President Donald Trump saying Hong Kong is part of China.

Trump has previously been reluctant to criticize China over its anti-democratic crackdown and now Chinese propagandists are using his own words against the protesters.

The protests in Hong Kong have been raging for eleven weeks now, initially set off by an extradition bill that would have allowed Beijing to snatch so-called criminals from Hong Kong. The big problem, however, is that Hong Kong is a haven for political dissidents and pro-democracy leaders in Asia. The extradition bill has been withdrawn by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, but the protesters want assurances that it won’t be reintroduced.

China’s Xinhua News has been on Facebook since 2012, despite the fact that Facebook is banned in mainland China. Twitter and YouTube are also banned, but the intended audience of these ads is clearly the international community. Protest organizers in Hong Kong have purchased their own ads in international newspapers, according to the Hong Kong Free Press, but it’s not clear whether they’re buying ads online as well.

The print ad, which appeared today in the New York Times and Canada’s Globe and Mail, among others, reads in part:

Amid tear gas and rubber bullets, this once vibrant and safe metropolis is at a crossroads. Since the protests against the controversial extradition bill started in June, Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom have been eroded beyond recognition. This is the ugly truth that the Hong Kong government does not want you to know: Hong Kong is becoming a police state.

Instead of implementing political reform as promised, the Hong Kong government has turned into an apparatus of repression. Police brutality, endorsed by both the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, has now become part of our daily lives.

In the name of public order, the police dehumanize protesters as ‘cockroaches’ and deploy certain anti-riot measures prohibited by international standards. The police also batter passers-by, journalists and medical personnel. Police stations are shut whenever alleged thugs-for-hire indiscriminately attack protesters and ordinary citizens.

Arbitrary arrests and political prosecutions are becoming increasingly common. These are all tactics of the Hong Kong government to intimidate its own people into silence.

Bear witness to Hongkongers’ fight for freedom. Tell our story—especially if we can no longer do it ourselves. Fight For Freedom. Stand With Hong Kong.

It’s not clear how much money Facebook and Twitter are making from the Chinese propaganda ads and the tech giants did not respond to requests for comment this morning. We will update this article if we hear back.

Report: Facebook Content Mods Say Company Therapists Were Pressured to Share Session Details

Adding to an already ridiculously long list of complaints, now Facebook’s content moderators say a higher-up asked company-appointed counselors to share information from their sessions, according to a new report from the Intercept.

Numerous investigations have described this workforce as notoriously underpaid and overworked in crappy working conditions that require them to scan through some of the most disturbing posts the internet can offer. You know, all the things it might behoove someone to see a therapist about.

This most recent criticism comes from a site in Austin, Texas, led by Accenture, an independent contractor Facebook hired to oversee 1,500 of its content moderators. Accenture and Facebook also employ trauma counselors, a.k.a. “wellness coaches,” to help staff cope after screening all that potentially graphic content to judge whether it violates the company’s terms of service.

But while both parties involved in these counseling sessions understood them to be private, a letter written by several whistleblowers claims that Accenture has made several attempts since July to review what was discussed. This letter, published by the Intercept with potentially identifying information redacted, reads in part:

It has come to our attention that an Accenture [manager] pressured a WeCare licensed counselor to divulge the contents of their session with an Accenture employee. The counselor refused, stating confidentiality concerns, but the [manager] pressed on by stating that because this was not a clinical setting, confidentiality did not exist. The counselor again refused. This pressuring of a licensed counselor to divulge confidential information is at best a careless breach of trust into the Wellness program and, at worst, an ethics and possible legal violation.

What exactly this Accenture executive wanted to know isn’t clear, the Intercept reported. The letter calls for this manager’s removal and claims at least one therapist resigned after being pressured to reveal information disclosed during one of these counseling sessions.

An outsourcing manager later told employees that Facebook had conducted an internal investigation into the matter and found “no violation or breach of trust between our licensed counselors and a contracted employee,” per the Intercept, though the incident did prompt the company to “refresh” the team’s “wellness coaches” on what they “can and can’t share.”

When Gizmodo reached out to Facebook about this report, a spokesperson reiterated the same company statement it provided the Intercept, which you can read below:

“All of our partners must provide a resiliency plan that is reviewed and approved by Facebook. This includes a holistic approach to wellbeing and resiliency that puts the needs of their employees first. All leaders and wellness coaches receive training on this employee resource and while we do not believe that there was a breach of privacy in this case, we have used this as an opportunity to reemphasize that training across the organization.”

Accenture also added the following in the report:

“These allegations are inaccurate. Our people’s wellbeing is our top priority and our trust-and-safety teams in Austin have unrestricted access to wellness support. Additionally, our wellness program offers proactive and on-demand counseling and is backed by a strong employee assistance program. Our people are actively encouraged to raise wellness concerns through these programs. We also review, benchmark and invest in our wellness programs on an ongoing basis to create the most supportive workplace environment – regularly seeking input from industry experts, medical professionals and our people.”

After coming under fire for other employee criticisms, Facebook announced in May that it would be improving pay and benefits for a portion of its content moderators. However, a recent Verge article covering a Tampa, Florida site (the same one where an employee purportedly died at his desk) still described a grim and chaotic workplace, indicating—along with this new Intercept report—that Facebook may still be ignoring the root of its moderator problem.

Instagram Boots Ad Partner HYP3R for Reportedly Scraping Huge Amounts of User Data

Instagram has banned one of its owner Facebook’s official marketing partners, San Francisco-based HYP3R, after “a combination of configuration errors and lax oversight” on its behalf allowed HYP3R to scrape massive amounts of data on Instagram users, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.

HYP3R, which has raised tens of millions of dollars in funding, relies on tracking social-media posts tagged in real-world locations, then allowing its marketing clients to interact with the users who uploaded them (say, to address complaints about service) or use that data for targeted advertising purposes. But following the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal at Facebook in early 2018, Instagram began disabling some parts of its API—including location tools. According to Business Insider, while HYP3R publicly supported the decision, it also created tools meant to continue scraping that data in ways that took advantage of Instagram’s sloppy implementation of the API rollbacks and sure look like violations of its terms of service.

Business Insider wrote that HYP3R took “advantage of an Instagram security lapse” that allowed users who were not logged in to view posts from public location pages. Using that access, the company created geofenced locations ranging from stadiums to hotels, harvested “every public post tagged with that location on Instagram,” and stored them indefinitely. It also built a tool to download Instagram Stories, which are supposed to auto-delete after 24 hours, from those locations and similarly store them forever. (In both cases, only users who set their accounts to public would be affected.)

This allowed HYP3R to “build up detailed profiles of huge numbers of people’s movements, their habits, and the businesses they frequent over time,” Business Insider wrote, with sources telling the site that Instagram accounted for over 90 percent of what HYP3R has advertised as a database of “hundreds of millions of the highest value consumers in the world.” But the practice also seemed to be in clear violation of Instagram terms of service forbidding storing content longer than “necessary to provide your app’s service,” as well as a ban on reverse-engineering Instagram’s APIs. Facebook also forbids automated data collection without express written permission. On Tuesday, Instagram sent HYP3R a cease and desist and banned it from its platform. 

Business Insider noted that HYP3R never hid what it was doing, touting its API as allowing more access to data than through official Instagram tools and listing “support for Instagram Stories” in release notes for the iOS version of its app. But Facebook nonetheless included the company on a list of recommended, and supposedly vetted, marketing partners. Business Insider added it is “not clear” how Instagram failed to detect the mass data scraping, which seems to stretch the bounds of credulity given that HYP3R was openly carrying out the practices while holding recommended marketing partner status.

“HYP4R’s actions were not sanctioned and violate our policies,” a spokesperson for Instagram told CNBC in a statement. “As a result, we’ve removed them from our platform. We’ve also made a product change that should help prevent other companies from scraping public location pages in this way.”

HYP3R denies that it violated any Instagram policies.

“Hyp3r is, and has always been, a company that enables authentic, delightful marketing that is compliant with consumer privacy regulations and social network Terms of Services,” Hyp3r CEO Carlos Garcia told CNET. “We do not view any content or information that cannot be accessed publicly by everyone online.”

Even a Country Without Regular Internet Access Doesn't Trust Facebook

Perennially responsible company Facebook announced its intention to launch its own cryptocurrency, called Libra, less than two months ago. In that time a raft of governmental bodies have told Facebook in no uncertain terms to knock it the hell off, including:

• The House Committee on Financial Services
• The Senate Banking Committee
• The Finance Minister of France
• The Secretary of the U.S Treasury
• The Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve

Credit where it’s due: Few things seem to unify our governmental bodies in these divided times quite like telling Facebook to take a flying leap. Perhaps sensing the call towards unity, an international group of privacy regulators today released a joint statement (and a “non-exhaustive list” of questions) expressing their “shared concerns about the privacy risks posed by the Libra digital currency.”

The statement, posted by the UK’s Information Commissioners Office, notes that “many of us in the regulatory community have had to address previous episodes where Facebook’s handling of people’s information has not met the expectations of regulators, or their own users.” Certainly, Zuckbucks—which is also backed by Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal—will have an uphill battle in having to not only satisfy these international IT and banking institutions’ concerns, but also in regaining consumer trust in the often-scammy world of cryptocurrency, and in Facebook itself.

Just how depleted is that trust? The signatories of the statement include usual suspects, like FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra; Giovanni Buttarelli, who oversees data protection for the EU; similarly-titled officials with the UK, Canada, and Australia. And Marguerite Ouedraogo Bonane, the president of the Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties for Burkina Faso.

Wait—Burkina Faso? Teeny, tiny West African country Burkina Faso? Burkina Faso that, unless public education in the U.S. has dramatically improved since my time in high school, almost no U.S.-based readers of this article could identify on a map? Yes, the very same. This is not to dunk on Burkina Faso or any other small Francophone nation, for that matter. What’s incredible is that a country where only around 3 percent of its population has regular internet access knows enough about Facebook to trust absolutely nothing it touches.

If you’d like to know where to direct your gratitude, Burkina Faso is here:

Facebook Will Attach Its Name to Instagram and WhatsApp, for Some Reason

Incredible. Despite a seemingly endless wave of ongoing public relations crises for Facebook, the social media giant appears prepared to foist its baggage onto two of its considerably less troubled subsidiaries—WhatsApp and Instagram—by attaching its name to their companies.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Information reported Thursday that Facebook is looking to rebrand the two apps by renaming them “Instagram from Facebook” and “WhatsApp from Facebook,” a format it already uses for its collaboration tool Workplace. The rebrand will be visible when users sign into the applications and on app store displays, according to the report, and presumably elsewhere. What could go wrong?!

The move comes as the result of Mark Zuckerberg’s frustration that his social media site hasn’t been given more props for the success of the companies, according to the Information, which sounds about right given what we know about Facebook’s big boy CEO. In a statement, Facebook spokeswoman Bertie Thomson told the Information that the company wants “to be clearer about the products and services that are part of Facebook.”

This is, of course, an almost comically bad decision on the part of Facebook and I imagine also terrible news for its so-called “family of apps.”

Instagram and WhatsApp—perhaps the former more so than the latter—have largely managed to sidestep some of the associative fallout from Facebook’s colossal mountain of bullshit, be it related to antitrust investigations, privacy concerns, security issues, or some as-yet-to-be-uncovered blunder.

And sure, a good percentage of consumers certainly realize that these apps are owned by a company that has yet to prove it can handle even a modicum of its own power. But adding such an explicit link between Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp certainly won’t be doing either any favors.

Man, and to think there was a time when influencer sponcon seemed like an Instagram death knell.

How Did This Egg Get 'Bigger Than Before'?

This 5-minute craft is perhaps among the best things on Facebook today. But, like many things on Facebook, it’s not quite right. So, it’s time we learn some elementary school science.

Chicken eggs, the container and food inside of which chicks develop, are cased in a calcium carbonate shell, where calcium carbonate is a common mineral found in rocks and throughout the natural world. Vinegar, on the other hand, contains acetic acid. When the two mix, the carbonate takes up the hydrogen ions from the acetic acid and becomes carbonic acid, which breaks down into carbon dioxide and water.

If you actually perform this experiment, you’ll notice two things: First, it produces bubbles from the carbon dioxide, and two, it might take longer than one day for all of the egg’s shell to undergo the reaction. I think when we did this experiment in elementary school we waited two or three days.

What’s left from this reaction is just a membrane layer with no shell. You’ll notice that the egg hasn’t changed. Puncture the membrane and you’ll be left with a puddle of raw egg. But the egg will indeed be “bigger than before,” as water from the vinegar passes through the membrane into the egg, which has a lower water concentration. It’s called osmosis.

The video then instructs you to put the egg into maple syrup and then, after a day, it will be “bigger than before.” I assume whatever syrup they used was also high in water, which is why it got even bigger than before. Typically when you (or any other YouTube scientists) run this experiment, the syrup has less water, so water then leaves the shell-less egg via osmosis and you’re left with a shriveled-up mass.

Facebook’s Broken Ad Archive Is Working as Intended

Facebook’s cash cow is its ad business, and in the unconstrained pursuit of making that business as valuable as possible, the company has been accused of allowing advertisers to explicitly target white nationalists, or exclude immigrants and people of color from seeing housing opportunities, or dodge older workers when posting job listings. There was also that whole Russia thing. So Facebook built an ad archive—first just for political spending, then for everything—and folks, it does exactly what it was designed to do.

Employees at Mozilla, government workers with Office of the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs, and data journalists the New York Times reported today that, despite using what’s designed to be a more robust, non-public version of the ad library, Facebook’s Ad Archive does not meet even the barest needs of these researchers, with the product failing in ways that would be humiliating for a company the fraction of Facebook’s size.

Per the Times, Facebook put on the charade of making the data available, but create a process so difficult in extracting the information as to rending it useless:

With each search limited to 2,000 results, the researchers needed to do 1,900 searches to collect all the data

[Mozilla researchers managed] to download the information they needed on only two days [worth of ads] in a six-week span because of bugs and technical issues

With the relatively lousy internet speeds in the U.S., six weeks is long enough to download the entire Library of Congress—about 23 times over.

These are not hard problems to solve for a firm with the engineering pool and brain trust of Facebook. But the prevailing assumption is that Facebook is in any way interested in making the Ads Archive functional.

Jason Chuang, a Mozilla researcher, engaged in a lengthy back-and-forth with Facebook about a bug that crashed a search after 59 pages of results. Weeks later, a Facebook representative sent a message saying, “This is unfortunately a won’t fix for now.” [...] as recently as this week, the researchers said the library still crashed when they tried to check if the bug was fixed.

But let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the big, awful company that’s lied to us repeatedly: An archive of your core business function can’t be easy, and all software has issues early on. At least, as issues arose, the researchers could file bug reports.

On two other occasions, the researchers said Facebook blocked them from reporting fresh bugs. The reason? They had already reported too many.

 So it has some issues. And the Ad Archive isn’t exactly priority #1 at Facebook HQ. But when it returns results, researchers can trust that—

[Researchers] found that identical searches often returned different results

Oh.

So maybe its “searchability” was overstated, but at least it preserves this content and in doing so fulfills the basic function of an archive.

The French officials also found that Facebook sometimes removed ads without explanation. They said 31 percent of the ads in the French library were removed in the week before the European elections, including at least 11 that violated French electoral law.

Tools—functioning tools—to glean rich data about these ads already existed, built by Mozilla and ProPublica among others. Facebook made the intentional move to shut them out in January, claiming the code changes that locked out these tools were part of “a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plug-ins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”