Tag Archives: coordinated inauthentic behavior

Weekly output: Streaming video vs. ISPs, streaming-TV advice, Twitter takedowns

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In an alternate universe, this week would have seen two opening days: the Nationals home game and the year’s first mowing of the lawn. Opening Day has yet to happen, but at least our yard looks a lot nicer, especially after some obsessive weeding this weekend.

Patreon members got an extra this week: my calculations about finally replacing my aging iMac with a now-slightly-less-expensive Mac mini.

3/30/2020: Relax: Netflix binging won’t kill broadband during the COVID-19 crisis, Fast Company

Beyond talking to the usual bandwidth experts about the odds of our connectivity crumpling under all the new work-from-home traffic, I also quizzed people at three small Internet providers that don’t have the resources of a Comcast to deal with a flood of traffic.

4/1/2020: Streaming Services: A U.S. News Guide, U.S. News & World Report

U.S. News contributor Rudi Greenberg interviewed me for this cheat sheet about TV cord cutting.

4/2/2020: Twitter takedowns, Al Jazeera

I appeared via Skype on the Arabic-language news channel to talk about Twitter’s latest takedowns of networks of state-run sockpuppet accounts. I hope my key point came across in overdubbed Arabic: Twitter’s problem is what while it’s learned to catch these influence operations, it can’t catch them as fast as its trending-topics algorithm can boost some of their output.

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Weekly output: Facebook customer dissatisfaction, Facebook meddling in the Middle East (x3)

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Tuesday has me departing for Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEF CON information-security conferences, aka Hacker Summer Camp. In addition to the usual risk of getting pwned, this year I and other attendees will also have to deal with a plague of grasshoppers.

Yahoo Facebook ACSI post7/30/2019: Study shows Facebook’s customer-satisfaction scores plunging, Yahoo Finance

A new survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed people’s contentment with Facebook plummeting to depths you could call Comcastic–except the cable company still rated lower in ACSI research earlier this year. If this post seems somewhat familiar, you may remember me writing up a similar set of ASCI findings in 2010. The issue of what we’ve learned about Facebook in the intervening years is left as an exercise for the reader.

8/1/2019: Facebook catches meddling from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on air live–twice in this day–to talk about Facebook’s announcement that it had booted hundreds of accounts and pages run out of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” its phrase for disinformation campaigns.

8/2/2019: Facebook catches meddling from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Al Jazeera

Saudi Arabia misbehaving on social media put the Qatari network into flood-the-zone mode–not difficult to understand, given the enmity between the kingdom and Qatar–and so AJ had me on for a second day in a row to talk about this story. If you don’t care about Gulf politics, please consider that the Facebook-meddling move here of impersonating local news sources could work in the many U.S cities and towns now starved for local news coverage.