‘Stop Fake Hate Profiles on Facebook’: Challenges for crowdsourced activism on social media

Abstract

This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation.

Sweden then vs. Sweden now

“…Collectively these studies have revealed how social media platforms create, to varying extent, enclaves within which overt or covert far-right discourses and the sorts of hate-speech underlying them can intensify, while simultaneously providing entry points to broader digitally networked audiences that allow the greater acceptance and normalisation of those same discourses (Farkas and Neumayer, 2017;Merrill and Åkerlund, 2018;Chaudhry and Gruzd, 2020). Social media platforms are thus not just neutral platforms on which racism is expressed, covertly or otherwise.…”

IRA Propaganda on Twitter

“…For scholars and journalists, such propaganda poses considerable challenges due to the difficulty of establishing authorship. Social media companies have so far been hesitant to provide support for such investigations, while offering extensive anonymity for content producers and handling abusive content by simply removing it [10]. This has led to a scenario in which little research has been carried out on the topic.…”

“…Disguised human-driven accounts can neither easily be found nor traced back to an original source or controller. Furthermore, potential identification of accounts require collaboration with social media companies, which are reluctant to provide such support [10]. Within the scope of this study, Twitter has released a list of 2752 deleted accounts identified as operated by the IRA.…”

“…It is difficult to establish the identity of disguised social media accounts [9,10] and their country of origin [7]. While social bots can be identified based on traces of computer automation, disguised human-driven accounts can be difficult to recognize, as they do not display features clearly associated with automation.…”

“…There are important epistemological issues that need to be taken into consideration within this line of inquiry and the specifics of the data being analyzed [10]. This is particularly the case of information potentially designed to induce a state of psychological warfare [15].…”