Hi guys.

Not sure if you guys have noticed this, but recently there's been a huge influx of fake accounts commenting on news articles in Malaysia.

Most recently, consider this Kini opinion piece about the recent visit from the Taliban.




Just look at the people who are commenting their accounts and the people who like the comments.

The accounts are invariably accounts with fake Al profile pictures, and they are locked.

The comments are all of a particular political leaning, and if you look at the sheer number of likes, on average Malaysiakini article comments don't receive such a large number of likes in the course of less than an hour and clearly, if you look at this, you will see that there is manipulation.

I think that always has been, but recently it has escalated like crazy.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Have a look at a sample at the link and down below and you will see multiple instances of this fake account usage.
There are at least fifteen fake accounts here - Eddie Azman, Fakri Nazri, Izzue Ashraf, Faizal Kamaruddin, Ikhwan Hakim, Ikhwan Fauzi, Dani Daniel, Khairul Ashraf, Azmir Ismail, Harith Iskandar, Fendi Akmal, etc amongst others.








If you guys could also help me with mass reporting these people to Facebook and MCMC that would be amazing!

Consider going to https://aduan.mcmc.gov.my to do so and clicking ‘report’ on their accounts.

Thanks!
V

This post has been edited by Exoflare: Nov 25 2024, 04:38 PM

Can be multiple computers and multiple people coordinating together rather than just one single individual.

They are 100% fake accounts. There are more than 15 of them. I’m also not seeing why what you’re saying is even tangentially related to what I said.

Hi! Let me answer the success rate of reporting part – my next response is going to be quite long. I have had success in reaching the minister of communications and also have had success in reaching MCMC hotlines to have content taken down and also escalated to law enforcement.

As a matter of fact, minister Fahmi once assisted me in removing the account of a local Malay extremist, which was encouraging. MCMC can be a little bit slow in acting, though, but if you do report, then typically they have a cost to take action, and your report will add to the bank of reasons as to why it is that they need to take action.

Let me now talk about the idea of fake accounts.

If we want to be really technical about it, the term fake account doesn't really make sense and we need to actually break it down.

Rather than speak about whether an account is fake or is real in terms of existence, it makes more sense to think of what is real or is fake in terms of its behaviour: All accounts exist, but not all accounts represent the people that they claim to be, and I claim that what we would typically call a fake account is an account that's associated with a particular behaviour pattern that Facebook itself has mentioned, that is called inauthentic behaviour.

Here is the original report:

https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/202...ort-Q2-2022.pdf

What is Inauthentic Behavior? Inauthentic behavior (IB), as detailed in our Community Standards, is an effort to mislead people or Facebook about the popularity of content, the purpose of a community (i.e. Groups, Pages, Events) or the identity of the people behind it. It is primarily centered around amplifying and increasing the distribution of content, and is often (but not exclusively) financially motivated.

It is most accurate to describe what's happening here with these accounts as what Facebook calls CIB, or Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior.

Facebook says of Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) the following:

“We view CIB as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal, in which fake accounts are central to the operation. In each case, people coordinate with one another and use fake accounts to mislead others about who they are and what they are doing. When we investigate and remove these operations, we focus on behavior rather than content — no matter who's behind them, what they post or whether they're foreign or domestic.”

Based on what I can see, the behaviour pattern of these accounts is to do two main things.

First, they repeatedly comment on contentious posts across news sites, such as recently the signboard issue, and recently the visit from the Taliban to the Education Ministry.

From there, they start structuring a narrative by criticising specific individuals, almost always in association with a political party.

For example, they will go around repeatedly criticising DAP, as they have done with Tiong King Sing, Anthony Loke, etc.

The second thing that they do is that they like one another's comments, and so they end up creating the impression of mass engagement, because sometimes there can be more than 10 likes in the course of 10 minutes for a comment on an article or something.

The result of these two things is that whenever anyone visits Facebook and views the article, they will see that there is a large number of likes or engagements on the bot's comments, creating the impression that a huge number of people are against DAP or whatever it is that the bots are trying to target.

Now, for the idea of fake accounts once again, the fake accounts, as I'd call them, misleads people about who is actually behind the account by putting in a name that is not guaranteed to actually be owned by the original person, and in any case cannot be verified in the same way that a social media profile of a real person can be, and an AI-generated profile picture is placed there as well, which further obfuscates things, because AI-generated profile pictures have a similarity to reality that you might not notice if you don't look close up - the thing is that they also lock their accounts so you can't really zoom in on the profile picture, so it's easy for you to mistake them for something else.

Anyway, that's how I use the idea of a fake account, or how I understand it. I think it's a really huge threat to Malaysia, and I really hope that something can be done about it. :/

Your argument is plausible, but ultimately if you inspect it, you realize that it doesn't make sense.

First of all, you assume that the reason I didn't respond is because I have a favorite political party. The problem is, you have no idea what my favorite political party is. Didn’t catch that did you?

You didn't bother to check, and perhaps you have a motive in claiming that the reason I'm opposing this is purely because I disagree with the current action.

My opposing this does not involve opposing democracy. Because what I'm trying to do is to stop massive groups of AI bots from swaying the narrative in general. And it doesn't matter whether they are for BN, for DAP, for PH, or for PAS/Bersatu because it is wrong either way but your low quality critical thinking skills, it seems, would have us believe that opposing any threat to Malaysia is an attempt at ‘curtailing democracy’.

I’m not surprised that Malaysia is a weak nation given people like you.

This in turn makes me wonder if you are associated with the current manipulation operation or if you are just an overly woke yapper who likes to think that he is plucked out from the matrix and is now super special. Because he has watched a few dramas and can now say that there is no good or evil.

Well, stop watching The Dark Knight multiple times and come back to reality because the current situation is materially different. And regardless of the political party that is in charge of this, or if not political party then individual or organization, it is something that needs to be stopped.

Stop downplaying things just because you're too tuned in to being a member of the woke class, please. Reality is now in session and the Malaysian people are being manipulated.

I'm not completely sure where you're trying to go with your comment and frankly I don’t understand most of it in the way that it is written, but thanks for the effort in reading through all of the Meta threat reports.

To focus us back, yes, the main point is this.

Legitimate criticism of the government is quite possible and in fact should be encouraged and I engage in a fair bit of it. However, there is an agency or entity or group of disgruntled individuals who are going out on Malaysian social media and using fake voices in order to discredit the government and doing so on a mass scale that showcases that it is organized and also is fake in that the names and identities of the individuals involved are likely fabricated.

This is not legitimate criticism. It is large scale deception and it doesn’t matter which political party or entity it comes from - it should be stopped.

P.S. Legitimate criticism is not particularly hard to do so given the wonderful activities that our our great leader has recently been taking part in and his refusal to step in in the constellation of contentious matters that have come up under his administration, namely sockgate, Israelgate, sijilgate, and now signboardgate.

Not too different from how wars have come up during the Biden and Harris administration and one of the reasons that I recently made this video:

The Disturbing Similarities of Anwar Ibrahim and Kamala Harris
https://youtu.be/oswxzyrdlvw