Amid George Floyd protests, weaponized misinformation floods social media

Bouquets of colorful flowers and prayer candles rest on the door of a small guard cabin with windows in downtown Oakland, California. A ribbon with a motif of the American flag is waving from the door handle. Two bullet holes mark the cabin windows.

Here, 53-year-old Dave Patrick Underwood was fatally shot at 9.45 p.m. on Friday while working as a contract security officer for the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The shootout, which seriously injured another DHS security officer, took place just a few blocks from where thousands of demonstrators had gathered to protest George Floyd’s murder. The 46-year-old unarmed black man died after a white policeman pinched a knee on his neck for almost 9 minutes. The official was charged with murder. Underwood was African American like Floyd.

First news about Underwood’s shots linked the incident to the protests. As is so often the case, the guess on Twitter and other social media sites ran away from the changing facts on the ground. Already on Friday evening, the Oakland Police Department sent a warning to reporters The shootout did not appear to have anything to do with the demonstrations that night. And the FBI never linked the two to the press in their statements. It confirmed to CNET that Underwood had died in a drive-by shooting, but declined to comment further as the investigation is ongoing.

The FBI’s report seemed too late for Twitter. Hashtags such as #PatrickUnderwood and #JusticeForPatrickUnderwood had already started to set trends based on reports that Underwood was “murdered” by demonstrators and “rioters”. The connection with the Oakland protesters, true or not, had already spread – to the White House.

Misinformation on social media is nothing new. Russian agents tried to influence the 2016 US presidential election with splitting tweets and Facebook posts. Message Board Chatter via “Pizza gate“A conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and others falsely accused of having a child’s sex ring in a restaurant resulted in gunfire in Washington, DC. Hoaxes, often disguised as legitimate news, have emerged thanks to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as 4chan, 8kun and other anonymous message boards.

However, the inability of social media to contain the explosion of misinformation is becoming more pressing as peaceful demonstrators fight the perception that all demonstrations have turned into looting and violence. Twitter’s role in distributing real-time, unchecked messages makes Twitter particularly vulnerable to tampering. In recent days, in addition to false tweets about protesters responsible for Underwood’s death, other false theories have spread, including an internet blackout in Washington, DC, and the far-right militant group Antifa, which sends protesters to riot in Cities around the world cause US. And if Facebook achieves something with over 2.6 billion active users per month, it is difficult to counteract this.

“It is very important that both platforms do it right, not just one or the other,” said Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University. “We need both.”

In a speech on Monday, President Donald Trump said the nation was “gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa and others” and painted a grim picture of the mostly peaceful protests that have swelled more than 140 cities across the country. Trump raised Underwood.

“A federal official in California, an African-American law enforcement hero, was shot,” he said. “These are not peaceful acts of protest. These are acts of domestic terror.”

Even though misinformation has appeared on social media that allows critics of the protests to create their own representation of the demonstrations, the platforms continue to serve a different purpose. The organizers also relied on the websites – especially Twitter – to coordinate demonstrations and to exchange important updates on site. Journalists use it to report developments, and citizens follow them to find out what’s happening in their cities. However, some people have used the widespread use of social media to create confusion among demonstrators.

Twitter says it is trying to address this issue.

“We are taking proactive measures in coordinated attempts to disrupt public conversation on the subject,” said a Twitter spokeswoman. “For example, we’re actively investigating the #dcblackout hashtag, and we’ve already blocked hundreds of spam accounts tweeting the hashtag during the process.”

The spokeswoman also said that Twitter “may” prevent certain content – such as racial-related issues – from being trending.

Facebook, for its part, said in a statement that its teams “have been working to find and remove violent activity since the protests began. We use automated detection systems, verify facts, reduce content distribution, and remove content that violates our policies. “

Facebook pays an army of fact-checkers to review potentially problematic posts, but Twitter doesn’t have this type of workforce. It tends to rely on machines even though people make big decisions. And while there is sometimes a warning sign tapping on a tweet, as was the case with several Trump posts recently, a lot of misinformation just flows through the site unaffected.

“It doesn’t matter who or where it comes from,” said Maddy Webb, an investigative researcher at First Draft, an organization that tracks and combats online misinformation. “There is such an erosion of trust that we really decimated this platform, which is very valuable to the organization.”

Spreading misinformation

The hashtag #DCblackout spread on Twitter early Monday morning. It referred to a fake story that said the riots would not make social media accessible in the city. When the hashtag spread, the Claims became wilder – that phones and other means of communication were blocked and the police replaced rubber bullets with gunpowder.

On Monday afternoon, the hashtag had almost 1 million mentions, according to NPR.

Netblocks, a group that tracks internet disruptions and shutdowns, followed the tweets about #DCblackout and monitored network traffic in real time. There was never instability in the links, indicating that the rumor was not true.

“Facts Check”, NetBlocks tweeted On Monday. “Washington, D.C. had no city-wide blackout.”

In a rapidly evolving environment, such as the protests surrounding Floyd’s death, incorrect information can overwhelm Twitter. On Sunday alone, Black Lives Matter, Floyd, and the protests against his death were mentioned 21.2 million times in all media, including Twitter, according to Zignal Labs. As of May 25, there have been over 101 million mentions, the media intelligence company said. Some of this information is armed to match people’s political agendas.

A common joke is that Antifa is behind the country’s more violent protests and that it brought protesters to mostly white neighborhoods to ransack homes and businesses.

Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, said a study of tweets surrounding the protests showed that essentially no one had used the Antifa hashtag. Instead, according to Carley and her team, they are mainly bots from May 25th to Sunday. She estimates that 30% to 49% of users who post about the protests are likely to be machines, not people. That doesn’t mean everyone publishes inaccurate information, but it does help create confusion, she said. (Twitter hasn’t said how many bots are involved in the last tweets, however Some social media experts have contested the numbers.)

Just turning off all bots isn’t the answer, she said. Many spread helpful messages such as earthquake warnings.

“Disinformation is sometimes really hard to spot,” said Carley. “Based on the hashtags, [bots are] More [often] to make the protests a political issue about things other than Black Lives Matter or other than George Floyd. “

While not using antifa hashtags, Trump tweeted about the activists, calling them a terrorist organization, and blaming them for the country’s protests. In the past week, people have posted similar feelings on Facebook more than 6,000 times The New York Times. And these contributions amounted to more than 1.3 million likes and shares, it said in the newspaper on Monday.

The widespread scrutiny and social media chaos are causing both Twitter and Facebook to respond.

Social media response

Last week, Twitter did something that had never been seen on its website before: It Label two tweets from President Trumpand warned that they contained “possibly misleading information about voting processes”. A few days later, Twitter also hid a Trump night tweet behind a label, saying it violated corporate rules on “glorifying violence.”

“When the looting begins, the shootings begin,” Trump tweeted, using a sentence from a Miami police chief in the 1960s that is widely viewed as a violent threat to protesters.

Facebook meanwhile took a rather uncomplicated approach. The social networking giant that makes a lot of money with political ads (something that Twitter forbids on its website), left a similar contribution from Trump. In response, Facebook employees held a rare protestand some said they would stop working for the company. Online therapy company Talkspace too ended the partnership discussion with Facebook because the startup “will not support a platform that encourages violence, racism and lies,” says founder Oren Frank.

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Trump in turn struck back. On Thursday, he signed an executive order requiring a reinterpretation of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The law, which guarantees freedom of speech on technical platforms, describes online companies such as Facebook and Twitter as “distributors” rather than “distributors”. Content publisher. This prevents them from being sued for every negative rating or comment on their websites. However, many experts say that Trump’s command is largely symbolic and unenforceable.

“When Section 230 was manufactured, nobody thought of trying to moderate the President of the United States,” said Syracuse’s Grygiel. “You are still struggling with it.”

As a rule, fact checkers ask social media to take some steps to combat misinformation. They suggest moderating the content and removing the retweet and share buttons, which would make it more difficult to spread fake information quickly.

In the event of protests, these strategies are unlikely to work, First Draft’s Webb says. While retweeting and sharing information can quickly spread misinformation, these tools are also critical to coordinating protesters. And during the protests, too much information is flowing for the social media websites to moderate without compromising freedom of speech and possibly marking accurate information as wrong. It could be difficult to establish fair removal guidelines, she said.

“We know that this type of policy targets people who don’t already have a lot of opportunity to speak,” said Webb.

If Twitter and Facebook can’t find a way to check themselves, it may be up to their users to be more careful about what information they share and believe. That means doing things like reverse image search and waiting before something is immediately retweeted, she added. Finally, companies could face increased government regulation.

While Twitter tries to cross the line between freedom of speech and containment of misinformation, Underwood’s name is still used to capture a narrative. Meanwhile, his friends and family try to remember the man who lost his life on Friday evening.

The federal building where Underwood worked is still cordoned off. On the makeshift memorial at the guard station where he died is a piece of paper with his picture and a link to a GoFundMe website for donations for his family. Underwood’s sister and cousin did not respond to requests for comments.

“Two of our federal contract officers were assaulted in an act of violent cowardice,” wrote Underwood’s superior and colleague Jennifer Tong on the fundraising website. “I have worked side by side with both men and I cannot describe the pain that we feel as brothers in arms.”

CNET’s Alfred Ng, Andrew Morse and Queenie Wong contributed to this report.