should be prosecuted like loitering. Be real, be transparent, or get lost.

These are very sophisticated operations paid for by some of the most unscrupulous oligarchs and plutocrats around.

The sad part is the people being paid to do it are nothing but tools for the machine and they could be applying their talents so much better in such greater ways.

They are just trying to make it look like they are doing something, they will do NOTHING!

...but it's still good that those accounts were removed. Part of the problem is that using your FB account to promote Trump is perfectly fine and permissible, but how can FB know whether you're expressing your personal politics or whether you're a state-sponsored bot sowing misinformation? And where is the line between fake accounts spreading misinformation and real FB users spreading the same misleading information? In this case FB could make the reasonable assumption that accounts and groups fronted by fake, CGI generated photos are more likely to be bogus than those bearing pictures of real people, but finding them is still hard.

I think FB is inherently dangerous for precisely that reason. It is an ideal platform for uploading lies directly into the consciousness of its users. I stopped watching television decades ago because I was (and still am) concerned about its capacity to serve up serious information control and behavior modification wrapped in a veneer of entertainment that taps directly into the visual cortex. Cough, cough, *Fox News*, cough. Now I'm beginning to think FB is even worse. It exploits different information pathways: tribalism, self-perceived persecution, and irrational outrage far more effectively than the squawking box*. We have seen that social media has the capacity to foster violence, sectarianism, social unrest, war, and revolution. It creates dangerous echo chambers where the rhetoric inevitably escalates toward "us against them" outrage.

You can make the argument that DU and similar forums are echo chambers as well, where the predispositions of members make it easy to herd and mislead them. Stay away from DU for a couple of years and then begin reading it again as an outsider might. It's eye opening.

I think the capacity of modern social media to subvert the truth is one of the greatest challenges we face in the coming years. How can we prevent increasingly unproductive polarization in a world that's deeply plugged in to polarizing content?

*edit: I'm showing my age. Nowadays it's more likely the squawking screen.

Marginalize these freaks. Isolate them. Quarantine.

do with this.

900 out of 9 million.