Subtle Censorship via Adversarial Fakeness in Kyrgyzstan

With the shift of public discourse to social media, we see simultaneously an expansion of civic engagement as the bar to enter the conversation is lowered, and the reaction by both state and non-state adversaries of free speech to silence these voices. Traditional forms of censorship struggle in this new situation to enforce the preferred narrative of those in power. Consequently, they have developed new methods for controlling the conversation that use the social media platform itself. Using the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan as a main case study, this talk explores how this new form of "subtle" censorship relies on pretence and imitation, and why interdisciplinary methods of research are needed to grapple with it. We examine how "fakeness" in the form of fake news and profiles is used as methods of subtle censorship.Comment: Accepted HotPETs talk, 201

Thinking Taxonomically about Fake Accounts: Classification, False Dichotomies, and the Need for Nuance

It is often said that war creates a fog in which it becomes difficult to discern friend from foe on the battlefield. In the ongoing war on fake accounts, conscious development of taxonomies of the phenomenon has yet to occur, resulting in much confusion on the digital battlefield about what exactly a fake account is. This paper intends to address this problem, not by proposing a taxonomy of fake accounts, but by proposing a systematic way to think taxonomically about the phenomenon. Specifically, we examine fake accounts through both a combined philosophical and computer science-based perspective. Through these lenses, we deconstruct narrow binary thinking about fake accounts, both in the form of general false dichotomies and specifically in relation to the Facebook's conceptual framework "Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" (CIB). We then address the false dichotomies by constructing a more complex way of thinking taxonomically about fake accounts