Daily Digest 2/20/2018 (Russian Meddling)

Benton Foundation

Elections

For Tech Giants, Halting Russian Meddling in US Politics Won’t Be Easy

The US indictment handed up against three Russian companies and 13 individuals shows starkly how ill-prepared the tech giants were for the type of aggressive influence campaign the Russians allegedly mounted. The details also suggest it won’t be easy to stop such tactics in the run-up to the midterm election in less than nine months, say researchers who study social media. Facebook, Google parent Alphabet, and Twitter have more than 100,000 employees and $150 billion in annual revenue combined. But a group of fewer than 100 Russian provocateurs armed with social-media savvy and widely available technological tools was able to manipulate the companies’ platforms to sow discord for years, according to the indictment. It isn’t yet clear if the technology companies will put the effort required into solving Russia’s manipulation problem, but a solution is possible, said Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard University professor who has studied the role of deceptive advertising in technology. “We put a man on the moon, and we’ve got cars that drive themselves,” he said. “I do believe that we can build business processes supported by software that identify ads that demand further review.”

On Russia, Facebook Sends a Message It Wishes It Hadn’t

Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, posted a series of messages on Twitter that were meant to clear up misconceptions about Facebook’s role in the election. Instead, he plunged the company deeper into controversy. “Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election,” Goldman tweeted. “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.” He continued, “The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump [sic] and the election.” Goldman was tweeting only for himself, but his comments, which drew praise from other Facebook executives on Twitter, were an unusually candid statement that flouted Facebook’s well-sculpted messaging strategy, which has generally been to stay as far away from partisan debates as possible. Goldman eventually walked back some of his statements, but it was too late. He had just given President Donald Trump something that looked like a Facebook-stamped exoneration. Now, Facebook is in the uncomfortable position of reining in an off-message executive, while clarifying that it didn’t mean to bolster the president’s position.

The Facebook Armageddon

As bad as scraping for advertising revenue might be, there’s another way the Facebook threat could actually get worse: Instead of continuing to be a primary platform for news companies and trying to strike relationships with them, the company could decide to simply wash its hands of news entirely, either because it isn’t generating enough revenue, or because it has become too much of a political headache. To really come to grips with what its size and influence have wrought both in journalism and society at large, Facebook is going to have to not only change its outlook but also its culture. But is that even possible at this stage? Can a company that became a $500 billion colossus by thinking in one way start to think in a different way? In a way, Facebook is like a band of revolutionaries who don’t know what to do once they manage to topple the dictator and actually become the government. And we are all living in the world that they have created for us, whether we like it or not.

How Unwitting Americans Encountered Russian Operatives Online

Tweaking a global source of news

Content

Lawmakers worry about rise of fake video technology

Lawmakers are concerned that advances in video manipulation technology could set off a new era of fake news. Now legislators say they want to start working on fixes to the problem before it’s too late. Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of the most vocal members of Congress on tech issues, painted a grim pictureabout what the advances could mean for the future of discerning truth in media.  “Since we can't rely on the responsibility of individual actors or the platforms they use, I fully expect there will be a proliferation of these sorts of fictions to a degree that nearly drowns out actual facts,” Sen Wyden said. "For those who value real information, there will still be some reliable publications and news outlets, and their credibility will need to be guarded all the more intently by professional journalists,” he added.

After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced (New York Times)

Government and Communications

When Trump goes global

[Commentary] The hope of the Arab Spring has been realized: Now that anyone can publish anything from anywhere, it is impossible for even the most determined despot to jail every journalist and critic. But even as the most ruthless dictators are realizing the world has changed, they are quickly learning a new method for dismissing dissent and turning the guerrilla media techniques back on the guerrillas. Their instructor: Donald J. Trump, president of the United States. He was trained by his mentor, the McCarthy hearings lawyer Roy Cohn, to relentlessly discredit his enemies, by NBC in the reality television art of manipulating the truth into a lie and reselling it as the truth, and by the New York Post and Twitter in coining a viral phrase. In 2016 he emerged as the perfect pioneer for not just discrediting inconvenient voices, but leaving them paralyzed with rage and confusion. [Ravi Somaiya has been a correspondent for HBO’s Vice News Tonight and covered the media and breaking news for The New York Times.]

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