Elections and Media

President Donald Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media may be rooted in statistical reality: An extensive review of subscription data and election results shows that Trump outperformed the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, in counties with the lowest numbers of news subscribers, but didn't do nearly as well in areas with heavier circulation. There's  a clear correlation between low subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Hillary Clinton and when compared to Romney in 2012.

Facebook announced it had suspended AggregateIQ (AIQ) from its platform following reports the company may be connected to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL..

When Mark Zuckerberg testifies to Congress the week of April 9, the Facebook chief executive will face off with lawmakers who have long been itching to confront him – on everything from a privacy mishap involving 87 million users to a litany of issues that have dogged the company for years. Zuckerberg’s scheduled appearance at two congressional hearings marks the first time that the tech leader will submit to questioning at the Capitol.

Facebook trumpeted the deletion of hundreds of pages and accounts run by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked troll army that has sought to meddle in U.S. politics. But of the five examples of deleted accounts Facebook provided the public, two had links to the troll army that should have been obvious to the social networking company months ago.

[Commentary] The inescapable, overwhelming and disorienting flurry of activity of news, which has become the new normal since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, begs two simple but profound questions: Can democracy survive information overload? And can it survive a president who knows how to use the resulting chaos to dodge democratic accountability?

Facebook will soon require political- and issues-based ads to receive verification before they’re served to users on the platform. The company said it will require advertisers to confirm the identity and location of the media buy before an ad runs. Additional changes will include requiring verification of people who manage large pages to make it harder to run pages from fake accounts, like the ones Facebook found operated by Russian operatives leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

Amid growing pressure to remove bad actors from Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would likely release more information about problematic content posted to the service during elections. But to ensure the accuracy of the data, Zuckerberg said, the reports will likely come after the elections are over. The move could help government officials, academic researchers, and concerned citizens understand whether Facebook’s increased attention to abuse is working — but the timing could make it harder for grasp what’s happening when it arguably matters most.

For years, Congress and federal regulators have allowed the world’s largest social network to police itself — with disastrous results. Here are four promising reforms under discussion in Washington: 

1. Impose Fines for Data Breaches
2. Police Political Advertising
3. Make Tech Companies Liable for Objectionable Content
4. Install Ethics Review Boards

In Dec 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration.