Elections and Media

Two top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are questioning former national security adviser Susan Rice about an "unusual" message she sent to herself on Jan 20, 2017 — President Donald Trump's Inauguration Day. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) questioned Rice about why she sent a note detailing a conversation she observed on Jan. 5 between then-FBI Director James Comey and then-President Barack Obama.

Researcher and technologist Aviv Ovadya, one of the first to identify the fake news catastrophe in early 2016, says he is worried about an “Information Apocalypse,” which could lead to “reality apathy,” or people just giving up on finding the truth because it is too indistinguishable from misinformation. Critics continue to explore the adverse impacts of automated content and platform abuse:

This is the story of the two years [at Facebook since the runup to the 2016 election], as they played out inside and around the company. Wired spoke with 51 current or former Facebook employees for this article. The stories varied, but most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege.

British lawmakers grilled Silicon Valley social media giants over the presence of “fake news” and Russian influence on their platforms in Washington (DC).  The British parliament members asked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube representatives pointed questions during a special US hearing over how hoax content disseminated from their websites may have swayed the 2016 British "Brexit" referendum on leaving the European Union.   The tech representatives downplayed those concerns, citing internal data they said found that accounts linked to Russians did not heavily use their platforms in the same w

The US official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several US states prior to the 2016 presidential election. Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated."

YouTube is the new television, with more than 1.5 billion users, and videos the site recommends have the power to influence viewpoints around the world. Those recommendations often present divisive, misleading or false content despite changes the site has recently made to highlight more-neutral fare. People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012, the site says. Behind that growth is an algorithm that creates personalized playlists.

US lawmakers examining the role of social media in elections plan to meet with counterparts from the UK the week of Feb 5. Apparently, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) would meet with British Members of Parliament Damian Collins and Paul Farrelly, who are on the committee looking into social media platforms across the Atlantic.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) says Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president.

At the center of the firestorm over a congressional memo that President Trump and his allies say reveals federal authorities’ missteps is a 40-year-old law passed in the wake of explosive domestic spying scandals. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) grew from congressional investigations into spy agencies’ eavesdropping on Americans, including civil rights activists and protesters against the Vietnam War, without warrants. The law created a warrant requirement for federal authorities to intercept the communications of anyone in the United States, including foreigners.

Facebook has said it plans to avoid a repeat of the Russia fiasco by improving transparency. An approach it’s rolling out in Canada now, and plans to expand to other countries this summer, enables Facebook users outside an advertiser’s targeted audience to see ads. The hope is that enhanced scrutiny will keep advertisers honest and make it easier to detect foreign interference in politics. So we used a remote connection, called a virtual private network, to log into Facebook from Canada and see how this experiment is working.