Digital Content

Twitter has deleted tweets and other user data of potentially irreplaceable value to investigators probing Russia’s suspected manipulation of the social media platform during the 2016 election, according to current and former government cybersecurity officials. Federal investigators now believe Twitter was one of Russia’s most potent weapons in its efforts to promote Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, the officials say, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

By creating and deploying armies of automated bots, fake users, catchy hashtags and bogus ad campaigns, unidentified operatives launched recurring waves of pro-Trump and anti-Clinton story lines via Twitter that were either false or greatly exaggerated, the officials said. Many U.S. investigators believe that their best hope for identifying who was behind these operations, how they collaborated with each other and their suspected links to the Kremlin lies buried within the mountains of data accumulated in recent years by Twitter. By analyzing Twitter data over time, investigators could establish what one U.S. government cybersecurity consultant described as “pattern of life behavior,” determining when Russian influence operations began, and how they “were trying to nudge the narrative in a certain direction.”

The story was explosive if true: Google planned to buy Apple for $9 billion, according to a Dow Jones Newswire headline earlier this week. Dow Jones deleted the story after just a few minutes, explaining that it was accidentally published as part of a technology test. And sophisticated stock traders likely didn’t even have enough time to digest the news before it was corrected, much less take any action. Yet that brief bit of fake news was blamed for a minor jump in Apple’s stock price to about $158 a share before falling back to around $155.

But if the headline was too absurd to be believed who was likely momentarily tricked? Bots. An increasing portion of stock trades every day are controlled by computer algorithms, many of which scan Twitter feeds, news headlines and other social media looking for tidbits that can move markets. And much of that trading it taking place in a blink of an eye with high-speed traders who measure time in microseconds. In a recent research report, JPMorgan Chase estimated that just 10 percent of daily trading is done by human stock pickers. The growing reliance on technology rather than humans to make stock trades has made identifying disreputable news a bigger challenge, market industry veterans have said.

The rise of fraudulent news and the erosion of public trust in mainstream journalism, due in part to a deliberate campaign of denigration, pose a looming crisis for American democracy and civic life. It is our hope in this report to spotlight the dimensions of the problem, call out its serious implications, and stimulate greater urgency across multiple sectors of society that have a role to play in addressing it.

Among PEN America's recommendations:
Educators should “adopt news literacy education as a core part of school curriculums.”
Social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook should “identify purveyors of fraudulent news . . . and take steps to ensure that they are not able to sustain themselves and profit from access to advertising services on your platforms.”
Social media networks also should “develop additional ways to offer users content that may differ from their own beliefs or views, in ways that are transparent to users and sustain their control over what they see.”
News outlets should “emphasize transparency of operations as a high priority, including finding new ways to be more open with readers about the journalistic and editing processes and the handling of errors.”
News outlets also should “clearly label different types of content as reporting, commentary, opinion, analysis, etc.”

[Commentary] Ultimately, the power of fake news is in the minds of the beholders — namely, news consumers. We need a news consumers’ equivalent of the venerable Consumers Union that, starting in the 1930s, mobilized millions behind taking an informed approach to purchases, or the more recent drive to empower individuals to take charge of their health by reading labels, counting steps, and getting tested for risk factors.

Recognizing fraudulent news as a threat to free expression cannot be grounds to justify a cure — in the form of new government or corporate restrictions on speech — that may end up being worse than the disease. Unscrupulous profiteers and political opportunists may never cease in their efforts to infect the global information flow of information to serve their purposes. The best prescription against the epidemic of fake news is to inoculate consumers by building up their ability to defend themselves.

[Suzanne Nossel is executive director of the Pen American Center and was formerly deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations at the U.S. State Department.]

Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research recently showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.

Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible. Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier. “This is public interest data,” Albright said Oct 11, expressing frustration that such a rich trove of information had disappeared — or at least moved somewhere the public can’t see it. “This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle. Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing.”

[Commentary] The actions that Facebook and Twitter take to police speech don't follow any kind of moral compass, are disproportionately applied, and—at least outwardly—seem completely arbitrary. For all of Silicon Valley's pretensions of being arbiters of free speech, these companies are fundamentally incapable of shaping a healthy public discourse. Making tough decisions, unfortunately, isn't always good for business.

When Americans are asked what has brought the biggest improvement to their lives in the past five decades, they name technology more than any other advancement. And as Americans think about the next 50 years, they expect that technology, along with medical advances, will continue to have a major impact, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted May to June of 2017. Technology was cited most (42%), while far fewer respondents mentioned medicine and health (14%), civil and equal rights (10%) or other advancements. Technology was identified as the biggest improvement by whites (47%) and Hispanics (35%), while blacks were about as likely to name technology (26%) as they were civil and equal rights (21%).

Rep Keith Ellison (D-MN) has asked Federal Trade Commission Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen for documentation of its long-running antitrust investigation of Google, which was closed in 2013 with no finding of antitrust violations. In 2013, the FTC concluded: "Google’s display of its own content could plausibly be viewed as an improvement in the overall quality of Google’s search product. Similarly, we have not found sufficient evidence that Google manipulates its search algorithms to unfairly disadvantage vertical websites that compete with Google-owned vertical properties."

That came despite complaints to Congress from some small online businesses that Google was disfavoring them in search. Rep Ellison points out that Google did volunteer to change some business practices in the wake of the investigation. "Given the impact Google has on small businesses, the flow of information, and that Google controls an outsize portion of the market for online search and online advertising, the public has a right to know what the Federal Trade Commission found in its investigation into Google," Ellison said in a letter to Ohlhausen.

The conversation about Facebook would benefit from more facts, and less speculation. So this week, I sent a list of some of my unanswered questions to Facebook. Two representatives — Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, and Joe Osborne, a company spokesman — responded to several questions in some detail. The company declined to answer several other questions, but I include those here as well, in hopes that they might one day be answered. Below are my questions, followed by Facebook’s responses, where applicable.

Image-bookmarking site Pinterest is known as a place where people go to get ideas about home décor, fashion, and recipes. Few would associate it with politics – let alone Russian trolls. But in the run-up to the 2016 election, the site became a repository for thousands of political posts created by Russian operatives seeking to shape public opinion and foment discord in US society, the company acknowledged Oct 11.

Russian operatives don’t appear to have posted directly on Pinterest, but their influence spread to the site through users who came across Russian content elsewhere and unwittingly “pinned” it onto their Pinterest scrap boards. “We believe the fake Facebook content was so sophisticated that it tricked real Americans into saving it to Pinterest,” said Pinterest head of public policy Charlie Hale. “We’ve removed the content brought to our attention and continue to investigate.”