Elections and Media

After examining Russia’s 2014 disinformation campaign in Ukraine, we found that Russian propaganda has very uneven effects. Whether it sways individuals to vote for pro-Russian candidates — or backfires, and makes them less likely to do so — depends on the political predispositions of the target audience.

Nothing helps President Donald Trump more — or tightens his hold on his base more securely — than his cozy, mutually-beneficial relationship with conservative TV. Trump's feedback loop, including cable-news coverage, and mainstream-media squawking, convinces the president that he's winning his war on media.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is defending itself against criticism for a recent on-air promotional message many of its local news anchors were asked to read that warned viewers about "false news" on competing media outlets.  Sinclair produced the spots to express concern about the spread of such false media reports such as the "Pope Endorses Trump" fake news story that quickly spread across social media, said Scott Livingston, Sinclair's senior vice president of news. “Some other false stories, like the fake ‘Pizzagate’ story, can result in dangerous consequences,” he said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Democracy 21 filed a criminal complaint alleging that the Trump campaign and a super PAC controlled by President Trump's new national security adviser John Bolton worked with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to violate a law preventing foreign nations from participating in US elections. The groups allege that the John Bolton Super PAC, the Trump campaign and its former chairman Stephen Bannon were aware of Cambridge Analytica's nefarious activities.

Facebook has a four-part plan to protect its platform from malicious attacks during the 2018 US midterm elections:

Cambridge Analytica and SCL were the subject of a number of previously unpublished harassment complaints filed in response to the numerous political survey and messaging calls made on behalf of US campaigns between 2013 and 2017.

As a start-up called Cambridge Analytica sought to harvest the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans in summer 2014, the company received help from at least one employee at Palantir Technologies, a top Silicon Valley contractor to American spy agencies and the Pentagon. It was a Palantir employee in London, working closely with the data scientists building Cambridge’s psychological profiling technology, who suggested the scientists create their own app — a mobile-phone-based personality quiz — to gain access to Facebook users’ friend networks. Cambridge ultimately took a similar ap

Facebook has been rocked by reports of a massive data scrape carried out by Cambridge Analytica and one of its then-contractors, a Cambridge University academic named Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan claims that the data he collected from thousands of Facebook users and their friends—amounting to data on over 50 million users—abided by Facebook’s terms; Cambridge Analytica promises it deleted the data; and Facebook is auditing everyone it can for signs of the data. But while Facebook provided the original data, it wasn’t the only vehicle for Kogan’s app.

[Commentary] The problems at Facebook and others, real and perceived, at Google, Amazon and Apple have led to an easy consensus: The large technology companies should be regulated. Such an outcome would be a bad mistake — bad for the companies, of course, but also bad for us, their users, and bad for the country. I do not pretend to be unbiased in writing this. While I am about as tech-savvy as your average 72-year-old , I met Mark Zuckerberg when he was 20, and spent six years on Facebook’s board.

Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-US citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to ­Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by US laws limiting foreign involvement in elections. The assignments came amid efforts to present the newly created company as “an American brand” that would appeal to U.S. political clients even though its parent, SCL Group, was based in London, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.