Elections and Media

Facebook removed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 election by accounts linked to Russia after a Columbia University social-media researcher, Jonathan Albright, used the company's data-analytics tool to examine the reach of the Russian accounts. Albright, who discovered the content had reached a far broader audience than Facebook had initially acknowledged, said that the data had allowed him "to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle" of Russia's election interference. "Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing," he said.

Facebook confirmed that the posts had been removed. But a spokesman said it was because the company had fixed a glitch in the analytics tool — called CrowdTangle — that Albright had used which provided "an unintended way to access information about deleted content." "Facebook is cooperating fully with federal investigations and are providing info to the relevant authorities," the spokesman said.

Every outlet and journalist wants to plant a flag; this story has proven to be a good way to do that. The result is that stories may be overhyped as important, just as happened with the Clinton e-mails and the WikiLeaks revelations. That builds a sense of growing scandal when what’s actually happening is the picture is being fleshed out. When you overlay that with an audience looking for a growing scandal — either from Clinton before the election or Trump after — that effect is magnified. And media outlets are rewarded for hyping things more than they ought to.

Again, none of this is to argue that there weren’t serious revelations uncovered and reported both before and after Election Day. It is, instead, to argue for more caution in evaluating the importance of a story you see on the Internet. Which, at this point, is admittedly a bit like arguing that we ought to close the doors of barns built in 1832 so that long-dead farmers don’t lose their long-dead horses.

On Sept. 15, nine days before the elections in Germany, the Green party complained to Facebook about a popular series of attack ads deriding its stances on gender-neutral bathrooms, electric cars and other topics. The party accused the advertiser, Greenwatch, of providing false contact information on its Facebook page and blog, which would violate a German Media Authority regulation requiring accurate contact information. But Facebook didn’t take down the ads or trace their origins. And after the election, Greenwatch disappeared. Its website and Facebook page were deleted, leaving behind only the nine Greenwatch ads that were captured by ProPublica’s Political Ad Collector, a tool that enables Facebook users to collect political ads that target them.

The Greenwatch episode illustrates that ads of dubious provenance aren’t just aimed at Facebook users in the US, but in Europe as well. Facebook’s failure to confront the advertiser — despite repeated complaints — raises questions about whether and how the world’s largest social network will deliver on its promise to monitor political advertising aggressively on its platform.

Twitter has has banned two Russian media outlets from advertising on the social network after concluding that they colluded with the Kremlin to influence the US election. Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, which have spent a combined $1.9 million on Twitter adverts, were blacklisted after an internal investigation into the two, following US intelligence reports saying they were part of a Russian effort to disrupt 2016’s vote. The decision prompted a furious response from the two news outlets, which are funded by the Russian government and seen as its mouthpieces in the West.

In so many ways, the underlying conditions of US democracy need repair. Among American citizens, ideological and philosophical divisions seem insurmountably sharp; among their representatives in Washington, compromise appears impossible. Whatever side you were on in last year’s election, it’s clear that the campaign brought these problems dramatically to the surface of our national life; it’s also clear that these challenges would have been with us, in equal measure, no matter who won. And so, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the election, we asked dozens of writers and artists to look beyond the day-to-day upheavals of the news cycle and propose one idea that could help fix the long-term problems bedeviling American democracy. The result: 38 conservative, liberal, practical, creative, broad, specific, technocratic, provocative solutions for an unsettled country.

Facebook, Twitter and Google played a far deeper role in Donald Trump's presidential campaign than has previously been disclosed, with company employees taking on the kind of political strategizing that campaigns typically entrust to their own staff or paid consultants, according to a new study released Oct 26. The peer-reviewed paper, based on more than a dozen interviews with both tech company staffers who worked inside several 2016 presidential campaigns and campaign officials, sheds new light on Silicon Valley's assistance to Trump before his surprise win last November.

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches. Such support was critical for the Trump campaign, which didn’t invest heavily in its own digital operations during the primary season and made extensive use of Facebook, Twitter and Google "embeds" for the general election, says the study, conducted by communications professors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Utah.

Cambridge Analytica used its own database and voter information collected from Facebook and news publishers in its effort to help elect Donald Trump, despite a claim by a top campaign official who has downplayed the company’s role in the election. The data analysis company, which uses a massive database of consumer and demographic information to profile and target voters, has come under the scrutiny of congressional investigators who are examining the Trump campaign.

This week, the group became the focus of a new controversy after the Daily Beast reported that the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, had contacted Julian Assange in 2016. Nix allegedly asked the WikiLeaks founder whether he could assist in releasing thousands of e-mails that had gone missing on a private server that had been used by Hillary Clinton. Assange confirmed the contact but said the offer was rejected. The news prompted a top former campaign official, Michael Glassner, who was executive director of the Trump election campaign, to minimise the role Cambridge Analytica played in electing Trump, despite the fact that it paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars in fees. In a statement on Oct 25, Glassner said that the Trump campaign relied on voter data owned by the Republican National Committee to help elect the president. “Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false,” he said. But that claim is contradicted by a detailed description of the company’s role in the 2016 election given in May by a senior Cambridge Analytica executive.

The FBI has pledged to hand over documents related to a controversial dossier linking President Trump to Russia, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said. The House Intelligence Committee has been seeking the documents for months, hoping to learn more about the bureau’s relationship to the dossier’s author, a former British spy named Christopher Steele, and whether the document was used by federal investigators to bolster their probe into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) in August had issued two subpoenas to compel the FBI and Justice Department to turn over the documents. He set an Oct 27 deadline for them to comply. “The FBI got in touch with us yesterday afternoon, and they have informed us that they will comply with our document requests, and that they will provide the documents Congress has been asking for by next week,” Speaker Ryan said. “And we expect the FBI to honor that commitment.”

[Commentary] Soon, a new law against hate speech will go into effect in Germany, fining Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies up to €50 million if they fail to take down illegal content from their sites within 24 hours of being notified. For more ambiguous content, companies will have seven days to decide whether to block the posts. The rule is Germany’s attempt to fight hate speech and fake news, both of which have risen online since the arrival of more than a million refugees in the last two years. Germany isn’t alone in its determination to crack down on these kinds of posts. For the past year, most of Europe has been in an intense and fascinating debate about how to regulate, who should regulate, and even whether to regulate illegal and defamatory online content.

Unlike the US, where we rely on corporate efforts to tackle the problems of fake news and disinformation online, the European Commission and some national governments are wading into the murky waters of free speech, working to come up with viable ways to stop election-meddling and the violence that has resulted from false news reports.

[Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.]

Twitter said it overstated its number of users for the past three years and committed to take advertising off its site from two Russian media outlets, even as it reported modest user growth for the third quarter. Twitter said it will no longer accept advertising from all accounts owned by Russian-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik. Federal intelligence officials say RT is “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.“ Twitter’s decision marks a stark change to its previous stance of accepting advertising from these groups. The RT editor in chief said in a tweet on Oct 26 that Twitter approached RT ahead of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to pitch ways RT could advertise on Twitter during this period.