Elections and Media

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, took to Twitter to deliver an unusually raw tweetstorm defending the company’s software algorithms against critics who believe Facebook needs more oversight. Facebook uses algorithms to determine everything from what you see and don’t see in News Feed, to finding and removing other content like hate speech and violent threats. The company has been criticized in the past for using these algorithms — and not humans — to monitor its service for things like abuse, violent threats, and misinformation. The algorithms can be fooled or gamed, and part of the criticism is that Facebook and other tech companies don’t always seem to appreciate that algorithms have biases, too. Stamos says it’s hard to understand from the outside.

The House Intelligence Committee is asking officials from Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet’s Google to testify publicly as part of its Russia probe on Nov. 1, the same day as a planned Senate Intelligence hearing. That would set up a marathon day for the social media companies, which are facing increasing scrutiny over the role their platforms played in Russia’s efforts to meddle in the U.S. election. The House panel previously said it was looking at sometime in October to bring technology companies in for a hearing.

Facebook cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election because of concerns among the company’s lawyers and members of its policy team, apparently. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion during the 2016 presidential contest.

Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, apparently. Ultimately, the 13-page report, published on April 27 and titled “Information Operations and Facebook,” was shortened by several pages by Facebook’s legal and policy teams from an earlier draft, and didn’t mention Russia at all. Rather, it concluded that “malicious actors” engaged in influence campaigns during the U.S. presidential election but said it couldn’t determine who was responsible. The extent of Facebook’s understanding at the time of Russian influence is unclear. It wasn’t until a Sept. 6 Facebook newsroom blog post that the company publicly identified Russia as a source of such efforts.

There is a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy. These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it. Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

[Commentary] Since the election, The New York Times has toughened everything about its coverage of Donald Trump, from the choice of words it uses to describe what he says to the number of reporters assigned to cover and investigate him. Like everyone else, the Times underestimated his chances of being elected. Although it published impressive investigations of his taxes, treatment of women, and real-estate deals, it was only after his surprise victory that the dimensions of Russia’s interference in the election and ties to Trump were examined and revealed.

In recent months, the Times has been in a running one-upmanship battle with The Washington Post, a thrilling journalistic display that has reinforced the importance of the few national news organizations left that still have the muscle to do this kind of reporting. “The role of the press is clearer now than it’s ever been,” said Executive Editor Dean Baquet on CBS’s Face the Nation in February. The quixotic nature of the new administration, the president’s serial lies (the word Baquet was right to use on the front page), and the false narratives that tumble out of the White House daily cry out for this kind of accountability journalism. Without the instrumental, muscular reporting of the Times’s team, we would not know what was going on inside this bizarre and byzantine White House.

[Jill Abramson is a former executive editor of The New York Times, and currently a senior lecturer in the English department of Harvard University]

In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that "there's no room in American society" for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK. But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) said the panel will work to combat Russia's disinformation campaign that aims to undermine democratic governments and sow division and dissent throughout the United States. “We know that Putin’s Russia has not slowed its efforts to interfere in our elections and domestic affairs. The Senate Armed Services Committee will continue working to address this challenge, which is a threat to our national security,” Sen McCain said. Sen McCain said he is a victim of one of Russia's targeted ads, which planted a false narrative that he met with a leader from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

[Commentary] With Facebook handing over Russian propaganda ads from the US election to Congressional investigators, we must understand that this is part of a much broader assault. The threat of these digital attacks extends to all democracies, in the West and beyond. Furthermore, attacks on elections over the past year are asymmetric. Liberal democracies do not and often cannot respond in kind to cyberattacks on their own way of governance. Democracies with free and fair elections are vulnerable to attack, while in autocratic societies, it only matters who is counting the votes. Authoritarian regimes do just fine manipulating their own elections. In Russia, tweeting or sharing real news that’s embarrassing to the regime can land you in prison. Imagine then the response of the regime to fake news that’s damaging to the Kremlin. If democracies actively disseminated such fake news, it would only reduce us to Russia’s level and lead to greater repression there.

The response to these cybercrimes must be international and must be broad-based, ranging from regulating social media to guarding our electrical grid and electoral systems. Building a collective defense in this new code war is at least as great a challenge as staving off the territorial or regional threats of the Cold War, when NATO was established in order to respond to threats in Europe.

[Toomas Hendrik Ilves served as president of Estonia from 2006-2016. He is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.]

[Commentary] A president who once contended that nine unnamed sources in one report couldn't possibly be real is waking up to articles with source tallies that sometimes soar into double digits. For example, ProPublica said its Oct 4 report that Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were close to being charged with felony fraud in 2012 was “based on interviews with 20 sources familiar with the investigation, court records, and other public documents.” Trump can cry “fake news” all he wants, but the frequency and volume of leaks makes it difficult to sell the idea that reporters are simply making things up.

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the panel will develop a "stronger partnership" with social media companies in order identify foreign entities trying to sow division within the country. "We're going to have to have a much stronger partnership where the intelligence committee identifies Russian troll farms like the one here, they share that information with the social media companies so they can identify those accounts and take them down," Schiff said. rep Schiff said these companies have to be "good corporate citizens" and dedicate more time and resources to properly monitor the threat of outside agents taking advantage of the platforms to influence attitudes or events in the US.