Elections and Media

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to once more defend himself and his platform. Responding to a cavalierly-tweeted charge of anti-Trump bias from the President of the United States, Zuckerberg again repeated his claim that Facebook was “a platform for all ideas,” and that, contrary to unfolding public opinion, his company did much more to further democracy than to stifle it. These arguments rest on a simple equation: The amount of information that a population shares is directly proportional to the quality of its democracy. And, as a corollary: the more viewpoints that get exposed, the greater the collective empathy and understanding.

This is what’s missing from Zuckerberg’s math—the transmutation of information into common myth. We have more data then ever before, but when you put it all together, it doesn’t add up to much.

Mark Zuckerberg wants his company’s role in the election to be seen like this: Facebook had a huge effect on voting—and no impact on votes. If Facebook wants to be a force for good in democracy, it needs to answer some questions. Does maximizing engagement, as it is understood through News Feed’s automated analysis, create structural problems in the information ecosystem? More broadly, do the tools that people use to communicate on Facebook influence what they actually talk about?

The fake news that ran rampant on Facebook was a symptom of a larger issue. The real problem lies at the very heart of Facebook’s most successful product: Perhaps virality and engagement cannot be the basis for a ubiquitous information service that acts as a “force for good in democracy.” And if this is true, how much is Facebook willing to change?

“We may have in America the best 20th-century military that money can buy, but we’re increasingly in a world where cyber vulnerability, misinformation and disinformation may be the tools of conflict,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Co-Chair Mark Warner (D-VA). “What we may have seen are the first tools of 21st-century disinformation.” He believes Russia’s use of social media to influence 2016’s election demonstrated how warfare has moved away from the battlefield and toward the internet. And the U.S. has been slow to adjust.

For a sense of the dilemma confronting Facebook over its ad-targeting system, consider the following word: confederate. As of Sept 27, any prospective advertiser who typed that word into Facebook’s ad-targeting engine would be prompted to distribute their ad to a potential audience of more than four million users who had indicated an interest in the Confederate States of America.

The social network recently grappled with revelations that advertisers were able to target Facebook users who used terms like “Jew hater” to describe themselves. But even after the company took steps to shut down those clearly offensive categories, other targeting terms remain that fall into a gray area. That includes categories like Confederate States, which are legitimate in principle but can be potentially problematic or misused in practice. It illustrates the blurry lines and policing challenge that confront Facebook in its ad targeting. And after a year in which the social network has accepted more responsibility to crack down on false or offensive material, and last week, when the company twice announced new measures to prevent abuses by advertisers, some experts said the scale of that challenge is only starting to become apparent.

Propaganda and other forms of “junk news” on Twitter flowed more heavily in a dozen battleground states than in the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016 presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted the most pivotal voters, researchers from Oxford University reported. The volumes of low-quality information on Twitter — much of it delivered by online “bots” and “trolls” working at the behest of unseen political actors — were strikingly heavy everywhere in the United States, said the researchers at Oxford’s Project on Computational Propaganda. They found that false, misleading and highly partisan reports were shared on Twitter at least as often as those from professional news organizations.

But in 12 battleground states, including New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida, the amount of what they called “junk news” exceeded that from professional news organizations, prompting researchers to conclude that those pushing disinformation approached the job with a geographic focus in hopes of having maximum impact on the outcome of the vote. The researchers defined junk news as “propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and information.” The researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from WikiLeaks — which published embarrassing posts about Democrat Hillary Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman’s email — as “polarizing political content” for the purposes of the analysis.

After a weekend when Americans took to social media to debate President Trump’s admonishment of National Football League players who do not stand for the national anthem, a network of Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia seized on both sides of the issue with hashtags such as #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee.

As Twitter prepared to brief staff members of the Senate and House intelligence committees on Sept 28 for their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, researchers from a public policy group have been following hundreds of accounts to track the continuing Russian operations to influence social media discourse and foment division in the United States. There is evidence that Twitter may have been used even more extensively than Facebook in the Russian influence campaign in 2016. In addition to Russia-linked Twitter accounts that posed as Americans, the platform was also used for large-scale automated messaging, using “bot” accounts to spread false stories and promote news articles about emails from Democratic operatives that had been obtained by Russian hackers.

President Donald Trump took aim at Facebook, calling the social network “anti-Trump.” But the social network insists it is pro-democracy and pro-truth — and the German election shows it.

“Trump says Facebook is against him,” said Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook. “Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like.” Zuckerberg expressed regret for initially appearing dismissive of his company’s potential effects on the 2016 election, saying that the topic was “too important.” But he also repeated a point he has made many times — that Facebook’s broader impact, “from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote,” had a much greater effect on the election than that of misinformation on the platform.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a request for Facebook to testify in an open hearing to examine how foreign actors may have used social media companies to influence the 2016 election. The hearing is set for Nov 1.

Committee leaders have also expressed interest in hearing from Twitter. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) said that it’s not important to him that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg or other top executives necessarily show up. “I think it’s more important that we get the person who’s most capable of talking about the technical aspects of what they need to do to identify foreign money that may come in and what procedures if any need to be put in law that make sure elections are not intruded by foreign entities,” Sen Burr said.

How much can Facebook tell us about what really happened when it comes to Russian sabotage of the 2016 election? Senate Intelligence Committee Co-Chair Mark Warner (D-VA), who is investigating Russian election interference, has been arguing lately that Facebook needs to come clean. It needs to publicly disclose the full scope and scale of how Russian entities used its social networking platform to spread fake news and propaganda in order to sow divisions among American voters and influence the outcome of the presidential election. We don’t know who paid for the ads on Facebook and, crucially, how and why the purchasers targeted certain Facebook users to see them in their feeds, and whether they worked with anyone in the United States to develop those lists of targets.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that the social network would begin voluntarily requiring disclaimers on political ads that appear on the site. But in 2011 Facebook went to federal regulators to get an exception from a rule that would have forced it to do the same thing.

Federal election regulations state that political "communications placed for a fee on another person's website" must carry disclaimers stating that they are advertisements and who paid for them. Facebook sought an exception to disclaimer regulations citing space constraints for its "character-limited ads." Lawyers for the company argued the ads were so small that a disclaimer would be impracticable. Facebook argued, at the time, that ads on the platform were restricted to 160 characters. However, ads on Facebook have since evolved into sophisticated multimedia experiences. Advertisers can choose to sponsor videos, carousels of images and slideshows. Today, not all of Facebook's advertising options are character-limited.