Platforms

In the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever, and the chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers. 

President Donald Trump said on that he's open to working across the aisle with Democratic lawmakers to regulate social media. President Trump was asked if social media companies were unfairly censoring conservative voices and if he would work with the opposition party to rein in their power. "Believe it or not, I'm really one that really likes free speech," President Trump said. "A lot of people don't understand that. When you start regulating, a lot of bad things can happen. But I would certainly talk to the Democrats if they want to do that. And I think they do want to do that."

Who was trying to influence your vote in the midterm elections? On Facebook, it was not always easy to find out.  Political advertisers are required to fill in a field that says who paid for the message in your news feed, but that does not necessarily tell you who they or their backers are. Entities can write whatever they want in that field as long as it's not deceptive or misleading. A growing number of Facebook ads in the run-up to the election took advantage of that loophole to obscure or conceal the identity and political motives of who paid for them – and Facebook did not catch it.

 Even as Silicon Valley has become more aggressive in battling foreign efforts to influence US politics, it is losing innumerable cat-and-mouse games with Americans who are eagerly deploying the same techniques used by the Russians in 2016. “Everyone’s witnessed the playbook playing out,” said former FBI agent Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Now they don’t need Russia so much.

The power of communication and the exchange of ideas were starkly brought home recently as news of bombs being delivered to Americans’ homes and businesses, and the murder of worshipers in Pittsburgh dominated headlines everywhere. President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies appear to be actively engaged in a feedback loop with extremists who participate in the darkest online forums.

Infowars is gone from Facebook after a high-profile showdown over the summer between Silicon Valley and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But another Facebook page he controls, NewsWars, has taken its place — and Jones’s many fans have followed. In the three months since Facebook removed four of Jones’s pages over allegations of hate speech, his NewsWars page has remained intact and surged in posts and page views.

An Oct 23 interview with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA).

Twitter deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in the 2018 midterm election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.  “We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman said. The removals took place in late Sept and early Oct. Twitter removed more than 10,000 accounts, according to three sources familiar with the Democrats’ effort.

A mass murderer shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (PA) on Oct 27, in what is believed to be the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in the United States, ever. The mass shooting followed a week of reporting on a series of bombs sent by a FL terrorist to prominent Democrats, George Soros, and CNN. Both men posted violent, hateful content online, including politically extremist views on immigration. The events tragically bring into focus, again, the very-real danger of hateful political rhetoric.

We have learned a lot about online disinformation — and we are doing nothing.  For these same distorting techniques are still in operation. They will affect the midterm elections. They continue to shape political debate in many countries around the world. They are being used not just by Russians, but by people in the countries they seek to influence. These campaigners, often hiding behind fake accounts, continue to act with impunity, promoting false narratives and relying on the main platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, and especially YouTube — to amplify their messages.