Stories from Abroad

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.

Google has started overhauling millions of search results in Europe—and neither the search giant nor its detractors are happy about it.

Google is allowing rival shopping-comparison services to bid for and resell advertising space at the very top of Google search results in Europe. The new ads appear alongside similar product ads from Google’s own shopping-ad unit, which Google said is bidding independently in the same auctions. The changes are part of Google’s effort to comply with a European Union antitrust decision that fined the company 2.42 billion euros ($2.71 billion) for using its dominant search engine to favor its own shopping ads at the expense of competitors’ -- and ordered it to start treating itself the same as its competitors. Google is appealing the decision, but is implementing its order to avoid noncompliance fines that can reach total 5% of its global daily revenue, or more than $12 million.

So, the Russian ad buy is a significant Facebook purchase, but not one that seems scaled to the ambition of interfering with a national US election. That could be because: 1) Not all the ads have been discovered, so the $100,000 is a significant undercount. 2) That was the right number, and the ads worked to aid distribution of disinformation. 3) The ads were part of a message-testing protocol to improve the reach of posts posted natively by other accounts. Think of it as a real-time focus group to test for the most viral content and framing. 4) That $100,000 was a test that didn’t work well, so it didn’t get more resources. 5) That $100,000 was merely a calling card, spent primarily to cause trouble for Facebook and the election system.

Technology doesn’t always cooperate with us when we want it to. And sometimes governments don’t want to cooperate with it, either. At the United Nation’s High-Level Event on Innovation and Technology various snafus reinforced a key point that recurred at various conferences during UNGA week: That all the talk of using technology to fight poverty, hunger, and gender inequality is useless if we can’t get over the most basic hurdle—universal access to the internet, which less than half the world currently has. Only then can we attempt to use our digital savvy to tackle the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), the UN’s ambitious framework for solving global problems by 2030.

In order to achieve any of this, however, technology leaders in the private sector and government leaders in the public sector are going to have to learn how to get along. Traditionally positioned as opponents at opposite ends of the ring—the private sector wanting to make a profit, the public sector wanting to make a difference—UNGA treated both as equals and encouraged them to shake hands instead of throw punches. True, lasting, global change isn’t the responsibility of either party alone, but to move forward, they’re going to have to find some middle ground on the following issues.

The European telecoms sector has lost €100 million a day to disruptive technology companies over the past decade, says a report commissioned by Etno, the trade body that represents the region’s largest operators.

Europe’s telecoms groups have long complained about the burden of regulation on the sector, while more lightly regulated US and Asian tech companies have launched rival services offering communications and internet access — often using the infrastructure created by the national telecoms groups. The report, compiled by Accenture, warns regulatory change is required to create a competitive digital economy in Europe.

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, apparently.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics -- also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women. These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate US political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

China has largely blocked the WhatsApp messaging app, the latest move by Beijing to step up surveillance ahead of a big Communist Party gathering in Oct. The disabling in mainland China of the Facebook-owned app is a setback for the social media giant, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushing to re-enter the Chinese market, and has been studying the Chinese language intensively. WhatsApp was the last of Facebook products to still be available in mainland China; the company’s main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram image-sharing app is also unavailable. In mid-July, Chinese censors began blocking video chats and the sending of photographs and other files using WhatsApp, and they stopped many voice chats, as well. But most text messages on the app continued to go through normally. The restrictions on video, audio chats and file sharing were at least temporarily lifted after a few weeks. WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly disrupted in China, even for text messages. The blocking of WhatsApp text messages suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp.

For the more than five million Puerto Ricans living on the United States mainland, it was bad enough to watch news reports on Sept 19 of Hurricane Maria ripping through an island where relatives and friends lived. What made it worse was not knowing how their loved ones had fared.

With the entire power grid knocked out and with more than 95 percent of wireless cell sites out of service, communication was all but impossible on Sept 21, and an already emotional day became even harder for the Puerto Rican diaspora. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that the hurricane’s impact on the island’s communications infrastructure had been “catastrophic,” and that the commission was trying to help. Some services, like texting and a few internet messaging apps, were reported to be working, but not consistently.

Russia's government denied using Facebook ads to influence the 2016 US presidential election, saying in a statement it didn't even know "how to place an advert" on the social media giant. “We do not know ... how to place an advert on Facebook. We have never done this, and the Russian side has never been involved in it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had even wrapped up their respective bids to secure the nomination for president, Kremlin-funded media outlet RT was plotting to promote its election coverage in the United States. RT hoped to take over at least two Twitter accounts or handles for its media coverage: @NotHillary and @NotTrump. Their goal, RT told Twitter’s advertising department, was to use the accounts to push their 2016 election coverage, but neither handle or username has any identifying information tracing the owner back to the Russian government-funded media organization.

Twitter denied the request. The company declined to comment on the record on the specific accounts “for privacy and security reasons.” RT says that the company’s interest in the dormant accounts was part of an ultimately doomed project to take advantage of a unique moment in American political history.