We built a platform that's used for a lot of good all around the world,
but there will always be bad actors.
Facebook has a much larger effect on our democracy than most of us would
have expected. I think both parties are going to recognize that these
platforms are very different than they were 10 years ago.
This was made clear in the 2016 presidential election.
We went and told everybody we could find in the middle of the summer the
Russians were messing with the election and we were basically shooed
away. There was a failure of the imagination in terms of thinking about
the way that this platform, which, you know, has its arms around the
world, could be exploited.
The company has attempted to better position itself for the 2020 election,
especially with a pandemic that pushed social media usage up 61 percent
in April of 2020.
But experts question the efficiency of its new strategy.
They seem to be addressing the threat of 2016 as the threat of 2020.
And while Facebook is a catalyst for election manipulation, it's only part
of a larger picture.
The media loves to hit on Facebook and has done very little to look at
itself. As the U.S.
heads into the 2020 election cycle.
What challenges does Facebook face and what measures can Facebook take to
stop the spread of disinformation and fake news around candidates and
voting security?
We're hoping to help inoculate public debate and protect against some of
the disinformation we'll see coming.
Facebook's role in the 2016 election has been well-documented.
We all know what happened, that Facebook's platform was manipulated,
exploited by expecially foreign bad actors who wanted to sway our
election. Just as a quick recap, though, Facebook affected the 2016
election mostly through foreign interference on its platform, data
misuse, like in the case of Cambridge Analytica, and the spread of
misinformation. Data misuse was a major blow to the platform.
Cambridge Analytica used profile data from more than 80 million Facebook
users, data that was supposed to be deleted by the company, to help
target political ads.
This is probably the darkest episode in the history of Facebook.
Not too long after they had a huge drop in their stock.
Though some discredit the severity of the ordeal.
Cambridge Analytica was a scam.
It had no appreciable impact on the election.
Misinformation, disinformation and fake news spread quickly on Facebook
during the 2016 election.
Even though Facebook is a major distributor of news, the way the news is
told or the frequency with which a topic or event is covered must be
scrutinized as well.
Critics of the media claim news organizations may only report stories
that fit a specific narrative or garner more views and clicks and leave
others underreported.
It's one thing to talk about the facts, but the overall story is wrong.
So even if the facts are correct, the story that's being told is
incomplete. And I think in a way that now with all of the documentaries
and stuff, those documentaries are really disinformation themselves.
Facebook does hold the largest user base of any social media platform on
Earth with nearly one point eight billion daily active users.
In the U.S., it is the number one social media and/or messaging platform
for news, well above YouTube and Twitter.
And then there was foreign interference.
Facebook reportedly took down hundreds of profiles created by Russian
operatives to spread a false narrative.
A second major thrust of the Russian operation was by the GRU, which is
the main intelligence directorate of the Russian military.
And the goal of that operation was to twist the public conversation
around Hillary Clinton through the selective leaking of real emails and
documents. An example of this was the site DCLeaks, the site on which
Russian operatives published stolen documents.
Facebook announced it would step up its efforts in three key areas to
protect the democratic process in the 2020 election, fighting foreign
interference, increasing transparency and reducing misinformation.
In 2018, Facebook proudly showed off its midterm election war rooms.
As these threats develop, not only do we respond to them quickly, but we
continue to speed up our response and make our response more effective
and more efficient. We've seen how powerful a tool Facebook's ad platform
is for foreign interference. Political advertising.
This is something that is regulated around in print, in TV.
It is not regulated at all in the digital world.
So when you have the Russians in 2016 buying Facebook ads, apparently
even paying in rubles, and being able to actually target their ads to
particular groups based on race, based on affinity, based on certain
characteristics that will either perhaps suppress the vote or maybe turn
them off from the candidate they are originally going to vote for.
That's unbelievably powerful tool.
To try and combat foreign interference, Facebook says it has removed over
six billion Facebook accounts and partnered with international groups to
stop emerging threats.
Another way the company plans to thwart foreign bad actors is through ad
transparency. All these ads go into an ads library, which is far more
transparent with political ads than are run on television or radio or in
the printed press, where you can see who's paid for political ad, who's
targeted, when they're running it, all different variants of the
political ads. Facebook says it will not allow new political ads a week
before the election on November 3rd.
The fact that you're not doing widespread fact checking on political ads
does raise the question about whether this is just a PR stunt.
No, it's not a PR stunt.
It's real. It means that no one can run new political ads for the most
crucial seven days in a campaign.
Recently, Facebook was tipped off by the FBI about a Russian fake news
operation that was hiring U.S.
journalists. This is similar to the tactics used in the 2016 election,
and Facebook has gotten relatively good at finding and taking down these
kinds of threats. The FBI tipped off Facebook, Facebook shut down those
accounts, that's great.
That's the way it should work. But what's the threat of 2020?
I think the biggest threat for 2020 is going to come domestically and it's
going to be disinformation that either makes it hard for people to vote
by misinforming them of the procedures of voting in a Covid world.
I think the other real risk is domestic sources questioning the outcome
of the election and trying to convince a large percentage populace that
the election was stolen.
We do have a president and many supporters behind the president who have
spent so much time breaking down trust, so much time
just spread in so much chaos and false information that people don't even
know what to believe anymore.
Facebook and other companies hold a new responsibility against fake news
and misinformation – that which comes from the government itself.
Can you give a direct answer, you will accept the election?
I have to see. Look, I have to see.
I'm not going to just say yes.
I'm not going to say no. And I didn't last time either.
Except for in the case of Bush versus Gore, we are used to waking up the
next day and knowing who our next president is going to be.
That's not going to happen this time.
The big likelihood is it will take weeks, if not longer, before we have
an actual result.
And so imagine a scenario where on Facebook the president starts bragging
about how he won.
And then every day as ballots are getting counted, that starts to shift
and it starts to show that the race is tightening.
Then he gets to start dog whistling to groups to say, 'hey, the Democrats
are stealing the election.
I won on November 3rd.
You all saw it.' And then the next thing you know, it starts to foment
more and more anger online, which he has been setting this up for months.
And then, let's say groups on Facebook start organizing violent protests
and Facebook has allowed all this to happen.
There has been disinformation coming from the White House about the mail
in voting system.
Twitter labeled these tweets with a warning that it violates Twitter's
rules. While Facebook has added a tag below the post, neither have
removed this content.
If you are going to stand up and say we have this voter suppression policy
and you cannot lie about time, place, method, process, we make you spell
it all out. And then you enforce it on everybody, but not on the
president. If you have decided that your platform is not going to allow
this of content, then you enforce that policy across the board.
Once you are making your policy decisions political, your policy carries
no weight. Twitter has already been flagging this type of disinformation.
It has also banned political ads, but it will allow non-profits to run
issue-based ads on its platform.
Facebook has taken a different stance.
Almost no one – I don't think any major Silicon Valley company – fact
checks what politicians say about each other, because what politicians
say about themselves, about each other, is always full of exaggeration,
caricature. Facebook has created a voting information center to dissuade
political misinformation around voting and will help register new voters.
Facebook's Voting Information Center is a new feature that they've added
to Facebook and Instagram that basically just shows up at the top of user
s' feeds and just, you know, provides them with information about the
election happening in the US in November.
It's great that they want to help register people and it's great that they
want to help steer people towards good content.
But having your Voting Information Center, while still allowing the
president of the United States to spread misinformation about mail in
ballots and things like that, those two do not cancel each other out.
But fake news, misinformation and conspiracy theories have become so
pervasive in society, trolling may be taking a backseat to simple,
uninformed posting.
One of the interesting shifts between 2016 and 2020 is now.
A lot of online disinformation is coming from domestic sources and real
domestic sources who have actual friends and family.
So when we talk about online movements like QAnon, one of the reasons it
has been very effective is that people are hearing these theories from
individuals they trust.
And so the absolute numbers of reach are perhaps not as important of
being able to affect people in a situation where they're more likely to
believe misinformation.
To combat this, Facebook has increased its safety and security team to
35000 staff members and is working with third party fact checkers to
reduce the distribution of fake news.
But are these new projects and policies going to be enough?
And what would be the repercussions for Facebook if they aren't enough?
I think that there's a central kind of problem over the last four years is
just a lack of kind of courage and ability to stand up to the problems
that their site has wreaked on the world.
The problems that arose during and after the 2016 election will certainly
be different during and after the 2020 election.
The one thing that so many people have screamed out for them to fix is
this business model that is actually encouraging people to be extreme, to
be salacious.
This business model that is allowing their recommendation engines to
steer people towards extremist groups who might have not even been
looking for that to begin with.
Mark Zuckerberg has said in the past that Facebook is not an arbiter of
truth and defends freedom of speech on its platform.
You know, we've tried to distinguish ourselves as probably being one of
the tech companies that is the most protective of giving people a voice
and free expression overall.
But as a company separate from the United States government, it has more
leeway in the definition of free speech.
This is a private platform.
So this is actually not a First Amendment issue.
And in additional Facebook is deciding what speech they're going to
amplify and what speech they're going to decide is not important every
single day. As for repercussions, there have been very little, both
legally and financially.
They're very, very, very few laws that guide how Facebook can operate.
The intellectual property is one example.
And again, boy are they good at making sure they're not on the wrong side
of that law.
But in terms of what they can allow in their platform, in terms of how
they can amplify things, in terms of how they can allow a foreign
adversary to pay in rubles for political advertising in our elections and
to this day still bear no responsibility for that.
Nobody's been held to account.
This means that the US law is not actually holding them accountable.
Facebook's challenges go far beyond the election.
For example, Facebook failed to remove a militia page, an event before a
deadly shooting took place that killed two people at a protest in
Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Facebook employees criticized Zuckerberg, who called the delayed removal
largely an operational mistake.
Not only have they taken some really good and important steps to fix some
of the problems that we saw in 2016, and not only are they taking some
important steps to try to bring down certain groups and to try and
finally go after groups like QANON or militia groups.
But at the end of the day, all of these are sort of these Band-Aid fixes
around the margins.
They still don't actually have anyone to account for at the end of the
day for how this plays out.
There was also a large ad boycott this summer as advertisers pursued
Facebook to do more to curb hate speech and misinformation on its site.
It obviously is clearly not great news, but we think more advertisers are
joining Facebook than leaving.
But even with all that, Facebook's business is thriving and its stock has
steadily increased since March.
You know, they every quarter give you an update as to how many paying
advertisers they have.
And that number currently sits at more than nine million.
A big part of what's driven Facebook's resiliency during the pandemic and,
you know, in just over a year to date has been how strongly typically it
performs for e-commerce and some of these native direct to consumer
brands. And the government hasn't taken much action either.
When Facebook was fined five billion dollars by the FTC for how the abused
our data, the very next day the stock market rallied, and they actually
rewarded them. Why?
Because they realized that that fine was pennies for a company like
Facebook. So the free market has not been one of the forces to help keep
them accountable. With almost 70 percent of American adults using the
platform in 2019, Facebook's user base is incredibly persuasive in the
United States democracy.
What goes on there is very influential in terms of, you know, the things
that people talk about and the way they think and what they care about.
But there's a bigger picture to consider.
Facebook is only one part of a much larger conversation around
misinformation and interference in US politics.
One of the ones I find really interesting is this Russian operation called
Secondary Infektion, which we believe was by a Russian intelligence
service, but we're not sure exactly which one.
And it was found to have operated during six years, over 300 different
online platforms. So that's one of the interesting questions in 2020 is
whether or not due to the reaction by the big companies, whether we'll
see foreign adversaries look to operate on many more smaller platforms to
try to get the same reach they were able to get just on Twitter and
Facebook and Youtube in 2016. The news media has its share of the blame
as well. Take, for example, the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi from 2018.
'That he was engaged in a cover up.'
That video only had like forty thousand views until everybody started
talking about it. And so it's like I'm on MSNBC talking about how the
media needs to not amplify this thing because they're doing the guy's job
for him. While in doing that, they're playing the video side by side with
me. I don't find that out until I watch it on the DVR.
It's like, that's the kind of thing that, if you see disinformation, you
can't just then say, 'oh, my God, look at this thing.
Look at this thing that I really hate.'
Facebook's influence goes far beyond U.S.
politics. In September of 2020, a Facebook data scientist wrote a memo to
the company after she was fired detailing how Facebook ignored election
manipulation and inauthentic activity around the world.
Sophie Zhang wrote, 'in the three years I've spent at Facebook, I found
multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our
platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry.
I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents
without oversight and taken action to enforce against so many prominent
politicians globally that I've lost count.'
There is only so much that can be preempted for the 2020 election.
Facebook can learn from 2016 and 2018, but 2020 and beyond will continue
to uncover new vulnerabilities.
Some would say Facebook has largely shrugged off the responsibility to
take action to fix these vulnerabilities because it would mean major
changes to the platform.
There are many of us who are really trying to get through to Facebook to
really think about bolder steps of what you're going to do after November
3rd. And none of them are going to make Mark Zuckerberg comfortable.
Questions like, should you actually enforce some sort of a quiet period
where any post about voting results except for from very serious
waitlisted sources either can't happen at all or at least are afixed with
a label that says, you know, results aren't in yet.
Like it or not, Facebook is where many people find their news.
And Facebook has changed a lot since 2016.
According to Facebook, it's removed over 100 networks worldwide for
engaging in coordinated, inauthentic behavior like the fake Russian news
organization mentioned earlier.
It worked with 70 different third party fact checking partners and has
greatly increased its ad transparency.
But is Facebook and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, doing enough?
He has a huge responsibility on his shoulders to protect not just what
happens on November 3rd, but what happens afterwards.
And let's be clear, it's a responsibility he chose.
He chose to scale to the point of trying to dominate the entire world's
communication. That was his choice.
And as they say, with great power comes great responsibility.
It's going to be a mess.