-Facebook's purpose was to connect people.
-Then, you can browse around and see who people's friends
are and just check out people's online identities.
-Google's was to share information.
-We have a tremendous ability and responsibility
to provide people the right information.
-Twitter's, to encourage public discourse.
-Never before have we had such access
to that immediate information.
-But, then, business models evolved and platforms grew.
-Now, we're at 100,000 people,
so, who knows where we're goin' next?
-Facebook, which announced today
that it had signed up its 500 millionth user.
-So, are you gonna add me as a friend?
-The business world is salivating
over the possibility of a public stock offering, an IPO.
-Their research project turned into
a much-praised search engine.
It is called Google.
-Have you Googled her yet? -Willow, she's 17.
-It's a search engine.
-Shares are up more than 1,700% in those 12 years.
-Many believe Jack Dorsey is the intellectual successor to Jobs.
-I think Twitter remains the first draft of history,
which is pretty important.
-But then, unintended and troubling consequences followed.
-Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
-Now facing a firestorm.
-About Russia's attempts to meddle in the 2016 election.
-Purchasing ads that reached millions of Americans.
-Designed to create divisions on a whole range of topics,
including immigration, gun control, and race.
-Fake accounts created by Moscow reached more Americans
than the total number of US citizens who voted.
-So, just to be clear, you're not going to sell,
or share, any of the information on Facebook?
-What the terms say is just
we're not gonna share people's information.
-But how are you going to make money,
if you won't sell or share people's information?
-The model's advertising. -In 2012 and 2013,
social media usage was skyrocketing.
Facebook had a billion users.
There were over 100 billion Google searches per month.
By 2014, the tech giants had acquired smaller companies,
including advertising exchanges and services,
like YouTube and Instagram.
-So they became even more central to our attention.
And then, also, they were creating
new tools for advertisers
so that advertisers could reach people
with even more precision and even more targeting.
-Those tools included services like Facebook's
Lookalike Audiences and Custom Audiences,
both of which launched in 2013.
They allowed advertisers to target individuals
with tailor-made messaging.
-Social media's a very different kind of animal.
You can target it at exactly who you want to.
You can figure out what their interests and biases might be,
what race someone is, what age group someone is,
where they live, and you can deliver exactly the message
to those folks that is most likely to persuade them.
-You just enter the amount of money
that you're willing to spend
and we'll make sure to put those ads
in front of the best candidates to receive them,
both in terms of your targeting choices
and Facebook's own algorithm.
Other platforms offer the same capability:
Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat.
It's become the industry standard.
-The platforms were able to directly capitalize on the data
consumers gave them in order to help companies
target those same people with ads.
-You can do that if you're selling a new energy drink
or you can do that if you're trying to disrupt an election.
The techniques are the same.
-And that is exactly what Russia did.
They used digital tools to try to influence an election.
Jacob Shapiro is a professor at Princeton University
who wrote about trends in foreign influence
efforts in elections.
-We define a foreign influence effort as one state targeting
another, on social media, in a manner that is intended
to appear organic to the target state.
So, for us, what was important was not
that the information was fake or real.
What was important to us is that it was one state reaching out
and trying to create content
which looked like it was coming from another state.
-Shapiro found the Russians started foreign influence
efforts masked
as digital campaigns all over the world.
Starting in 2014, a troll farm,
known as the Internet Research Agency,
or the IRA, promoted propaganda on social media in the US.
-You know, you had hundreds of people.
They worked on different things: financial offices.
They had graphics offices. They had engagement teams.
And so, in a way, it looks like any kinda startup
anywhere in the world.
-By 2016, they had started
more than 20 campaigns in 13 countries.
40% of those campaigns were on Facebook.
Nearly 90% were on Twitter.
They were on fake websites, Reddit, WhatsApp,
and Russian-controlled media;
basically, anywhere that digital content could be spread.
-So there was a sort of sophisticated understanding of
who uses the platforms, what they use them for,
and what messages might resonate best on those platforms.
And then, how to use the targeting capabilities
of those platforms
to test and hone messages with greater effectiveness.
All the same things that a good marketer would do.
-And, just as the IRA had fully ramped up its efforts,
Google and Facebook sharpened
how precisely individual users could be targeted.
-The degree of precision that was possible
became basically ready for primetime
just as we were going into the peak of the election season.
-Russia didn't just target people on social media.
Russian military intelligence, often referred to as the GRU,
tried to push propaganda into the larger media ecosystem.
What they would do is they would plant a seed of a story.
That story would be repeated by other media properties
would pick it up, so there would be this like chain of citation.
The GRU created fake think tanks and alternative news sites
to help plant false stories.
They created fake online accounts to author
and amplify this content.
-Instead of trying to get a real sympathetic person
to write your story for you,
you can just create a fake persona.
-The GRU also strategically leaked
and hacked information to WikiLeaks
and direct-messaged journalists
at opportune moments of the 2016 campaign.
-This just in to CNN: Russian hackers managed
to infiltrate the computer network
at the Democratic National Committee.
-We know Clinton's dealing with some new email leaks,
her own campaign woes there,
following the third dump, really, of hacked emails.
-You can't separate propaganda from the kind
of infrastructure that's putting it out.
So, social platforms are really great for targeted,
niche content, but, if you wanna reach the entirety of a country,
get all of a country talking about a particular thing,
this is where you start to see the role of mainstream media
in shaping the conversation around those materials.
-So the GRU used sensationalism to engage traditional media,
while the IRA targeted voters on social media platforms.
Effectively, they worked toward the same goal,
using different strategies.
-The president-elect of the United States of America,
Donald Trump.
-Ladies and gentlemen, the president-elect
of the United States, Donald John Trump.
-Blockbuster charges today from the special counsel
investigating Russia's election interference.
-The indictment charges 12 Russian military officers
by name
for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
-What has Google done to make sure this doesn't happen again?
-Our efforts have been pretty successful, so far, Google,
as a whole, through both our election cycles,
but it's an area where it's never enough.
-We didn't do enough to prevent these tools
from being used for harm as well.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility,
and that was a big mistake.
-We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped
for the immensity of the problems
that we've acknowledged:
abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda,
through bots and human coordination,
misinformation campaigns, and divisive filter bubbles.
-Facebook estimated around 126 million people
may have seen content from an IRA page.
They also identified 170 Instagram accounts
that posted 120,000 pieces of content
during the 2016 campaign.
Twitter announced it identified 3,814 IRA-controlled accounts
and notified 1point4 million people
they may have been in contact with one of them.
Propaganda articles were published
on at least 142 alternative media outlets.
The social media companies removed accounts
that were being run by foreign operatives.
They built partnerships with fact checkers
and they instituted voluntary policies to label political ads.
But the Russian operations didn't stop there.
-When the social media platforms tried to start detecting it
and start to crack down on fake accounts, through 2018,
you see a shift in the Russian efforts
towards lower-volume, higher-quality content.
-We see them making up less content and, instead,
using inauthentic means to amplify domestic voices.
-They've adopted the hashtags which are already there.
This is where the real soul searching needs
to happen in the West.
Because, if there weren't American trolls,
the Russian trolls wouldn't have anybody to pretend to be.
And so, it's people in our own countries
who are creating the environment
and creating the kind of vitriolic rhetoric
which, then, foreign actors can manipulate
and which they can imitate.
-What we've seen in military planning documents
coming out of Russia is this idea that we're gonna go
after the internal coherence of the enemy.
-And so success for Russia means undermining
the most trusted American institutions:
the government, the justice system,
the media, however and wherever possible.
-We assess that foreign actors will view the 2020 US elections
as an opportunity to advance their interests.
-Nearly a billion dollars has been spent on Facebook
and Google political ads in the US since May of 2018.
Targeted advertising is still offered
on every major social platform.
While tech companies have made efforts at transparency
and blocking foreign interference,
no new regulations or laws have been implemented
to govern digital political advertising as a whole.
-We need to assume that these sorts of tactics
are going to be with us, essentially, forever.
The responsibility to do better
certainly lays with the companies.
To some extent, it lays with the government.
It also rests with all of us to be more skeptical
consumers of the information that reaches us.
-The Russians weaponized social media in the 2016 election.
Social media companies and policymakers
have tried to respond.
The question is whether a new startup, Russian or otherwise,
will seek to exploit new vulnerabilities
in the 2020 election that have not yet been identified
or have not yet been addressed.