Craig Timberg

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.

Gab has become the most visible of a collection of services catering to people mainstream companies such as Twitter and Facebook have rejected as too hateful, extreme or threatening in their posts as part of a crackdown on extremism.

Facebook announced that it had suspended 82 pages, groups and accounts that originated in Iran for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" and sharing divisive political messages, including opposition to President Donald Trump. The accounts -- some of which also had been removed from Facebook’s photo-sharing site, Instagram -- do not appear to have clear "ties to the Iranian government,” but Facebook could not say for certain who was behind them.

For two years, Alex Stamos was the Facebook executive tasked with defending the company’s systems against Russian interference and other critical threats. Now the former chief security officer, who left the social network in Aug, says Facebook — and the entire technology industry — needs a systems of checks and balances to help it weigh the complex decisions Silicon Valley companies are making in areas including security and democratic expression.

Online advertising systems regularly put mainstream ads alongside content from the political fringes — and dollars in the pockets of those producing polarizing and politically charged headlines. This mismatch of online content and ads, which digital advertising companies have been working to fix, goes to the heart of how the Internet economy works. Tens of billions of dollars are at stake in the promises of online ad systems to match advertising pitches with receptive targets.

Racist and anti-Semitic content has surged on shadowy social media platforms — spiking around President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day and the “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville (VA) — spreading hate speech and extremist views to mainstream audiences, according to a recent analysis. The findings, from a newly formed group of scientists named the Network Contagion Research Institute who studied hundreds of millions of social media messages, bolster a growing body of evidence about how extremist speech online can be fueled by real-world events.

Technology giants increasingly are casting themselves as defenders of online integrity as American democracy, yet again, comes under attack. A recent string of revelations from companies including Facebook, Microsoft and Google about foreign hacking and disinformation amount to a public answer to charges that the technology industry should have done more to thwart Russia’s online attacks in 2016.

Housing Sec Ben Carson accused Facebook of enabling illegal housing discrimination by giving landlords and developers advertising tools that made it easy to exclude people based on race, gender, zip code or religion -- or whether a potential renter has young children at home or a personal disability. The action, which comes after nearly two years of preliminary investigation, amounts to a formal legal complaint against the company and starts a process that could culminate in a federal lawsuit against Facebook.

At least three groups that Facebook banned recently for spreading disinformation shared similar names and traits with Twitter accounts that had been linked publicly to Russia earlier this year, underscoring the challenges of swiftly shutting down a foreign influence campaign even once strong hints emerge of who is behind it. Facebook’s handling of the situation underscores the nation’s struggles to respond to credible reports of disinformation two years after the first signs that Russians were seeking to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts. They say that voting systems are more secure against hackers, thanks to action at the federal and state levels — and that the Russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016. But Russian efforts to manipulate U.S.