Elections and Media

[Commentary] Every day a new front emerges in Big Tech’s battle against fake news. Signs of trouble reared their head during the election, when hyper-partisan misinformation began materializing on Facebook. Months later it became known that many of these sites had been weaponized in a larger misinformation campaign spearheaded by external players, including the Russian government.

While they make head nods toward trying to fix the misinformation problem, the tech giants refuse to own up to these issues–citing the privacy of their clients and their own proprietary ad systems. While it may seem noble that the big tech companies are taking up the charge, their current attempts will likely produce little effect. The problem rests in the very advertising systems these companies created. No amount of content tagging or ad category de-incentivizing is going to stop the beast unless a bigger upheaval begins to take root.

[Cale is a Brooklyn-based reporter.]

How the Kremlin built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century — and why it may be impossible to stop.

Apparently, Russia’s effort to influence US voters through Facebook and other social media is a “red-hot” focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election and possible links to President Donald Trump’s associates. Mueller’s team of prosecutors and FBI agents is zeroing in on how Russia spread fake and damaging information through social media and is seeking additional evidence from companies like Facebook and Twitter about what happened on their networks, said one of the officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the ongoing investigation. The ability of foreign nations to use social media to manipulate and influence elections and policy is increasingly seen as the soft underbelly of international espionage, another official said, because it doesn’t involve the theft of state secrets and the US doesn’t have a ready defense to prevent such attacks.

[Commentary] The Sept. 9 Digest item “Ex-IRS official won’t be charged in scandal” noted that the ex-Internal Revenue Service official will not be charged in the “mistreatment of conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections.” However, the real big scandal here is the undermining of our democratic process by the IRS fostering a tsunami of “dark money” in our elections.

With the decision in Citizens United, our elections have been swamped by an increased flood of money, but the Supreme Court’s decision was based on the premise that the electorate would be informed as to who was trying to influence it and could then make its own decision. That is not the case with the IRS procedure here, which does not require any transparency as to the identity of the true donors. The names given, such as Crossroads GPS and Organizing for Action, lack such transparency. While the Communications Act and long- established Federal Communications Commission rules require disclosure of the identity of the sponsors in political or controversial-issue ads, the FCC has failed to enforce the act or rules. That is the scandal, and it applies to the FCC under its present chairman and his predecessor.

President Donald Trump is a symptom of a media environment based on short attention spans that is making the world stupider, one of the founders of Twitter has said. Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of the network, said Trump’s election highlighted a wider issue about how social media platforms were helping to “dumb the entire world down” and undermining our sense of truth. Earlier in 2017 President Trump said he would not be president if it “wasn’t for Twitter”. Williams was asked whether President Trump’s prolific use of Twitter had given him pause for thought, during an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He replied: “The much bigger issue is not Donald Trump using Twitter that got him elected, even if he says so; it is the quality of the information we consume that is reinforcing dangerous beliefs and isolating people and limiting people’s open-mindedness and respect for truth.”

Many of Hillary Clinton's supporters identify one culprit more than others in the 2016 outcome: the media. Clinton herself points a finger in that direction in her new book, “What Happened,” according to an excerpt published at the Hill. “Many in the political media don’t want to hear about how these things happened and how these things tipped the election in the final days,” Clinton writes. “They say their beef is that I’m not taking responsibility for my mistakes — but I have and I do again throughout this book. Their real problem is they can’t bear to face their own role in helping elect Trump, from providing him free airtime to giving my emails three times more coverage than all the issues affecting people’s lives combined.”

The first point there is fair. By the end of the campaign, Donald Trump had been the beneficiary of the equivalent of some $5 billion in free advertising, according to the media tracking firm mediaQuant. Some of that was a function of the live coverage of Trump’s rallies, which often ran without interruption on cable news, particularly in the early days of the campaign. But much of that free coverage was also a function of online coverage, often driven by his tweets. In May 2016, as the Street notes, Trump generated nearly $200 million in free media attention — largely thanks to his weird tweet about taco bowls. It’s also worth noting that Clinton, too, was the beneficiary of free coverage. MediaQuant estimates that she was the beneficiary of $3.24 billion in free media coverage — or, as it’s known in political campaigns, earned media. Politicians work to get this free coverage. It’s part of the process. And Trump earned more than Clinton.

We now know that a Russian organization spent two years trying to influence American voters using Facebook. Here are the questions Facebook has yet to answer and why it matters:
What were the demographics of the users who saw the ads, and how were they targeted?
What were the 470 accounts connected to the ad campaign?
What was in the ads, and what types of ads were they?
Was there any overlap between the content used by the Russian campaign and other known campaigns?

Russian operatives hiding behind false identities used Facebook’s event management tool to remotely organize and promote political protests in the US, including an August 2016 anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the social-media giant “shut down several promoted events as part of the takedown we described last week.” The company declined to elaborate, except to confirm that the events were promoted with paid ads. (This is the first time the social media giant has publicly acknowledged the existence of such events.)

The Facebook events—one of which echoed Islamophobic conspiracy theories pushed by pro-Trump media outlets—are the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action.

The FBI recently questioned a former White House correspondent for Sputnik, the Russian-government-funded news agency, as part of an investigation into whether it is acting as an undeclared propaganda arm of the Kremlin in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). As part of the probe, the bureau has obtained a thumb drive containing thousands of internal Sputnik e-mails and documents — material that could potentially help prosecutors build a case that the news agency played a role in the Russian government “influence campaign” that was waged during last year’s presidential election and, in the view of US intelligence officials, is still ongoing.

The e-mails were turned over by Andrew Feinberg, the news agency’s former White House correspondent, who had downloaded the material onto his laptop before he was fired in May. He confirmed that he was questioned for more than two hours on Sept. 1 by an FBI agent and a Justice Department national security lawyer at the bureau’s Washington field office. Feinberg said the interview was focused on Sputnik’s “internal structure, editorial processes and funding.” “They wanted to know where did my orders come from and if I ever got any direction from Moscow,” Feinberg said. “They were interested in examples of how I was steered towards covering certain issues.”

[Commentary] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should publicly testify under oath before Congress on his company’s capabilities to influence the political process, be it Russian meddling or anything else. If the company is as powerful as it promises advertisers, it should be held accountable. And if it’s not, then we need to stop fretting so much about it. Either way, threats to entire societies should be reckoned with publicly by those very societies and not confined to R&D labs and closed-door briefings. If democracy can be gamed from a laptop, that shouldn’t be considered a trade secret.