A thought provoking piece at Vanity Fair looks at the role that Facebook, Twitter and social media more generally played in Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Among other things, it raises the question of why no one at these companies noticed the suspicious activities of foreign agents. Facebook can follow my shopping habits, but it did notice the buying activities of agents working in Moscow? With Robert Mueller now having secured search warrants of some of the suspicious foreign accounts, one cannot help but hope that changes will be made to stop anything like this from happening again in the future. Ditto for hate groups using the platforms to spread hate, bigotry and intolerance. Here are highlights from the piece:
Twenty thousand six hundred and fifty-eight. That’s a pretty big number, especially when you consider that it’s the number of people who are currently employed by Facebook. Those 20,000 employees include insanely smart people with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and M.I.T., many of whom spend their days toiling away on various revenue products, particularly in advertising-technology features—or ad tech, as it’s known in the industry—that helped the company generate some $27.6 billion in total revenue last year.
So why is it that none of those employees noticed that Russian operatives were using Facebook to manipulate the U.S. electoral process? And why is it—months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, and after deadly protests in Charlottesville—that those workers allowed organizations to buy ads on the platform targeting people who searched for phrases such as “Jew haters”?
This ad-targeting mess has quickly become the Exxon Valdez of the Internet. Google, for its part, has 72,053 employees, many of whom are also working on smart algorithms to improve the company’s ad revenue, which accounts for 88 percent of its income. And yet, on Friday, BuzzFeed reported that Google allows groups to target ads toward people searching for racist phrases. So when people type in search queries like “Jewish parasite,” “black people ruin everything,” or “the evil Jew,” ads can potentially be served next to those keywords, and Google makes money off the transaction. The Daily Beast, meanwhile, also reported that Twitter allows people to target users on the platform who use the n-word and other putrid, disgusting, racist terms.
Since the election (and even leading up to it), it’s become abundantly clear that social media presented itself as a profoundly useful tool for the Russians, extremists, and possibly even people within the Trump campaign, to potentially disfigure our electoral process. Before Trump co-opted the term “fake news” to describe entirely accurate, if unfavorable, stories about him, real fake news was being created and proliferated at scale. Algorithms on Facebook didn’t work to try to stop this from happening, but rather to ensure that these fake stories landed right on the digital doorsteps of the people who might find them most interesting, and who might change their votes as a result of that content. Twitter’s problem with political bots has existed for as long as I can remember.
This might seem harmless on some level, but these accounts had been disseminating incredibly divisive (and oftentimes fake) stories about Brexit, Ukraine, and Syria, plus anti-immigration articles from outlets like Breitbart and excessively schismatic articles from the Daily Mail. The researcher also found that these accounts only tweeted between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Moscow time, and only during the week—almost as if it were someone’s job in Russia to do so. The accounts have tens of thousands of followers, and the suspected propagandists behind them stoked the flames of dissent by creating far-left bots which would go after Trump and his supporters.
Of course people are going to try to manipulate these technologies. The larger issue, however, is that these enormous, profoundly wealthy companies aren’t doing enough to stop them, and are not being held accountable. (Twitter and Facebook have attempted to crackdown on trolls in some ways since the election.) Curiously, Wall Street, which still remains oddly buoyant in the Trump era (it’s amazing what the rich will sacrifice for tax reform) is not chastising Silicon Valley for the extensive role it played in the mess we find ourselves in today. Facebook is worth $491 billion, despite months’ worth of news stories indicating it allowed Russian accounts to buy and target pages and ads on its network during the election, which estimates say could have reached 70 million Americans. Twitter’s stock, while bumpy, has barely moved since news definitively broke about all of the “fake Americans” that Russia created and operated on the social network during the election.
There are also reports that there is now a “red-hot” focus on social media by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election. But in both of these instances, there needs to be real consequences. It doesn’t take 20,000 employees to see the apathy and neglect these platforms have played, and continue to play, in the attacks against democracy by the people who want to see it fall.
