5 ms·

I'm no fan of Facebook as a corporation but they seemed to handle the election interference situation about as best they could. The default stance for posts an

I'm no fan of Facebook as a corporation but they seemed to handle the election interference situation about as best they could. The default stance for posts and advertisements should always be to not censor, which is what happened. When they were presented with clear evidence of malicious advertising and accounts, they provided everything they knew about them to law enforcement and to Congress. And now they're proactively monitoring for future attempts.

viraptor 9y ago
> When they were presented with clear evidence of malicious advertising and accounts, they provided everything they knew about them to law enforcement and to Congress. I kind of agree. The issue of fake accounts and pushing propaganda was known for a long time. It's only when it became common knowledge / no longer possible to ignore that they reacted. There was no proactive monitoring it seems so it had to be pointed out to them by third parties. A cynical person could risk a guess they cared about active users - doesn't matter if human or not. They definitely could've done better.
ryandrake 9y ago
I'm not a fan either, but honestly--if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems much deeper than Facebook. What happened to the five whys and getting to the root cause of a problem? To any politician ready to crucify Facebook over Russians buying ads I ask: "What have you personally done to help separate money from politics?"
- RyanZAG 9y ago
  As a non-American, I haven't understood why this issue is about Russians to start with. Aren't there many countries who donated large sums of money to American politics [1]? Also if Russian adverts are having such a huge effect on American politics, why are Russian adverts different to political adverts bought by non-Russians? Any advert is obviously bought with the intent to swing the election in favor of company purchasing that advert - likely for malicious intent by many. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign-charity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clint...
  - ssijak 9y ago
    Well, if for example Saudi king donates you tens of millions of dollars to your campaign [1] and you win thats perfectly fine, but you lost and then 500k of funny ads bought by some bogus/fake companies is in your words why you lost. Not even funny. And saying facebook is part of it is even more stupid. On the other hand I never understood why for US citizens it is perfectly fine for political persons to receive millions in donations from corporations. Where I come from that is considered bribery by default and that politician would be in problem. [1] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/25/why-did-the-saudi-regime-and-other-gulf-tyrannies-donate-millions-to-the-clinton-foundation/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/25/why-did-the-saudi-regime...
    - ern 9y ago
      Well, if for example Saudi king donates you tens of millions of dollars to your campaign I feel compelled to fact check this. There article you linked to discusses the Clinton Foundation, not the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
  - imron 9y ago
    > I haven't understood why this issue is about Russians to start with The democrats needed someone to be a scapegoat for their loss, and it was more convenient to look outward rather than inward.
    - ern 9y ago
      I’ve asked this question before, but doesn’t it arouse ones curiosity that the Russians spent money on the ads? Why would they have done that if they didn’t believe it would have made a difference to the election?
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        > "Why would they have [spent money on the ads] if they didn’t believe it would have made a difference to the election?" Because, even though it likely didn't make a difference in determining the election winner, it has successfully created a lot of internal fighting in America. Very effective and such a low cost!
- jabretti 9y ago
  Let's face it, Russians buying ads on facebook was never what swayed the election, it never came close (if it even happened). It's just a bizarre narrative that the DNC seems to have settled on in order to avoid any serious analysis of why their candidate didn't win the election. Was it that they chose a bad candidate? Or maybe their policies are unpopular? Nope, it's definitely because a few Russian IPs spent a few thousand dollars on a bizarre and inconsistent collection of rather silly ads including the "buff Bernie Sanders colouring book" one. Incidentally, one of the less noted features of the 2016 US election was that it actually disproved a lot of what is often said about money in politics, because the Clinton campaign outspent the Trump campaign by roughly two to one, and still lost. Political ads simply don't seem to be all that effective, at least not at the Presidential level.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    Not just the DNC: The Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, CBS News, CNN, BuzzFeed. It seemed like many news directors briefly had a public mea culpa moment after the election, but then decided to abandon that and launched full steam into the "fake news" narrative a few days later. Look at that term's Google Trend curve. November 13, 2016 initial spike and it hasn't left us: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202017-11-19&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202...
  - viraptor 9y ago
    > Nope, it's definitely because a few Russian IPs spent a few thousand dollars on... This is called false dichotomy. The reasons are not exclusive. Acknowledging the issue of bought, foreign influence does not negate internal failures in the DNC. You can find multiple cases of analysis of how the fake information spread from the originating accounts to "normal" users who continued to forward it. Even if it didn't tip the scales, it should be fixed before worse damage is done the same way in the future.
- netsharc 9y ago
  Facebook has become the web for many people, their only source of information. Tragically it also has a filter bubble, and the "hackers" (Russia? Cambridge Analytica?) Have managed to fill some people's bubbles with misinformation. Considering they targeted the "low-information" voters (i.e. idiots) of crucial districts of swing states, I consider it vote hacking, with the hacking being done on people's minds. And they targeted people's emotions, and it's very easy to influence people through emotions. And the web is now a place filled with emotion-bait ("He asked her to prom, you won't believe ehat happens next!"), which makes people addicts...
  - viraptor 9y ago
    > I consider it vote hacking, with the hacking being done on people's minds. Also known as psywar/psyops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
  - paulmd 9y ago
    It certainly doesn't help that around mid-2016 Facebook did away with their hand-curated Trending Topics feature and attempted to machine-learn trending topics. The new machine-learning approach was very susceptible to botnets spreading fake-news sites in a way that the old hand-curated topics were not, and this was exploited with botnets/etc. It was an extraordinarily bad time to test this feature in production with the Russian meddling that was taking place. But conservatives were whining that the "Trending News" section had a liberal bias, so it had to go. https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-un...
- ern 9y ago
  if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems much deeper than Facebook How’s this for a root cause: the Electoral College means that carefully targeting propaganda at a few voters in swing states can have an outsize influence on the outcome (a reverse “law of large numbers”?) Traditional controls on political advertising were ignored by foreign propagandists buying ads to sow division and political strife. It’s ironic that the US, despite its massive geostrategic advantages, allowed an enemy into its heartland in this way. The Electoral College isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and, regardless, solutions have to found before something worse happens (a faux social-media movement that, say, triggers a Constitutional Convention that leads to the breakup of the US would probably be a wet dream of foreign rivals).
  - paulmd 9y ago
    There is an easy fix to the Electoral College though. The number of electoral votes a state gets is equal to the number of senators plus the number of representatives it gets. The number of representatives has been fixed by statute at 435 for a century now, which has led to drastic decrease in the level of representation (more constituents per representative). All we need to do to fix the Electoral College is to bring those numbers a bit closer to historical norms. If you quadruple the number of reps, then the distribution of Eletoral College votes is going to resemble the underlying distribution of population a lot more closely. It should also help make gerrymandering a bit more difficult as a side benefit. The Senate has always been a poor idea right from the start (especially in its original conception as a body that is appointed by the state legislatures rather than elected) but there's really not a lot we can do about it at this point. It's essentially been a regressive and negative force on American politics right from its conception. The Electoral College, however, is trivially fixable even without an action like the National Popular Vote Compact. We literally just need to crank up the number of reps and it stops being an issue (even if the root problem isn't actually solved).
- smsm42 9y ago
  > if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems No, people persuading other people by showing them arguments is called "debate" and if this happens and people can be swayed by it then USA has it excellent. It's when people can't be persuaded by any new information is when political process is dead and USA is in a huge trouble. What you probably wanted to say if "if presidential election could be swayed by a tiny number of foreign trolls with a budget of 0.01% of candidate's electoral budgets, showing idiotic ads betraying no understanding of actual politics" - and the good news it could not be, it's just a lie. > To any politician ready to crucify Facebook over Russians buying ads I would ask this politician "why you are doing your job so badly that a Russian troll drawing silly pictures on Facebook can boot you from your seat? If you delivered any real value to your electorate, that couldn't happen. You are the problem, it's it time for you to leave?".

viraptor 9y ago

> When they were presented with clear evidence of malicious advertising and accounts, they provided everything they knew about them to law enforcement and to Congress. I kind of agree. The issue of fake accounts and pushing propaganda was known for a long time. It's only when it became common knowledge / no longer possible to ignore that they reacted. There was no proactive monitoring it seems so it had to be pointed out to them by third parties. A cynical person could risk a guess they cared about active users - doesn't matter if human or not. They definitely could've done better.

ryandrake 9y ago

I'm not a fan either, but honestly--if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems much deeper than Facebook. What happened to the five whys and getting to the root cause of a problem? To any politician ready to crucify Facebook over Russians buying ads I ask: "What have you personally done to help separate money from politics?"

RyanZAG 9y ago
As a non-American, I haven't understood why this issue is about Russians to start with. Aren't there many countries who donated large sums of money to American politics [1]? Also if Russian adverts are having such a huge effect on American politics, why are Russian adverts different to political adverts bought by non-Russians? Any advert is obviously bought with the intent to swing the election in favor of company purchasing that advert - likely for malicious intent by many. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign-charity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clint...
- ssijak 9y ago
  Well, if for example Saudi king donates you tens of millions of dollars to your campaign [1] and you win thats perfectly fine, but you lost and then 500k of funny ads bought by some bogus/fake companies is in your words why you lost. Not even funny. And saying facebook is part of it is even more stupid. On the other hand I never understood why for US citizens it is perfectly fine for political persons to receive millions in donations from corporations. Where I come from that is considered bribery by default and that politician would be in problem. [1] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/25/why-did-the-saudi-regime-and-other-gulf-tyrannies-donate-millions-to-the-clinton-foundation/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/25/why-did-the-saudi-regime...
  - ern 9y ago
    Well, if for example Saudi king donates you tens of millions of dollars to your campaign I feel compelled to fact check this. There article you linked to discusses the Clinton Foundation, not the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
- imron 9y ago
  > I haven't understood why this issue is about Russians to start with The democrats needed someone to be a scapegoat for their loss, and it was more convenient to look outward rather than inward.
  - ern 9y ago
    I’ve asked this question before, but doesn’t it arouse ones curiosity that the Russians spent money on the ads? Why would they have done that if they didn’t believe it would have made a difference to the election?
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      > "Why would they have [spent money on the ads] if they didn’t believe it would have made a difference to the election?" Because, even though it likely didn't make a difference in determining the election winner, it has successfully created a lot of internal fighting in America. Very effective and such a low cost!
jabretti 9y ago
Let's face it, Russians buying ads on facebook was never what swayed the election, it never came close (if it even happened). It's just a bizarre narrative that the DNC seems to have settled on in order to avoid any serious analysis of why their candidate didn't win the election. Was it that they chose a bad candidate? Or maybe their policies are unpopular? Nope, it's definitely because a few Russian IPs spent a few thousand dollars on a bizarre and inconsistent collection of rather silly ads including the "buff Bernie Sanders colouring book" one. Incidentally, one of the less noted features of the 2016 US election was that it actually disproved a lot of what is often said about money in politics, because the Clinton campaign outspent the Trump campaign by roughly two to one, and still lost. Political ads simply don't seem to be all that effective, at least not at the Presidential level.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  Not just the DNC: The Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, CBS News, CNN, BuzzFeed. It seemed like many news directors briefly had a public mea culpa moment after the election, but then decided to abandon that and launched full steam into the "fake news" narrative a few days later. Look at that term's Google Trend curve. November 13, 2016 initial spike and it hasn't left us: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202017-11-19&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202...
- viraptor 9y ago
  > Nope, it's definitely because a few Russian IPs spent a few thousand dollars on... This is called false dichotomy. The reasons are not exclusive. Acknowledging the issue of bought, foreign influence does not negate internal failures in the DNC. You can find multiple cases of analysis of how the fake information spread from the originating accounts to "normal" users who continued to forward it. Even if it didn't tip the scales, it should be fixed before worse damage is done the same way in the future.
netsharc 9y ago
Facebook has become the web for many people, their only source of information. Tragically it also has a filter bubble, and the "hackers" (Russia? Cambridge Analytica?) Have managed to fill some people's bubbles with misinformation. Considering they targeted the "low-information" voters (i.e. idiots) of crucial districts of swing states, I consider it vote hacking, with the hacking being done on people's minds. And they targeted people's emotions, and it's very easy to influence people through emotions. And the web is now a place filled with emotion-bait ("He asked her to prom, you won't believe ehat happens next!"), which makes people addicts...
- viraptor 9y ago
  > I consider it vote hacking, with the hacking being done on people's minds. Also known as psywar/psyops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
- paulmd 9y ago
  It certainly doesn't help that around mid-2016 Facebook did away with their hand-curated Trending Topics feature and attempted to machine-learn trending topics. The new machine-learning approach was very susceptible to botnets spreading fake-news sites in a way that the old hand-curated topics were not, and this was exploited with botnets/etc. It was an extraordinarily bad time to test this feature in production with the Russian meddling that was taking place. But conservatives were whining that the "Trending News" section had a liberal bias, so it had to go. https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-un...
ern 9y ago
if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems much deeper than Facebook How’s this for a root cause: the Electoral College means that carefully targeting propaganda at a few voters in swing states can have an outsize influence on the outcome (a reverse “law of large numbers”?) Traditional controls on political advertising were ignored by foreign propagandists buying ads to sow division and political strife. It’s ironic that the US, despite its massive geostrategic advantages, allowed an enemy into its heartland in this way. The Electoral College isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and, regardless, solutions have to found before something worse happens (a faux social-media movement that, say, triggers a Constitutional Convention that leads to the breakup of the US would probably be a wet dream of foreign rivals).
- paulmd 9y ago
  There is an easy fix to the Electoral College though. The number of electoral votes a state gets is equal to the number of senators plus the number of representatives it gets. The number of representatives has been fixed by statute at 435 for a century now, which has led to drastic decrease in the level of representation (more constituents per representative). All we need to do to fix the Electoral College is to bring those numbers a bit closer to historical norms. If you quadruple the number of reps, then the distribution of Eletoral College votes is going to resemble the underlying distribution of population a lot more closely. It should also help make gerrymandering a bit more difficult as a side benefit. The Senate has always been a poor idea right from the start (especially in its original conception as a body that is appointed by the state legislatures rather than elected) but there's really not a lot we can do about it at this point. It's essentially been a regressive and negative force on American politics right from its conception. The Electoral College, however, is trivially fixable even without an action like the National Popular Vote Compact. We literally just need to crank up the number of reps and it stops being an issue (even if the root problem isn't actually solved).
smsm42 9y ago
> if a presidential election can actually be swayed by "people buying ads on Facebook" then the USA has problems No, people persuading other people by showing them arguments is called "debate" and if this happens and people can be swayed by it then USA has it excellent. It's when people can't be persuaded by any new information is when political process is dead and USA is in a huge trouble. What you probably wanted to say if "if presidential election could be swayed by a tiny number of foreign trolls with a budget of 0.01% of candidate's electoral budgets, showing idiotic ads betraying no understanding of actual politics" - and the good news it could not be, it's just a lie. > To any politician ready to crucify Facebook over Russians buying ads I would ask this politician "why you are doing your job so badly that a Russian troll drawing silly pictures on Facebook can boot you from your seat? If you delivered any real value to your electorate, that couldn't happen. You are the problem, it's it time for you to leave?".