Facebook Knows More About Russia’s Election Meddling. Shouldn’t We?

>Here’s what we don’t know, at least not directly from Facebook:

>• What all of those ads looked like

>• What specific information – or disinformation — they were spreading

>• Who or what the accounts pretended to be

>• How many Americans interacted with the ads or the fake personae

>We also don’t know what geographical locations the alleged social media saboteurs were targeting (The regular list of swing states and counties? Or the most politically flammable fringes?) Facebook says that more of those ads ran in 2015 than in 2016, but not how many more.

>Nor has Facebook reported whether the people who were targeted were from specific demographic or philosophical groups — all of which means we really don’t know the full extent of the duping on Facebook, and maybe Facebook doesn’t either.

Couldn't it be the case that Facebook has given, or is in the process of giving, all of this information to the FBI? And perhaps the FBI does not want it publicized as it may affect an ongoing investigation? Also, it's pretty personal info: in the event that one or more of the ad buyers grouped into the list really was a private citizen with no affiliation to any government, is Facebook in the right to publicize who they are and which ads they purchased?

I want Mueller to know, and I want to know in a year, but I don't want Facebook to release the info now. Better to let the guilty parties remain uncertain about how much is known so that they make mistakes.

Wasn't about $2B spent on the election by each party?

If someone knew how to win an election with a $100k ad buy, they sure could have saved a lot of money. $100k is 0.00005 of a $2B budget.

Not if laws weren't broken with the meddling. Buying ads and making fake news sites isn't necessarily illegal, and we shouldn't expect FB to police something that's not illegal.

In the affiliate marketing world I've seen huge international affiliates set up 100s of proxies to arbitrage grey-market affiliate offers (supplements / financial services / bizop / etc) on FB's platform.

One stupidly effective and commonly used tactic to prevent FB from shutting the accounts down immediately was to run URL redirects based on known IP blocks from FB's compliance team, including 3rd party teams / etc - sort of an arms race.

I imagine with the budget and sophistication of Russia's digital team anything that's so far been detected by FB is the tip of the iceberg.

Facebook intentionally revealed that a small amount of money was spent by one firm via its ads platform.

In reality it is the news feed behavior that was exploited. Facebook can "fix" the ads platform by adding a bit more human vetting, but unless the behavior of the news feed is changed specifically to censor political content deemed objectionable by Facebook, the same basic PR strategy will work in the next election.

So we have to decide whether broad censorship over social media is what we really want.

There is also too much emphasis being placed on the foreignness of the ad-buyers. It's just as likely that in the next election some domestic entity will sponsor similar ads, since any foreign interests will have had time to establish domestic branches run by American citizens.

So we must ask again, do we really want censorship?

The solution, I think, is to allow the marketplace of ideas to function, and for all of us to make the extra effort needed to hold informed, reasoned opinions and to resist tribalism and the good guys vs bad guys mentality that plagues politics and political debate.

These losers that lost the battle of ideas really want to push a message that anything that goes against their narrative and interests automatically implies evil, criminality and debauchery. Nobody cares if people in Russia did things to influence US culture. People from different countries can speak to one another and exchange ideas. The only people who oppose this are authoritarians that want to shut down the discourse. All sides push propaganda, who cares if it comes from Russia? Why specifically is it "sabotage" and "meddling" when it comes from Russia? We are talking about internet ads that push a certain kind of ideology, not criminal acts. Hilary Clinton lost because she ran one of the most embarrassingly awful and out of touch election campaigns of all time. Even if Russia did push lies and manipulations, if it resulted in denying that terrible cow the presidency then ultimately it is still a good thing. The US should be easing sanctions on them because of this, not constantly berating them in the media.

Russia bought ads. The US flies over countries distributing propaganda for their favored candidate. Why is there a conflict?

So ... other countries are watching this carefully I assume. And waiting to hit Facebook with their own requests for similar ads run in their countries which were paid for in USD?

I am hoping, as an individual, for this to all come out because I expect the scope to be really interesting.

Can anyone summarise what Facebook are being accused of here? That they were careless not reviewing ads like these or something worse?

I'd be interested to know the content of the ads especially if people are claiming these somehow helped swing the election.

Its about time Facebook faced the music.

The giant tech companies have enjoyed eye-watering revenues thanks to the magic of network effects and the dopamine boost that social networking gives the human brain.

By keeping their support/human costs low, they've delivered massive profits.

Now we start to see the pushback. For Google, it was Europe's right to be forgotten.

Now for Facebook, its the concept that its simply not acceptable to allow hostile foreigners to use your platform to disrupt political debate.

Its time these guys paid their way. Their profits have always been fuelled by very deliberately staying away from this hard stuff. That can't go on.