What is our action plan against foreign interference?
facebook.com
facebook.com
There ads would be filterable, so that someone viewing the database could filter based on the same criteria that Facebook allows advertisers to target. So if I search "non-college educated white males over the age of 40 in Midwestern suburbia", I get a complete overview of what these people have been shown. If I come across a nefarious advertiser, I can also filter to see what other campaigns they've run and who they've targeted.
Transparency, solved. Now the responsibility to police the ads becomes somewhat shared and it's easy to imagine watchdog groups monitoring different types of campaigns looking for bad actors.
I think Facebook does not want to be evil, if the rules are the same for their competitors too they might be convinced to implement deep changes like this one.
The alternative, which they will really not want, is that they are ultimately made liable for the defamation, paid disinformation campaigns and other forms of injustice they facilitate, in every jurisdiction where they operate.
Well, first thing I think is how to convince the host of those ads to make this kind of information public.
I mean, if I knew that ad is targeting me, I will probably be more cation towards it and thus reduce it's effectiveness. I don't think Facebook or anyone in the business want that to happen.
So, in order to implement that kind of transparency, you need law and government to enforce them across all online ad services, rather than depends on self-discipline of some certain company.
However, that may come with their own problem, for example, it will increase government's control on online content displaying.
Truly a hard problem isn't?
I think another side-effect here is that it could turn the act of buying advertising into an arms race, where those buying advertising are forced to monitor their competitor's advertising buys since they know that their competitors are doing it to them.
Just the US or to all governments?
Will this transparency be available to the Russians? Saudi Arabians? Egyptians? Nigerians? Brits? French? Iranians?
Even though all nations interfere in everyone's business,the undisputed number one interferer in others countries business is the United States government.
Anything short of of making these tools available to everyone would position Facebook as an agent/agency of the US Government.
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As an aside, the Russia brouhaha is a ridiculous sideshow led by people who are yet to come to terms of defeat. If a Less than a million dollars of Facebook ads shown to a few thousand people can determine who becomes president in the US, then there is a much bigger problem.
But we all know that's not the case.
Do we know that that’s all that happened? Or is this just the tip of the ice berg.
>Anything short of of making these tools available to everyone would position Facebook as an agent/agency of the US Government.
Facebook is an American company. So is Apple and Google. Even if they are not legally bound to serve the interests of the country, their employees are overwhelmingly American and probably patriotic and so we have to expect that when push comes to shove the interests of the US will come first.
85% of Facebook users are outside the United States. Taking the position of "when push comes to shove, we work for the US government" is probably not the best way to be seen.
There is nothing stopping them to be equally transparent for everyone while keeping the laws of every jurisdiction in which they operate.
It isn't even "US government". It is a part of US government that is gripped by paranoia-of-the-day and wants to grab powers Constitution does not give then, because paranoia is excellent grounds for power-grabbing.
There's a lot of folks to advertise to on this side of the pond, and we're having elections to ;)
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
How is that a moral justification?
Even if we might expect it, it does not make the fact any better.
You're sounding as if Facebook were a global site and not just American company caring only about American controversy-of-the-day...
> If a Less than a million dollars of Facebook ads shown to a few thousand people can determine who becomes president in the US, then there is a much bigger problem.
"If". It is obviously not the case, but it's much easier to scream "Russians stole our presidency" than own up to actual mistakes made. Especially if one of the mistakes would sound like "selecting me as a candidate"...
Eek. Those fact-checking sites are staffed by underpaid, inexperienced, 20-somethings with their own ideological bent. These young staffers aren't doing any investigative work - they just sit there and google stuff. Not to mention the fact that those sites have the same advertising pressures as other sites (incentive is for click-bait articles). Let's not go overboard with treating them as some sort of a gold-standard.
Speaking of, does Facebook censor Al Jazeera? It is foreign State run media that often runs English language stories tinged with Anti-Western agitprop.
Their drive to limit clickbait is at least noble, though we'll see what that means in practice. Some of the worst clickbait offenders are none other than the large US media institutions themselves, from NYTimes, to WaPo, to Vice and BuzzFeed.
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.
To any politician ready to crucify Facebook over Russians buying ads I ask: "What have you personally done to help separate money from politics?"
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clint...
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...
I feel compelled to fact check this. There article you linked to discusses the Clinton Foundation, not the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
There is some measure of transparency in politician donations and ads. However a foreign government covertly working to influence an election would be interpreted as a hostile act in most countries (and yes, the fact that US does this does smack of hypocrisy). Incidentally, your link doesn’t mention foreign donations to the election campaign of the candidate in question (these things are carefully monitored in most first-world democracies), and if there was any evidence of money being funneled from the foundation to the election campaign, I’m sure it’d have been front page news already.
No, foreigners donating to political campaigns or issue-advocacy groups (PACs), or engaging in electioneering or electioneering communications is illegal.
Hence why it's a big deal that Facebook was letting Russians engage in electioneering - if they had attempted to purchase this advertising at, say, a local TV or radio station they would have been denied, but Facebook let them do it. Even if they added sufficient shell companies and lied their way through, the act would still have been logged and disclosed as all electioneering communications are - which again, Facebook was not doing.
Facebook may not fall neatly into the existing rules, though (I'm unclear) as those are mainly targeted at broadcast media. Thus they're trying to scramble to make a show of compliance to avoid actual regulation. But this is very clearly something that will happen again unless something is done.
http://classic.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/electioneering.sht...
I’m guessing it may just be cultural differences though
Yep. I am aware that in many countries, private political funding is entirely opaque, campaign finance laws are non-existent, and the lines between party and campaign, and party and state are non-existent. Fortunately the United States is not (yet) one of those countries.
Also while you stated that donations to political candidates is illegal, is it illegal to buy adverts for political candidates as a foreigner? I was under the impression it was not, but that adds an interesting twist. Who would be held guilty in this case? Would the USA government try to use extradition treaties to get a foreign national onto USA soil if they bought adverts for a candidate?
The donations to the foundation are disclosed, and the foundation is run for a well-defined charitable purpose, subject to strict governance, and is it not a personal slush fund (especially not this one, which is probably the most scrutinized in the US, for obvious reasons). The fact that it accepted donations from tyrannies is indeed unsavory, but it was well documented and voters would have been able to make decisions based on this. Voters could have made the same sorts of judgements on the international dealings of the candidate’s opponent (tax returns aside). The idea that these sorts of personal/business dealings (by both candidates) are equivalent to a hostile foreign power undertaking covert activities to influence the outcome of the election and sow internal discord is incongruous, to put it mildly.
Who would be held guilty in this case? Would the USA government try to use extradition treaties to get a foreign national onto USA soil if they bought adverts for a candidate
I’m sure that, once the current political climate calms, there will be severe consequences, with bipartisan agreement, to make it clear to foreign entities that this sort of activity is unwelcome. Also, I doubt FB’s implicit mea culpa in TFA would have been produced if they weren’t terrified.
The key fact to understand here is it did not, and literally zero evidence was shown that it had any effect at all. There is evidence the ads were run, but that's it. All the talk about "huge effect" is pure speculation which has no base in any observable fact.
The democrats needed someone to be a scapegoat for their loss, and it was more convenient to look outward rather than inward.
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!
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...
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-un...
Also known as psywar/psyops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
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?".
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).
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).
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.
Unsurprisingly, many of these measures align with zucc's motives to make Facebook the new Experian as the canonical owners of your 'identity' for business purposes.
1. Stop collecting data on people's political leaning
2. Stop allowing granular ad targeting which can reach people of certain political leaning and/or world view