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Facebook, Twitter Execs Admit Failures, Warn of 'Overwhelming' Threat To Elections (gizmodo.com)
Openly recognizing their companies' past failures in rare displays of modesty, Facebook and Twitter executives touted new efforts to combat state-sponsored propaganda across their platforms before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, acknowledging that the task is often "overwhelming" and proving a massive drain on their resources. Gizmodo: In opening remarks on Wednesday, Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, acknowledged that Facebook had been "too slow to act" in 2016 against the Kremlin-backed campaign that was designed to sow discord among American voters. "That's on us," she said, describing Moscow's meddling as "completely unacceptable" and a violation of Facebook's values "and of the country we love." "We're investing for the long term because security is never a finished job," Sandberg added, noting that Facebook has increased its security and communications staff to 20,000 people, doubling it over the past year. "Our adversaries are determined, creative, and well-funded," she said. "But we are even more determined -- and we will continue to fight back."
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, portrayed the matter as not just a threat to democracy, but as a threat to the overall health and security of his business, saying that above all else, Twitter's goal is to serve a "global public conversation." Dorsey also acknowledged a range of threats faced by his company, including widespread abuse, manipulation by foreign powers, and "malicious automation" (i.e., bots). "Any attempts to undermine the integrity of our service is antithetical to our fundamental rights," he said, calling freedom of expression a "core tenant" upon which the Twitter is based. Google, which was also asked to appear before the committee, chose not to do so. An empty chair was left at the table next to Sandberg and Dorsey to signify Google's absence.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, portrayed the matter as not just a threat to democracy, but as a threat to the overall health and security of his business, saying that above all else, Twitter's goal is to serve a "global public conversation." Dorsey also acknowledged a range of threats faced by his company, including widespread abuse, manipulation by foreign powers, and "malicious automation" (i.e., bots). "Any attempts to undermine the integrity of our service is antithetical to our fundamental rights," he said, calling freedom of expression a "core tenant" upon which the Twitter is based. Google, which was also asked to appear before the committee, chose not to do so. An empty chair was left at the table next to Sandberg and Dorsey to signify Google's absence.
Seems to me like they're a only one thing left to do. Shut them all down. Society will be better off without them.
The only current threat is THEIR censorship of political opposition who they are intolerant of.
Either they support free speech or they do not.
All this panic around social networks. Are these premature signs of America planning to build an internet wall instead of a Mexican one?
Its only a threat to elections if mindless twittees let themselves be influenced by tweets.
Oh yes russian interference is worst issue in the world because we support this vaguely anti-trump narrative... but let's not talk about how we shit on our user's privacy for profit because we are modest!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Suddenly these Irish companies pretend to care about America, the land that gave them everything to start their business. America is also the country they refuse to pay their fair share of taxes to, and the country who's political dysfunction they knowingly and intentionally made worse, while profiting by selling propaganda to their own userbase, purchased by foreign enemies. Spare me your crocodile tears. They only care that they got caught, since it puts their profits at risk to face additional regulation.
"We acknowledge our failure to totally silence US Conservatives (labeled as "state actors", "Nazis", "White Supremacists" etc for the convenience of this political purge) but promise to de-platform all opposition voices to Progressive viewpoints and politicians before the next election."
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So, Russia placed misinformation on social networks, and who do we believe that swayed? I've yet to see a single study, or even anyone claiming, those ads and fake news reports actually had an effect on the election, i.e., convinced voters to choose one candidate over another. Isn't that something that should be studied?
Seems to me, the only people who'd gravitate to the type of fake news and misinformation being put out during the 2016 campaign were those already staunchly in their political corners.
An honest effort to fight foreign state influence would be fine, I suppose, but as we know, this is being used as a Trojan horse for the tech executives to simply further their own political predilections.
(Also, if our elections could truly be determined by Facebook ads and tweets, we would be doomed anyway.)
Because as I understand the term, while certainly mischievous, I don't understand how it would necessarily increase the likelihood of one particular election result that I would ordinarily assume to be the case with actual election interference.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"Core tenet", not "core tenant." A tenant is someone that rents property.
When will Facebook act on the Left-stream media sowing discord with lies about police shootings; relentless attacks on the President; whitewashing of the criminals, especially of the immigrant variety and on and on?
The 24/7 attacks on Trump back in the 2015-2016 election season by the mass-media including by the NY Times partially owned by Carlos Slim (foreigner) is just fine but a handful of FB ads is the end of the world.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
Pose far less of a threat to the American election process than an ill-informed American populace.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
The US has a long history of meddling in foreign elections. The US also has a long history of broadcasting radio into the East Bloc. And under the First Amendment, Americans have a right to hear the views and speech of foreigners.
How about worrying about the activities of the US government vis-a-vis US citizens? This is what Edward Bernays, the founder of US public relations had to say, about US government propaganda:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country
And the CIA appears to have been manipulating news media in the US since the 1950s as part of Operation Mockingbird:
According to writer Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and oversaw the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed after a 1967 Ramparts magazine article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In the 1970s, Congressional investigations and reports also revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups. None of these reports, however, mentions an Operation Mockingbird coordinating or supporting these activities.
I guess we can add "uncontrollable propaganda outlet" to the litany of reasons why everyone should either disconnect entirely or drastically reduce social media consumption.
I must say this is a nice touch, and stab at Google.
AC comments get piped to
Agreed. I voted for Hillary because I quit Twitter and Facebook in 2015. My mind was not poisoned. I suggest everyone do the same.
Simple solution to the problems he causes for the USA, and coincidently also solution the problems he causes for the rest of us too. Putin's Russia is toying with psychological warfare, but they can't deal with actual warfare.
due to this nations failing educational system. The rise of Anti-vaxers and flat eathers tells you exactly where this country is headed...
What they are really saying is the peasants can't think for themselves and make the proper decision on voting. We're all sheep. The entire electorate can't figure out fact from fiction and we need gatekeepers to tell us how to vote. These people are absolutely dictatorial and insane.
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That's BS. If that was true they wouldn't ban so many thousands of users each day. My last Twitter account was created less than two weeks ago, and it's already been banned. I never even posted anything. I just clicked follow on a few friends.
One interpretation is that this is posterior covering: a first, subtle step toward moving this issue onto the government's shoulders, and thus off of theirs. As in many such cases, it could be another case of "be careful what you ask for; you might get it". Meaning politics and the government moving more directly into their business. They might have been better off actually doing something about their admitted failures and demonstrating progress rather than lip service.
"We can't control the narrative, this is horrible - the commoners can't be allowed to discuss things and vote!"
They just can't and won't ever admit that Hillary Clinton was pretty much the most unlikable candidate ever.
I said from the beginning she had zero chance of winning.
She will never be US president.
Thank God.
If you are using facebook or twitter, you are part of the problem. Get right with yourself and delete those accounts - your physical and mental health will improve greatly. Also, do your best to purge google from every corner of your life. These jerks got very rich because we let them farm us like vegetables. It's time to take back control of our data and stop letting them manipulate us.
I read their points as:
1) We are so important that Americans could not help but be influenced by our might.
2) Now that we are actually working on the problem our superior intellect will solve the problem easily.
2a) Subsidies and hand outs welcome, we are brilliant but underfunded.
The only current threat is THEIR censorship of political opposition who they are intolerant of.
Either they support free speech or they do not.
Unless Facebook and Twitter have been made public and are no longer private entities, they are not required to keep posted everything you write. They are corporate entities dealing with the public at large. They want to attract as large a public as possible to boost their incomes and help out their shareholders; sometimes that means removing things like hate speech that might otherwise make their platforms less desirable to certain demographics.
Facebook and Twitter aren't required to give you free speech.
And this should change.
That's the point everyone is making, that although it is perfectly legal that these sites are censoring whoever they like, that should change.
There's some legal precedent for this: when a shopping center is torn down and a mall built in its place, the mall can't prevent [otherwise legal] postings on its corkboard, because the mall has taken place of the supermarket public corkboard. Even though the mall is privately owned - the supermarket was also privately owned.
There's some legal precedent for this: when a service makes editorial decisions about what can and cannot appear on its site, it is then responsible for the content. Newspapers pay people to write articles, they can require any [otherwise legal] style or content they like. A blogging system with a vetted cadre of editors can require that the posts be on specific topics, can have specific views, and so on.
A site that allows anyone to post should be required to allow any post that is otherwise legal.
It's even worse, because these sites *used to be* allowing of legal free-speech, but after the election all that changed. Now that they've lured everyone in and become big, suddenly gun advocates are no longer allowed, or conservative views are no longer allowed.
Social media doesn't have to allow free speech currently, but that should change.
That's the point everyone is making.
It's also quite obvious that this is what has to happen, and that it is going to happen. The "masters of the universe" are too timid and/or clueless to realize this and get out in front of it, so expect this to happen:
a) Lots of warnings about one-sided suppression
b) The midterms
c) Lots of finger-pointing highlighting one-sided suppression as the cause(*)
d) A new law, the "internet free speech act of 2019" soon after.
And again, the "masters of the universe" are too clueless to predict any of this, or avoid it before this happens.
(*) From either side, it doesn't matter. Enough Dems and Reps will be elected to provide fodder for both sides of this issue.
Get my family freindly Goat C shirt! ~ CaptainFork
Facebook is committed to answer to the US government as it is an American company and conducts business under its regulatory control.
But what about in countries where almost the entire citizenry relies on Facebook as its primary source of information? One of these is the Philippines, where once tabloids and tv dominated, today Facebook is THE biggest medium to disseminate information, thanks to the mobile phone and subsidized access to Facebook courtesy of the telco duopoly.
Duterte's campaign team used it to propel a known murderer into the presidency, whereby he immediately implemented his War on Drugs which has since claimed over 12,000 lives. His first two years in office has also seen the economy plummet to new lows, with inflation at its highest in close to a decade and currently the highest in asia.
And now that Duterte's social media propaganda is state-sponsored, you can then understand why his approval ratings are the highest in history. This is even if his sound bites make Trump sound like Anne Frank in comparison (even more so in the vernacular).
I am unsure if Facebook will be able to fix itself because if it doesn't, you can very well imagine what the consequences are for Filipinos.
They admit that they can't realistically and fairly run their own businesses. Newsflash: this has been apparent to the rest of us for some time now. Weak, weak sauce.
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Let's take a look at the issues Facebook is facing.
1. Fake news
2. Political ads by foreign powers
3. Censorship because of political views
4. Egregious selling of personal data to advertisers
The first two are difficult to detect because they are fake stories/ads posing as real ones. You have to think that with all the engineers Facebook has that they would have at least tried to solve this problem. But Facebook has really taken the position in the past that they really don't care. That is until their stock got slammed last month. Now they care.
The last two are within Facebook's control but chooses to ignore the problem because of political bias or outright greed. Greed is good, right?
Google had the motto of "don't be evil". Facebook's motto is "we just don't care".
Everyone brilliant is underfunded.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Only the approved speech is free speech?
Instead of pure American-brand bullshit, our social networks will also be full of Russian-brand bullshit...
I'd like to see your source for that. That sounds like some weird quirky law. I can't imagine malls are legally required to have a public corkboard in the first place in most locations. I haven't looked for one, but I don't recall ever seeing one in any mall I've been in.
I think you're trying to provoke a snarky response.
Do you honestly have no way to search for this information?
... it's the goddam naive simple-minded, gullible membership.
Facebook and Twitter will never fix stupid. ~ © 2018 CaptainDork
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Why not impose a blackout for a week, or 2 weeks prior to the election?
A social media "blackout"? Just pull the plug on the services for 2 weeks prior to the midterm elections.
It should be easy. They'll lose 1-2 weeks worth of advertising, so what?
Why do they complain that it is sooo difficult to limit state-sponsored propaganda?
Did they attempt to restrict IP addresses? Did they try to restrict known proxy servers?
They already have IP addresses of mostly every "legitimate" american.
denyhosts, and you're done. Inconvenience the foreign entities just a little. Have they tried to do that?
Create a blacklist, like a do-not-call phone list, a do-not-connect-to-fb/twitter ip list. Just for 1-2 weeks prior to elections. What's the big deal?
Here's one about handing out leaflets.
In general, the court held that the more an area was opened up to public use, the more it had to abide by statutory rights of a person in a public place.
So you agree that entities that choose to serve to the public should be required to serve everyone; like say a baker making cakes, regardless of their personal beliefs?
I'd like to hear the court's opinion on that, but I think that one boils down to the difference between a commodity sale and a contract negotiation.
For custom work, you're basically negotiating a contract and you aren't required to agree to any particular contract or statement of conditions.
For a commodity sale, then yes - if you generally sell something to the public, then you should be required to sell to the parts of the public that you don't agree with.
We're seeing a lot of boycotting nowadays - "in-and-out burgers" got a boycott recently for making a donation to the Republican party. Mastercard and Visa stopped doing business with Wikileaks, and so on and so on. This is the analogue to social media banning and deleting accounts - they are a public company choosing who they do business with.
Can a Telco stop servicing a customer because they have a Trump sign in their front yard? Can the electric company (privately owned, as virtually all of them are) say that they will no longer deliver electricity to houses of gun owners? You don't *need* to get electricity, and in any event you could choose to move to another city.
My take is that having a license to do business gives you government-mandated protections, and in return there should be government-mandated requirements.
One of which is that, commodity sales have to be made to anyone.
So it's best to lay the groundwork now for future narratives.
Though, if a Dem wins, $100 says this whole election meddling stuff dies.
To be fair, they said a similar thing about TV, radio, and the printing press.
To be even fairer, they were probably right.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From just the summary it seems the threat itself is not overwhelming, just the difficulty in figuring out who is a state actor.
In reality the threat level is slightly about the same as if a bunch of homeless guys were given campaign posters. i.e. none.
No-one is changing minds on social media, or had you not noticed? That it where you go to yell, not to debate and learn.
It's especially hard for state actors to get anything done these days when everyone is already furious and insane. Can't really manipulate people that have already manipulated themselves to a far greater degree.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh.
Wait.
We did.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
that now anyone can conceivably "upset an election" and not just those rich enough to control an alphabet news network.
Let's start off by getting Facebook, Twitter, et al to admit that they're engaging in rampant and heavy-handed censorship. Guns? Censored! Criticism of left-wing? Censored! Praise of neutral to right-wing? Censored!
you have programmers and government contractors who have testified under oath that they were instructed to construct voting machine software such that the tallies could be altered remotely. Stop blaming everything on Russia or China, or North Korea who have less total computer know-how than the average western High School.
Your own government and big corporations are the biggest threat to your country's elections.
The also mentioned a the hearing that all of these companies were funded by CIA incubator company In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s Venture Capital Firm.
Exactly right, white fragility will not abide with any identity politics other than their own. #MAGA
'Ramparts' you say? Here's a quote from a former writer about said publication: "The mainstream press celebrated my leftist colleagues and me as heroes of American journalism. Ramparts rise to celebrity status seemed to herald a new era of the media speaking truth to power. The reality was far less luminous, and Ramparts legacy, which a new book celebrates, was not a positive one for the country." See the following link: https://www.city-journal.org/h...
And you completely missed the part about Operation Mockingbird being a CIA RESPONSE to Russian activities: "Reporter Deborah Davis claimed in her 1979 biography of Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, (Katharine the Great), that the CIA ran an "Operation Mockingbird" during this time.[2] Davis claimed that the International Organization of Journalists was created as a Communist front organization and "received money from Moscow and controlled reporters on every major newspaper in Europe, disseminating stories that promoted the Communist cause. Davis claimed that Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (a covert operations unit created in 1948 by the United States National Security Council) had created Operation Mockingbird in response to the International Organization of Journalists, recruiting Phil Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the industry."(taken from YOUR link to the Wikipedia.)
1) Feel a need for vast technology/Internet company reform
2) Stage an election with an obvious moron winning where nobody could believe it
3) Have the moron do all sorts of stupid things to drill into people that he's the biggest moron
4) Pretend that the boogie man broke the process and tainted the fragile minds of idiots on social media to elect said moron
5) Point the finger at the boogie man
6) Use momentum to get the public behind reforming technology/Internet/privacy law, disregarding that pesky Constitution thing
7) Profit!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The deep state has given them their marching orders... they have to toe the line to promote the "2016 election was hacked" narrative. All the while OBAMA legalised propaganda so its ok right???
calling freedom of expression a "core tenant" -- is that like a peripheral landlord?
Bunch of BS, fake news. If the Russians helped ANYONE it was the DNC & Hillary, not Republicans & Trump. But, go ahead and claim the election was stolen if it makes you happy (or in this case keeps you angry).
I'm so disappointed in Slashdot for buying into the Russiagate story, and shooting yourselves in the foot re free speech.
There is no evidence of Russia interference through Facebook. The $150k dpent on memes posted by a Russian marketing firm included puppies and an LGBT buff-Bernie. Half of their posts were *after* the election.
Now Facebook has teamed with the Atlantic Counsel, a right-wing, pro war think tank staffed by Bill Kristol and other war mongers, to "protect" you from false content.
Out of touch billionaire plutocrats should not be sensoring content.
We live in a corporate state, and the sheep are applauding their owners to "please sensor us from scary content".
Wake up Slashdot, and don't be complicite in corporate state propaganda!
So is that Dorsey's ignorance, mixing up tenet and tenant, or was that the poster? I don't see how "freedom of expression" could be living in the "core" of anything.
This whole election meddling controversy highlights democracies greatest fault: that people of low intelligence, people who are easily manipulated, people who are too lazy to take the time to investigate and understand issues, people with personality disorders, people who are corrupt, etc. all get to vote.
However, this is not new. It's been true from the very day that the masses were granted the vote. You cannot change that. Call it the cost of doing business.
Look, I'm sure Russia's meddling had a minor impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However, was it material? Did they flip 20% of the American electorate (poling projected Hillary to be ahead by that much before the election)?
Hell no. Not even close. James Comey's asininity likely had several orders of magnitude more impact on the election than did the Russian interference.
If you want to place blame for Hillary's loss somewhere, place it where it truly belongs: with Hillary's poorly run campaign and James Comey's ego.
Great, it's like a country-wide training program for VPNs and assassins at the same time.