Facebook Will Open a 'War Room' Next Week To Monitor Election Interference (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Sheera Frankel and Mike Isaac [write from The New York Times]: "Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebook's campus, an approximately 25-foot by 35-foot conference room is under construction. Thick cords of blue wiring hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to window-size computer monitors on 16 desks. On one wall, a half dozen televisions will be tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major cable networks. A small paper sign with orange lettering taped to the glass door describes what's being built: "War Room."

Set to open next week, the conference room is in keeping with Facebook's nick-of-time approach to midterm election preparedness. (It introduced a "pilot program" for candidate account security on Monday.) It's a big project. Samidh Chakrabarti, who oversees elections and civic engagement, told the Times: "We see this as probably the biggest companywide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones." Of course, the effort extends beyond the new conference room. Chakrabarti showed the Times a new internal tool "that helps track information flowing across the social network in real time," helping to identify misinformation as it goes viral or a surge in the creation of new (and likely fake) accounts.

Comments

Just to clarify

[Brett Buck]

A War Room to monitor election interference that doesn't go their way.

Re:Just to clarify

[Time_Ngler]

The title:

  "Facebook Will Open a 'War Room' Next Week To Monitor Election Interface On Behalf Of Democrats"

was strangely cut off in my browser to just:

  "Facebook Will Open a 'War Room' Next Week To Monitor Election Interface"

The site admins should really work on fixing this.

Fox in hen house

[AndyKron]

They want to make sure their interference is going smoothly

Re:You should get that treated.

[DNS-and-BIND]

Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election"

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/hard-questions-russian-ads-delivered-to-congress/

"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?

The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate - and advertise - their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so - just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.

- the ads were non-political in nature, and didn't feature or favour a political candidate
- 56% of the ads were run AFTER the 2016 US federal election
- 25% of the ads were never displayed to anyone due to Facebook's algorithms not finding them relevant to trending interests
- only 25% of the ads were geographically-targeted
- Facebook is not sure that the ads were part of an organized campaign
- Facebook is not sure that the accounts the ads were purchased with are associated with each other
- Facebook is not certain that the ads were purchased by Russians
- many of the ads were not purchased using Russia's currency
- huge numbers of actual political ads are bought and run on Facebook from all countries around the world, and that is normal and OK
- the "overwhelming majority" of ad-space purchases from Russia by Russians are normal and not suspicious in any way

So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.

Re:*Foreign*

[Uberbah]

To be clear, it is a CRIME for a foreign country to interfere in US elections.

Based on which international law? One that is consistent and thus makes the United States worse in this category than all other nations combined?

Re:I'm not so sure

[Kiuas]

Bugger all happened in 2016, that is the actual evidence. Trolling advertisements, click bait got quite corruptly called political, when it fact it most definitely is not. It simply targets politics to get you to click it, to take you to the actual ad.

This is actually far from true. Here's some of what is known to have happened, the political ads themselves are a minor part of the whole thing:

The Mueller indictment permanently demolishes the idea that the scale of the Russian campaign was not significant enough to have any impact on the American public. We are no longer talking about approximately $100,000 (paid in rubles, no less) of advertising grudgingly disclosed by Facebook, but tens of millions of dollars spent over several years to build a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion.

The Russian efforts described in the indictment focused on establishing deep, authenticated, long-term identities for individuals and groups within specific communities. This was underlaid by the establishment of servers and VPNs based in the US to mask the location of the individuals involved. US-based email accounts linked to fake or stolen US identity documents (driver licenses, social security numbers, and more) were used to back the online identities. These identities were also used to launder payments through PayPal and cryptocurrency accounts. All of this deception was designed to make it appear that these activities were being carried out by Americans.

Additionally, the indictment mentions that the IRA* had a department whose job was gaming algorithms. This is important because information warfare—the term used in the indictment itself—is not about "fake news" and “bots." It is about creating an information environment and a narrative—specific storytelling vehicles used to achieve goals of subversion and activation, amplified and promoted through a variety of means.

2. What kind of content did it rely on?

As the indictment lays out in thorough detail, the content pumped out by the Russians was not paid or promoted ads; it was so-called native content—including video, visual, memetic, and text elements designed to push narrative themes, conspiracies, and character attacks. All of it was designed to look like it was coming from authentic American voices and interest groups. And the IRA wasn’t just guessing about what worked. They used data-driven targeting and analysis to assess how the content was received, and they used that information to refine their messages and make them more effective.

3. Who or what was the operation targeting, and what did it aim to achieve?

The indictment mentions that the Russian accounts were meant to embed with and emulate “radical” groups. The content was not designed to persuade people to change their views, but to harden those views. Confirmation bias is powerful and commonly employed in these kinds of psychological operations (a related Soviet concept is “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response). The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior.

4. What impact did it have?

We’re only at the beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the indictment recounts a number of instances where events and demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific thing

Re:Indictments mean shit

[Kiuas]

If Mueller had actual evidence of actual collusion, we would have seen it a year ago

This statement is based on absolutely nothing, it's just an assertion you throw out about a large on-going investigation without anything to back it up. 'Because the investigation is taking so long it cannot lead to anything' is some of the worst logic possible.

However you're missing the point I was making entirely. I'm not American, I'm Finnish. My point in the comment was not to take on side over the other as to the result of the investigation. Whether or not there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian information warfare campaign is another matter that remains to be seen once the investigation completes, but that was not my point. It may be that there was no collusion, but that does not negate the fact that the Russians are actively posing as western citizens and pumping out propaganda to influence elections and sow political discontent throughout the West and not just in the US. That was my point, and there's plenty of evidence of that that's not coming from Mueller & al, including from your own intelligence agencies as well as other non-governmental researchers (see for example the report about the interference in Europe).