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A UK Commons Committee Chair Says He's Seen Evidence a Facebook Engineer Flagged Russian Entities Pulling Billions of Points of Data Every Day in 2014 (buzzfeed.com)
A UK Commons committee chair claims a seized trove of Facebook documents reveals that a company engineer flagged Russian "entities" were using a Pinterest API to pull billions of points of Facebook data every day in 2014. From a report: Damian Collins appeared to use parliamentary privilege to outline the detail from the sealed documents, during a fiery session of questioning of Facebook executive Richard Allan before the first sitting of the "international grand committee on disinformation and fake news" in London on Tuesday. The most contentious moment came during an exchange between Allan and the chair of the committee over what's alleged to be in a set of documents that are subject to the protective order of a California court.
During the questioning of Allan on Tuesday, Collins said the emails would not be released. But he did outline details from an alleged incident which, if true, would raise further questions about how Facebook responded to learning about data being taken from the platform. "An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day," Collins said. "Now was that reported to any external body at the time?" Allan dismissed the claim by focusing on the source of the information, Six4Three, labelling it a "hostile litigant." Further reading: Facebook Exec Admits Zuckerberg Not Appearing Before UK Parliament Doesn't Look Great (CNBC); 'The Problem is Facebook,' Lawmakers From Nine Countries Tell Zuckerberg's Accountability Stand-in (TechCrunch); and "When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own Bullshit": The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg (VanityFair).
During the questioning of Allan on Tuesday, Collins said the emails would not be released. But he did outline details from an alleged incident which, if true, would raise further questions about how Facebook responded to learning about data being taken from the platform. "An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day," Collins said. "Now was that reported to any external body at the time?" Allan dismissed the claim by focusing on the source of the information, Six4Three, labelling it a "hostile litigant." Further reading: Facebook Exec Admits Zuckerberg Not Appearing Before UK Parliament Doesn't Look Great (CNBC); 'The Problem is Facebook,' Lawmakers From Nine Countries Tell Zuckerberg's Accountability Stand-in (TechCrunch); and "When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own Bullshit": The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg (VanityFair).
If Russia wants to plaster its name all over Facebook ads disturbingly similar to Moscow Donald's talking points that's one thing.
That's free speech. It's treason that Donald Trump colluded with Russian influence operations, but still it's free speech.
What Russia is doing is writing comments pretending to be American citizens, and intentionally downing out debate on our social networks with bot generated attacks.
People need to stop being so naive and start to understand that the content they consume is biased and sometimes outright false. If people were more skeptical of propaganda and could start to think for themselves, this wouldn't be an issue. Until then, society will be vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors.
Exactly... people as a whole are obviously not going to wise up to this game any time soon, and corporations will continue to walk over them, gathering and reselling their intimate details until it's too late for people to revoke that from them. We need regulation to prevent this. But preventing foreign state actors from spewing limitless propaganda on global platforms is not censorship, it's basic moderation.