The major social media companies whose platforms were used by the Russian government to sharpen division in the United State before and after the 2016 election had an “uncoordinated” response to the influence campaign and did not fully cooperate with government investigations, a new report on the effort claimed.
“Social media firms need to co-operate with public agencies in a way that respects users’ privacy,” read the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee released Monday. “However, sharing data about public problems should be more than performative, it should be meaningful and constructive.”
The report – compiled by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project – singles out Facebook and Google for either presenting limited information or handing over data in an unnecessarily burdensome way.
Google, for example, “chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format,” even though the data – Google ads that the Internet Research Agency had bought – was “previously organized in spreadsheets.”
“Google’s disruption efforts are impossible to audit and contrast with Facebook’s and Twitter’s efforts given the sparse data provided,” the report reads.
Facebook, on the other hand, provided limited information that forced the scope of the investigation to be narrowed. The social media network “chose not to disclose data” from specific Internet Research Agency “profiles or groups” but instead provided data from “a small number of pages” to Senate investigators.
The bulk of the report details how far the Russian trolls – working at St. Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency – gained influence in U.S. politics by amassing millions of shares and views on social media posts.
The report states that the trolls aimed at stoking division and increasing polarization in the United States while discouraging traditional Democratic constituencies from voting, most notably African-Americans.
On Facebook, for example, the five most shared and liked posts “focused on divisive issues, with pro-gun ownership content, anti-immigration content pitting immigrants against veterans, content decrying police violence against African Americans, and content that was anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Obama, and pro-Trump.”
In some cases, trolls campaigned for “African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures” and attempted to encourage “extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational.”
The report argues that the Russian trolls used existing divides in the U.S. political system to achieve a wide scope in their disinformation campaign.
“Explicit mentions of Donald Trump increased in early and mid-2016, as his primary campaign gained momentum,” the researchers write. “These campaigns, however, seemed to be geared towards extending the anti-immigrant rhetoric that Trump’s campaign frequently made use of.”
The campaign reached tens of millions of Americans, with more than 30 million sharing the IRA’s Facebook posts between 2015 and 2017, the period covered by the report.
And though the report takes no position on whether the Russian influence campaign changed the outcome of the election, the researchers argue that the use of “computational propaganda” – where people can be individually targeted and manipulated by algorithms crunching mass amounts of data on their preferences – represents a threat to the free flow of accurate information that buttresses democracy.
“Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike,” the report concludes.
In prison, Zuck can make lots of new “friends”.
Alas, ain’t gonna happen.
Corporate malfeasance is above the law.
Maybe.
Google isn’t a social media site, even when it had one. I use Google’s search engine daily and I can say with a great deal of certainty that it never sent me to a fake Russia-backed newsite when I was looking for an address to a bar I was going to that evening.
FB on the other hand, needs to jettison it’s top management as they make Larry Ellison look like a swell guy.
Two years after the RW conspiracy with Russia stole the election, and this is the reaction from Google, FB & Twitter? This shows their unbelievable callousness about the power they wield.
If these companies were serious about rooting out misinformation, or just about being platforms that ordinary people can rely on, this wouldn’t happen. They would co-operate with these Congressional investigations (in Europe as well) to get to the bottom of what really happened. It’s quite likely they already know, and don’t want anyone finding out.
Clearly, these companies need to be regulated and held accountable. Europe is leading the way.
Point of order - if someone gets his or her political information from Twitter, they deserve Trump. I think Congress ought to pass a law before 2020 that bans the president, members of Congress, governors, etc., etc., from using it. In that sense, it’s about as reliable as Coconut Telegraph and there are more substantial ways of communicating to the public is real enough time.
Google doesn’t need to do that. It’s database will simply show that “jeffrey” is the kind of person who goes to _____ bar, on a weekday/weekend evening. It will link that with where you live, where you work, what your interests are, who you hang out with, where you bank/shop/eat. it sells your “profile” while you unassumingly use Google Maps as GPS, or Search for “how to grow succulents in Denver”.
I can assure you Google has far more information about you than you’d ever think, and advertisers are willing to pay for that information to sell you stuff.
We still don’t know all the ways in which new media collects and uses our data.