How social platforms influenced the 2016 election – The Verge

The case that Russia is winning the cyberwar

2018-09-25T06:00:01-04:00

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is a prominent political scientist and professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania. For the past 40 years, she has studied political communication: debates, advertisements, and speeches. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, she studied the effect that the debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had on the electorate. That set Jamieson down a road that led her to a bold (if not particularly original) conclusion: Russia very likely tipped the election to Trump.

What makes Jamieson's take notable is her scrupulously data-driven approach to answering a question that many people have dismissed …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Facebook disclosure requirements for political ads take effect in the United States today

2018-05-24T14:00:02-04:00

Facebook's new rules regarding disclosures for political ads take effect in the United States today, requiring election-related and issue ads to include information about who paid for them. A new "paid for" label will be visible at the top of ads on Facebook and Instagram, and clicking it will take you to a page with information about the cost of the ad and the demographic breakdown of the audience that saw it.

Advertisers will also have to verify their identity and location, a move that Facebook says will discourage foreign agents from attempting to interfere in outside elections. Facebook announced new rules around ad disclosures last yea …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This is Facebook’s self-defense plan for the 2018 midterm elections

2018-03-29T13:48:45-04:00

Facebook has a four-part plan to protect its platform from malicious attacks during the 2018 US midterm elections, company executives said today. In a conference call with reporters, representatives from Facebook's security, product, and advertising teams laid out their strategy for preventing the kinds of problems that plagued it during the 2016 campaign. While most bad actors are motivated by profits, executives said, state-sponsored attackers continue in their efforts to manipulate public opinion using posts on Facebook.

Here's Facebook's plan to shore up its security over the next several months.

1. Fighting foreign interference. Execu …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Facebook suspended Donald Trump’s data operations team for misusing people’s personal information

2018-03-16T22:32:38-04:00

Facebook said late Friday that it had suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), along with its political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, for violating its policies around data collection and retention. The companies, which ran data operations for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign, are widely credited with helping Trump more effectively target voters on Facebook than his rival, Hillary Clinton. While the exact nature of their role remains somewhat mysterious, Facebook's disclosure suggests that the company improperly obtained user data that could have given it an unfair advantage in reaching voters.

Fac …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Senators blast tech companies over Russian meddling: ‘Do something about it — or we will’

2017-11-01T11:30:54-04:00

Senators raised the stakes against some of America's biggest tech companies on Wednesday, telling them they must take more comprehensive action against foreign actors misusing their platforms. "You created these platforms … and now they're being misused," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told the top lawyers at Facebook, Google, and Twitter. "And you have to be the ones who do something about it - or we will."

Feinstein's remarks came during a blistering hearing of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russian meddling interference in the 2016 election. It is the second of three hearings at which representative …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Senators grill tech companies about Russian interference, but don’t get very far

2017-10-31T18:06:31-04:00

A bipartisan group of Senators grilled tech companies today about how Russians used their platforms to interfere in the 2016 election, calling on them to better monitor abuse in the future. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary committee challenged top lawyers from Facebook, Google, and Twitter on the potential use of shell companies to hide advertiser identities, the malicious use of bot networks, and the limited capabilities of existing ad review policies. But despite the bipartisan appeal of criticizing the tech companies in public, it's not clear what, if anything, will come of the critiques.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter sent top lega …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Russia’s election posts reached 126 million people, Facebook will tell Congress

2017-10-30T18:40:41-04:00

Russia's surreptitious campaign to meddle in the US election reached 126 million people through posts on the social network, according to prepared testimony obtained by The Verge. That figure, which is more than 10 times the number of people reportedly exposed to Russia-linked advertising on the site, indicates that more than half of US Facebook users saw Russia-linked posts in the months leading up to the election.

The figures are disclosed in prepared testimony scheduled to be delivered Tuesday by Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. "The foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and ou …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Russia reportedly used Pokémon Go in an effort to inflame racial tensions

2017-10-12T16:23:51-04:00

Russia's far-ranging campaign to promote dissension in the United States reportedly included an effort to weaponize Pokémon Go. CNN reported today that in July 2016, a Tumblr page linked to Russia's now-notorious Internet Research Agency promoted a contest encouraging people sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement to play the game near famous sites of police brutality. Players were told to change their characters' names to the victims of those incidents - an apparent effort to inflame racial tensions.

The Tumblr page was linked to Do Not Shoot Us, a multi-platform campaign designed to mimic aspects of Black Lives Matter. (As CNN note …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Facebook is patenting a tool that could help automate removal of fake news

2016-12-07T12:02:56-05:00

As Facebook works on new tools to stop the spread of misinformation on its network, it's seeking to patent technology that could be used for that purpose. This month the US Trademark and Patent Office published Facebook's application for Patent 0350675: "systems and methods to identify objectionable content." The application, which was filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network.

As described in the application, the primary purpose of the tool is to improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying. But last month, Zuckerberg highlighted …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Facebook’s Like button is a built-in filter bubble

2016-11-16T15:07:36-05:00

Imagine if every newspaper came with a mandatory T-shirt. Suddenly, that tabloid you paged through out of curiosity becomes part of your identity. You have to explain to friends that despite being a walking billboard, you don't actually agree with The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorials, or think The New York Times is too liberal but still covers the facts. Increasingly, you stick to outlets you unambiguously approve of, reinforcing things you already believe.

This is how Facebook imagines the future of news, and it's absurd.

Since president-elect Donald Trump's campaign exposed deep rifts in the American electorate, people have …

Read the full story at The Verge.