Is Facebook Even Capable Of Stopping An Influence Campaign On Its Platform?
By SAM THIELMAN Published SEPTEMBER 15, 2017 10:52 AM
Recent weeks have clarified a few things about Facebook and the broad campaign of Russian interference in the 2016 election. We know a Kremlin-affiliated troll farm spent $100,000 on divisive political ads on the platform, and that Facebook has located and removed a huge number of ads and posts related to the campaign.
The Daily Beast has reported that Facebook won’t share anything but the most cursory assessment of the damage from those ads with the public. The company “declined to commit to releasing information about Russian government-backed Facebook posts, groups, and paid advertisements to the users who encountered them,” according to the Beast.
The obvious question is whether Facebook will do anything more to inform or protect users affected by that abuse of its platform, or else exercise a greater measure of control over the material that appears on it. Experts say the company is unlikely to be compelled to do either unless public pressure on Facebook reaches critical mass.
According to Aaron Mackey, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there’s not much in the law that can force Facebook to disclose, well, anything. “The short answer is that as a private entity, there’s no requirement that they provide any additional information,” Mackey said. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
Russian operatives manipulating Facebook’s largely automated ad-buying platform are dealing with a kind of information that is totally unprotected by regulation, he said—that makes it different from, say, credit monitoring service Equifax dealing with a huge breach of user data.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/russian-political-ad-buys-raise-questions-facebook-transparency
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