Elections and Media

House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) Senate campaign announcement ad has been blocked by Twitter over a statement the abortion rights opponent makes about the sale of fetal tissue for medical research. Chairman Blackburn, who is running for the seat being opened by the retirement of Sen Bob Corker (R-TN), boasts in the ad that she “stopped the sale of baby body parts.”

A Twitter representative told the candidate’s vendors on Oct 10 that the statement was “deemed an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction." Twitter said the Blackburn campaign would be allowed to run the rest of the video if the flagged statement is omitted. While the decision keeps Chairman Blackburn from paying to promote the video on Twitter, it doesn’t keep it from being linked from YouTube and other platforms. Chairman Blackburn took to Twitter to urge supporters to re-post her video and join her in “standing up to Silicon Valley.”

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, apparently.

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

The Trump presidential campaign spent most of its digital advertising budget on Facebook, testing more than 50,000 ad variations each day in an attempt to micro-target voters, President Donald Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview scheduled to air Oct 8. “Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” Parscale said. Facebook provided Trump 2016 with employees who embedded in the campaign’s digital office and helped educate staffers on how to use Facebook ads, he said. Because he “wanted people who supported Donald Trump”, Parscale said, the Facebook employees were questioned on their political views. “Campaigns aren’t able to hand-pick Facebook team members to work on their projects,” the statement read, in apparent reference to Parscale’s claim, as reported by CBS, that the Facebook employees that served as “embeds” in his office “had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure”. Parscale said the Trump campaign used Facebook to reach clusters of rural voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for”. “I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling,” he said. “I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.”

Russian trolls and others aligned with the Kremlin are injecting disinformation into streams of online content flowing to American military personnel and veterans on Twitter and Facebook, according to an Oxford University study released Oct 9. The researchers found fake or slanted news from Russian-controlled accounts are mixing with a wide range of legitimate content consumed by veterans and active-duty personnel in their Facebook and Twitter news feeds. These groups were found to be reading and sharing articles on conservative political thought, articles on right-wing politics in Europe and writing touting various conspiracy theories. In some cases, the disinformation reached the friends and families of military personnel and veterans as well, the researchers said. But it was not always clear who was creating the content.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) said that she is working on legislation that would mandate online political advertisements be subject to the same rules as broadcast advertisements. “And the rules that apply for ads when they’re put on TV or radio, where you have to register them and say how much you paid, that doesn’t apply to these online ads. And so our laws need to catch up with what’s going on with our campaigns,” Sen Klobuchar said. The effort comes amid the growing controversy over Facebook’s political advertising during the 2016 election. The social media company admitted last month that Russians possibly tied to the Kremlin purchased ads on the platform during the presidential race.

Facebook is going to require advertisements that are targeted to people based on "politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues" to be manually reviewed before they go live, according to an e-mail sent to advertisers. That's a higher standard than that required of most Facebook ads, which are bought and uploaded to the site through an automated system. It's also warning that it expects the new policy to slow down the launch of new ad campaigns.

The steps Facebook is taking to combat questions of Russian election interference strike at the core of the company's business. The ad buyers who spent $450 million on Facebook ads love the platform's speed and efficiency — something they fear will be diminished by inserting more human oversight of political ads before they go live. The company's action comes as a political ad disclosure bill gains momentum on Capitol Hill.

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, took to Twitter to deliver an unusually raw tweetstorm defending the company’s software algorithms against critics who believe Facebook needs more oversight. Facebook uses algorithms to determine everything from what you see and don’t see in News Feed, to finding and removing other content like hate speech and violent threats. The company has been criticized in the past for using these algorithms — and not humans — to monitor its service for things like abuse, violent threats, and misinformation. The algorithms can be fooled or gamed, and part of the criticism is that Facebook and other tech companies don’t always seem to appreciate that algorithms have biases, too. Stamos says it’s hard to understand from the outside.

The House Intelligence Committee is asking officials from Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet’s Google to testify publicly as part of its Russia probe on Nov. 1, the same day as a planned Senate Intelligence hearing. That would set up a marathon day for the social media companies, which are facing increasing scrutiny over the role their platforms played in Russia’s efforts to meddle in the U.S. election. The House panel previously said it was looking at sometime in October to bring technology companies in for a hearing.

Facebook cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election because of concerns among the company’s lawyers and members of its policy team, apparently. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion during the 2016 presidential contest.

Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, apparently. Ultimately, the 13-page report, published on April 27 and titled “Information Operations and Facebook,” was shortened by several pages by Facebook’s legal and policy teams from an earlier draft, and didn’t mention Russia at all. Rather, it concluded that “malicious actors” engaged in influence campaigns during the U.S. presidential election but said it couldn’t determine who was responsible. The extent of Facebook’s understanding at the time of Russian influence is unclear. It wasn’t until a Sept. 6 Facebook newsroom blog post that the company publicly identified Russia as a source of such efforts.

There is a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy. These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it. Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.