This week, as the British government stumbled towards a ruinously expensive divorce from Europe and the growing likelihood of another political crisis, Facebook’s senior management drew criticism for its negligent oversight of user information and a laissez faire policy that allowed political groups to misuse that data. The stories may not, at first glance, seem related, but they are. Mounting evidence has shown that the outcomes of both the Brexit vote and the 2016 US elections were heavily influenced by carefully targeted online propaganda campaigns which relied on the exactly the sort of personal data that companies like Facebook often promise to protect but sell to the highest bidder.
According to the New York Times, during the spring of 2016 a Facebook cyberconflict expert detected possible Russian interference in the election. Closer examination revealed that “Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns…[and] were messaging journalists to share information from [emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee].” At the time Facebook’s top executives dismissed any suggestion that they helped to distribute Russian propaganda. In November 2017 Mark Zuckerberg said that even the suggestion that “ fake news on Facebook … influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.”
It is important to note that Russian interference in the 2016 US elections is no longer in dispute, what is being determined at the moment is the extent of that interference and its consequences. Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee and he has also indicted the Internet Research Agency, a notorious troll farm based in St Petersburg.
In light of this, it is significant that when Facebook learned that its user information – the key to its giant profits – had been misused it ought to have come clean. Instead it chose to cover its tracks, wary of the public relations fallout. The Times investigation shows that the company continued to gather evidence of Russian interference for more than a year before senior executives went public with the findings, or even shared them with the board of directors. Worse still, it used political lobbyists to downplay the depth of the crisis and engaged a public relations firm to cast aspersions on its critics and shift the blame to rivals like Google. Both strategies were naive and short-sighted. Subsequent revelations caused precipitous falls in Facebook stock and ongoing coverage has diminished public trust in the company even further. As yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times noted: “In short, Facebook capitalizes on personal information to influence the behaviour of its users, and then sells that influence to advertisers for a profit. It is an ecosystem ripe for manipulation.”
What has received less attention is what should be done to revisit political decisions influenced by propaganda that used platforms like Facebook’s as a delivery system. Two years after the Brexit vote, for example, it is clear that much of the Leave campaign’s advertising was grossly misleading if not outright lies. Faced with the true estimate of what leaving the EU will entail the British public has every right to be outraged at the way that private actors were allowed to distort its public sphere and democracy. While most of the nefarious activities related to these political campaigns and votes has been attributed to groups like Cambridge Analytica, online behemoths like Facebook, Google and and Twitter – companies that help spread deceptive information to previously unimaginable numbers of potential voters also deserve their fair share of the blame.
