Facebook, Brexit and the Russians

For those wondering if the Russians were involved with the Brexit vote, we can say for sure they were, just not to what extent.  The U.K. Goverment is going through the same kind of investigation of this meddling that the US went through with tampering with our election.  There is no doubt the Russians did that too, in spite of their denials.  I hope nobody thought they would jump up and confess.

That is not the story I want to tell.  Yes, we can bet the Russians, as a part of the Political Warfare campaign, did just that.  The fact that we don’t know the extent of these influence campaigns is as much the fault of Facebook as it is the Intelligence services of the respect countries involved.  Include Germany and France in that number.

Facebook did a terrible job of trying to find out the sources of the money coming into the US to influence users.  They looked for places in Russia, with Russian IP addresses, largely paying in rubles.  Congressional leaders and our intelligence services told them to look again.  Unless the Russians are stupid, a check of those kinds of things would not show very much of a campaign.  Apparently, that was what Facebook wanted to show.  That was a serious error on their part.

First, it spurred more talk of regulation, which Twitter and Google also do not want.  Both of them did better at identifying sources for the campaign, at least part of the reason Facebook had to look again to get more information.

Second, it prompted Facebook to try to head this off by reviewing more of its content and trying to pretend it was interested in doing better.  This reminds me of the history lesson from US carmakers who thought safety was not an issue they needed to address, and TV networks who thought content was not theirs to police.  I dare say, we may have forgotten the latter when cable started violating all of those rules we used to have for programming.  Both of them thought they could self-regulate themselves out of trouble and did so for a long time.  Not by pretending, but by actually doing something, they were able to reduce, but not eliminate regulation.  Those social media outlets are headed down the same path.  Good luck with that.  Eventually, it will catch up with them, and they won’t enjoy what comes after.