Facebook and the IRA

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) in Russia is the current target of delayed response by Facebook.   Facebook is making a public display of deleting 138 accounts “controlled by the IRA” [TechCrunch says 70], regardless of content.  This is just before announcing that the CEO will testify before Congress on the 11th of April, one week from now.  You can bet somebody at Facebook finally figured out that they were going to asked a lot of questions about the accounts and why they were still operating as current accounts after all that has been done.

Can you say, “Better late than never”?  Facebook has known for months that it was facing criticism for not removing accounts that were traceable to the IRA.  The ads that were paid for have already been published by other committees of Congress.  I’m really shocked that Facebook did nothing until now to get rid of any leftover accounts that were traceable to Russian trolls, whether they worked for the IRA or not.  Maybe the Iranian trolls or Chinese trolls would be a good idea too.  Maybe any trolls from anywhere, even companies that sponsor and fund them would be a good idea.

They might have looked at this the way a number of others have done.  Gosh, we can’t possibly know who all of our users are because we have no way of knowing who our users are.  I know that part is true because I am reminded that my aunt’s birthday is in February and she has been dead for three years.  When you are selling to advertisers, numbers count.  The advertisers don’t know she is dead and Facebook doesn’t want to know who owns all those accounts used by foreign intelligence services.  Their focus has always been on the numbers of users, because that is where the revenue comes from.  In fairness, though I really don’t want to be fair to Facebook, they really have no way to find out how many of  these accounts are paid trolls.  In this case, Congress told them, and likely had intelligence sources that gave them the information.  Did they clear out those accounts when they found out?  No, not until the CEO had to testify and that seat was getting awfully warm.