One weapon in the battle against foreign interference in our elections has just become law in California and will go into effect on January 1, 2018. The California Disclose Act requires that political ads on electronic media must clearly show who is really paying for them. An online political ad will have to Include the question “Who funded this ad?” linked to a website containing the answer. The law also specifies the size of the question (no less than an 8 point font) and color (contrasting). leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/...
In 2011 the Federal Election Commission wanted Facebook to follow the usual regulations re political ads, but the company resisted. Facebook claimed that its ads were too small for the type of disclosure required on TV and print ads. It also argued that the ads should not have to link to a page revealing the ads’ sponsors. www.bna.com/...
Now, following recent reports that Russian-linked political ads and posts on Facebook may have swung the election, Facebook will probably have to disclose more information about who is funding its political ads. On September 14, the Federal Election Commission voted unanimously to reopen a public comment period regarding online ad disclaimers. Until that vote, Republican and Democratic commissioners had been divided over whether new rules are needed. www.bna.com/…
On October 3 The Fresno Bee wrote emphatically that new rules are needed: “Tech companies need to change the way they operate, and Congress needs to enact laws to make sure those changes happen.” The editors also said:
Not only did fake news probably influence voters, but the proliferation of it was a highly coordinated affair, with Russian operatives buying targeted political ads, and creating bots and fake user accounts to spread discord among the electorate on a number of social media platforms run by California companies. We’re looking at you, Facebook and Twitter.
These revelations, which have trickled out over the past few weeks, should shake every American to his or her core….
Our democracy is at stake. www.fresnobee.com/...
Disclosure of the true funders of online political ads might have changed the 2016 election results. If people had known that an ad was funded by a Russian group, would they have let the ad influence their vote?
As we now know, the Russian effort to influence the 2016 election involved more than paid ads on Facebook. For example, there was fake news in Facebook postings by fake Russian-linked groups such as “Heart of Texas” pretending to be Americans. Stunning examples of the fake posts and paid ads can be seen in What Was Russia Up To? Here’s what we know about how Russia tried to use Facebook, Google, and Twitter to sway the 2016 election. (Slate 10/11). The article reports that the posts from just six of the fake groups were shared 340 million times. An excellent daily kos diary (10/10) titled Rachel Maddow: Media giants' massive culpability in election hi-jack has more details along with a link to Rachel’s program the day before where she showed some of the ads and fake posts. And another daily kos diary today has more information: How Facebook May Have Destroyed Our Democracy-For Good.
Facebook and Twitter are expected to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee public hearing on November 1, but Google (“the largest online ad company in the world”) has not yet said it will participate. The testimony may show what the companies knew about the Russian content on their platforms and what they did or did not do to stop its spread.
The Senate hearings may eventually result in legislation to stop foreign interference in our elections, and the Federal Election Commission may come up with some new regulations. The disclosure of who funds an ad on electronic media will be a start.
Comments regarding new FEC regulations will be received through November 9 at sers.fec.gov/…
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UPDATE: (10/17/17)
New legislation, and perhaps new Federal Election Commission regulations, may help put a stop to this: Russian Trolls Used ‘Up To 100’ Activists To Organize Events In US, Report Finds According to a report published on Tuesday, Oct. 17, “Up to 100 American citizens helped to organize the events for the ‘Trolls factory,’ not knowing who’s really behind all these groups.” It reports that the troll farm spent “about $80,000 total—just $20,000 less than Facebook said was spent promoting divisive ads on its platform—on paying for these local organizers’ work (flights, printing costs, technical equipment)”. In addition:
the investigation uncovered more than 100 community pages and associated accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms active through August 2017 that it believes were run by the troll farm. It confirmed those accounts’ authenticity using screenshots of posts and by consulting “a source close to the factory’s leadership.” The report estimates about 70 million people a week saw something posted by those accounts.
UPDATE: 10/19/17 Russian meddling efforts extended to Pokémon Going over the White House fence
UPDATE: 10/20/17 NYT:
Senators Demand Online Ad Disclosures as Tech Lobby Mobilizes In a two-front war, tech companies are targeting an election commission rule-making process that was restarted last month and a legislative effort in the Senate…. in the weeks leading up to the introduction of the Klobuchar-Warner-McCain bill, Facebook told congressional aides that it is too difficult to figure out if an ad is political or commercial because candidates are often changing messages and topics. The company added that with the sheer number of ads on the site, the engineering involved in identifying political ads would be extremely challenging….
Critics are not accepting that. Google and Facebook had ample opportunity to work with the Federal Election Commission to devise and put in place effective and practical disclaimer rules, “but they were silent,” said Lawrence M. Noble, a former general counsel for the election commission who now serves in that position with the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that pushes for stricter rules governing money in politics. “And they are still trying to avoid regulation,” Mr. Noble said.
UPDATE: 10/21/17 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Retweeted Alleged Russian Trolls Even Jack Dorsey fell for Moscow’s propaganda, it appears. He retweeted messages from an account identified by an independent Russian news agency as Kremlin-created.
UPDATE: 10/22/17 McClatchy: Russia-sponsored troll networks targeting the U.S. may number in the hundreds "Dozens, if not hundreds of troll networks” supported by Russian operatives are likely operating today, including in countries outside Russia such as Albania, Cyprus and Macedonia, said Michael Carpenter, who specialized in Russia issues as a senior Defense Department official during the Obama administration. A series of revelations in recent weeks, many flowing from an expose that a Russian online magazine published on Tuesday, have lifted the veil on what may be the biggest troll factory – a St. Petersburg-based operation in which 80 to 90 employees devoted their time solely to posing as Americans and trying to lure U.S. citizens to interact with them. CNN reported it has been bankrolled with millions of dollars from Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a longtime crony of Russia President Vladimir Putin…..
Countries in Eastern Europe have long sought to track Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at weakening their democracies. Eric Chenoweth, co-founder of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, said his group and others warned the U.S. government as long ago as the 1990s about Russia’s disinformation efforts as they watched the destabilizing effects in former Soviet bloc nations. But, he said, nobody would listen.
UPDATE: 10/22/17 The Guardian: Tech giants face Congress as showdown over Russia election meddling looms
All three companies have admitted that Russian entities bought ads on their sites in an effort to skew the vote. In Facebook’s case, ads pushing divisive messageswere bought by fake American accounts and focused on swing states. On Twitter, vast armies of automated user accounts – “bots” – and fake users helped promote fake news stories, damaging to Hillary Clinton and favourable to Donald Trump. Russian-funded accounts spread bogus stories across the Google search engine and its subsidiary YouTube. The wider question hovering over the committee hearings on 1 November is whether these organisations, which once seemed to encapsulate the spirit of free speech and communication in the 21st century, have become Trojan horses used by foreign autocracies and domestic extremists to subvert democracies from the inside, exploiting openness, blurring fact and fiction and fuelling civil conflict.
On Thursday, a bipartisan bid was launched in the Senate to exercise some control over online political advertising. “The Honest Ads Act”, sponsored by Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner and Republican John McCain, is aimed at preventing foreign influence on elections by subjecting political ads sold online to the same rules and transparency that applies to TV and radio.
“Unfortunately, US laws requiring transparency in political campaigns have not kept pace with rapid advances in technology, allowing our adversaries to take advantage of these loopholes to deceive millions of American voters with impunity,” McCain said on the bill’s launch….
There will be be sharp questioning over whether the precise targeting of divisive ads and fake news in areas that proved critical to Trump’s victory showed any evidence of collusion. CNN has reported that Russian-purchased ads were targeted in sophisticated ways on key demographic groups in Wisconsin and Michigan. In central Pennsylvania, another state won narrowly by Trump, there is evidence of outside tampering designed to depress the Clinton vote.
John Mattes, a former Senate investigator who helped run the online campaign in San Diego for Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s challenger for the Democratic nomination, has found Sanders supporters sites riddled with eastern Europeans posting fake news under false names. More recently he has come across the same phenomenon in a Facebook supporters group in central Pennsylvania. One troll, calling himself Stephen Woods, shared a series of fake news stories targeting Clinton, Muslim refugees and African Americans. Woods’s profile claimed he was from Los Angeles, but his details were thin and he had not bothered to delete posts before February 2015 that were all in Macedonian. Mattes suspects, as do US intelligence agencies, that many Macedonian trolls, who were responsible for a substantial amount of the fake news circulated during the election, are funded by and fed material from Moscow.
UPDATE: 10/23/17
Facebook Users Have the Right To Know How They Were Exposed to Russian Propaganda Regardless of the specific vehicle used to inform them, users should be able to see how organic content and advertising messages from identified Russian sources appeared in their timeline, whether they interacted with such media, if they engaged with events or received messages from propagandists, and basic metrics that quantify their overall exposure. This is not hard. The harm to people on Facebook is not simply a “one-off” experience involving the presidential elections. First, Russian active measures on Facebook started long before the 2016 primary season and lasted long after November 8th. The issue here is broader than election interference and whether Russia’s actions affected public trust in their outcome. Second, individuals’ exposure is not something left in the past. What they were told can easily affect how individuals think about the world in which they live today. Facebook holds the keys to correct for the company’s own admitted mistakes in facilitating Russia’s ability to target these Americans.
UPDATE: 10/24/17: Russia’s Facebook Fake News Could Have Reached 70 Million Americans This article from 9/8/17 explains how Facebook ads are used. “$100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times. But that average hides a lot of complexity, and the actual rate can range from $1 to $100 for 1,000 impressions on an ad with pinpoint targeting. Virality matters, too. Ads that get more shares, likes, and comments are far cheaper than boring ads that nobody likes, and ads that send users to Facebook posts instead of third-party websites enjoy an additional price break. Finally, there are network effects, which can vastly multiply the number of users who see a promoted Facebook post.”
Russia maximized its impact with a basic strategy practiced by Facebook marketers: Seed a new Facebook post with a tiny buy as low as $1 a day, then watch Facebook’s ad console and see if the post catches fire. If it doesn’t, write it off and start on the next post. But if people begin engaging with the post in a serious way, you go all in. “One out of every 100 posts, you’re going to get that home run. Then you’re going to boost the heck out of that sucker. You’re going to put $10,000 on it. And Facebook’s algorithm already knows who to show it to, like the friends of the people who already liked it… It’s a risk-free lottery. The minimum cost is $1 per day.”
One now-shuttered Facebook page provides evidence Russia was following this strategy. Called SecuredBorders, the page positioned itself as the work of a group of Americans concerned about U.S. border security. “America is at risk and we need to protect our country now more than ever, liberal hogwash aside,” read the tagline. But a March article by the respected Russian news outlet RBC revealed the page was created and run by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Association, identified by a January U.S. intelligence report as a farm of “professional trolls” financed by a Vladmir Putin ally. It’s unclear how many pages like SecuredBorders Russia ran, but that group alone had 133,000 followers before it disappeared last month, almost certainly as part of Facebook’s purge of 470 deceptive Russian accounts and, reportedly, 25 Facebook communities with a cumulative 3 million subscribers.
UPDATE: 10/25/17
Twitter will now label political ads, including who bought them and how much they are spending
- Twitter will clearly label political ads and require campaigns and organizations to disclose who bought the ad and how much they spent.
- A new "transparency center" will have a database of all ads currently running on the platform, with more disclosures for political ads.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have introduced the "Honest Ads Act" as a way to get platforms to disclose more about paid online political ads. The legislation would require platforms with 50 million or more monthly unique visitors to have a public database of political ads and records for anyone who bought more than $500 worth of political ads in the previous 12 months.
The company will also launch a "transparency center," which will show all ads — political or not — currently running on Twitter, and how long the ads have been running. The database will show users which ads have been targeted toward them and the personal criteria used to target them.
Political ads specifically will have additional information in the center, including all associated campaign ads currently running or that have run on the platform. It will show who funded the campaign, how much they spent on this specific campaign, and how much they spent on the platform in total. There will be information on the criteria used to place the ad, such as age, gender and geography.
UPDATE: 10/26/2017 Twitter Bans All Ads from Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik This is a great start. However, Twitter still needs to get rid of the ‘bots’ — automated fake accounts that continue to swarm and menace the platform. Facebook and Google should follow Twitter’s lead, and ban ads from RT and Sputnik. They are, after all, straight-up propaganda outfits of a hostile nation.
UPDATE: 10/26/2017 Twitter Bans RT, Which Retaliates With Powerpoint
Russia’s overt propaganda outlet won’t be allowed to buy ads on the service anymore. It responded with a leak of a business presentation Twitter made just for them.
The decision comes amid continuing revelations about how Russian troll accounts used social networks like Twitter and Facebook to sow discord without restraint. Twitter cited the DNI assessment that both RT and Sputnik were used by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 presidential election as the key reason for its move. “We did not come to this decision lightly,” the company said in a statement.
UPDATE: 10/27/2017 Are Donald Trump's Followers Real? Report Finds Almost Half of His Social Media Following Could Be Fake A quick search on Twitter audit shows that the president has about 19.7 million fake followers and 21.5 million real followers. In comparison, the website says former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has 9 million real followers and 10 million fake followers.
UPDATE: 10/27/2017 Russia’s Troll Factory Made ‘Hillary Clinton’ Sex Tape, Ex-Worker Claims A veteran of Moscow’s internet propaganda army has gone public and says the job was more comedy than warfare. Alan Baskaev worked for the troll factory, also known as the Internet Research Agency, for about six months, he told the independent Russian television channel TV Rain. His account of the night shift at the troll factory’s American division sheds even more light on the inner workings of the Russian-sponsored effort to influence U.S. elections.
UPDATE: 10/27/2017 Facebook will require full transparency for political advertisers – and other businesses too Facebook announced Friday that advertisers running federal election-related ads in the US would be required to verify their identity as well as run disclosures on each ad. The company also said that it would allow people to see the ads a Facebook business page — whether a brand, small business or a person — is currently running. The move comes on the heels of Twitter saying that it would publicly disclose all ads on its platform and the identity of who purchased them earlier this week.
UPDATE: 10/28/2017 Top Experts: Can Facebook Legally Disclose Russian Ads–What does the Stored Communications Act say? Facebook has explicitly stated that it will share the Russian ads with the Special Counsel and Congress but not release them to the public. Facebook’s position is apparently that the Stored Communications Act prohibits certain disclosures. One expert says: the point of the Stored Communications Act is to protect the privacy of messages that are meant to be private. There is a strong argument that the ads were never meant to be private and have no protection under the SCA. (The same would presumably hold true for organic posts if not more so, since they were not targeted to any particular audience.)…. Another expert says: As long as the demand for information refers to paid advertising, these are political communications under the FEC’s 2006 rules. ...Another says: The primary focus of the investigation into Russia’s activities on Facebook has been on advertisements and viral posts spread via the platform, and the underlying principles of the SCA don’t really apply to those materials. Advertisements and viral posts are, by their nature, communications that are broadcast for public consumption and are not akin to the private subscriber messages that Facebook is required by law to protect.
10/31/17 Former FBI agent says Russia interference began in 2014
A former FBI agent says that Russia was using fake news and automated bots on Twitter and Facebook to manipulate American opinion all through 2014 in something of a dry run before its on-line escalation in the U.S. presidential campaign two years later….Russia was initially attempting to steer American opinion on issues like Syria. But early in 2015 and on into 2016, the bots began to get into American political issues, like stirring up a rumor that a planned U.S. military exercise in Texas, called Jade Helm, was actually a plot to take over the state. No one — not the government nor the companies — took the actions seriously because they did not seem important. They also did not violate the platforms' terms of service.
(more updates in new draft beginning Nov. 1.)