For ancient, old, curmudgeons, like your humble correspondent, the digital world is awesome, marvellous, mysterious, frustrating and scary. The digital world is, to our ossified brains, incomprehensible. An enigma.
We, the chronologically challenged, have long worried about this new digital age, and what it is doing to our society. Some of our worst fears were confirmed in the Thursday edition of the New York Times. (Which, of course was read by thousands more people on-line, than those who actually held a copy of the paper in their hands. Ah, the marvels of the digital age.)
Back to the fears. The Times, after spending a lot of time and effort, has confirmed what has long been suspected, the Russians played a major role in the election of Donald Trump. And it reported that Facebook was one of the digital tools Russia used to foist Mr. Trump on the American people. The company became aware that the Kremlin was using Facebook to interfere in American politics early in 2016. Facebook did nothing about it.
The employees who discovered the Russians were using Facebook to undermine the Democrats didn’t even tell the company’s senior executives until well after the election was over.
The Times reported that in December 2016, after Mark Zuckerberg, president and principal shareholder of Facebook had, “publicly scoffed at the idea that fake news on Facebook had helped elect Mr. Trump” did anyone tell what his employees had found out months earlier.
Alex Stamos, the head of the team that uncovered Russia’s use of Facebook, was alarmed by Mr. Zuckerberg’s ignorance and requested a meeting to make the senior executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, aware of what they had discovered.
The Times reported Ms. Sandberg’s reaction, she was angry. “Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the company exposed legally.” When things cooled down it was decided that Mr. Stamos should continue investigating.
By January, Mr. Stamos knew he had “only scratched the surface of Russian activity of Facebook” and urged the company to go public with its findings.
By this time American intelligence agencies reported that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president had ordered the computer hacking to help elect Donald Trump. Joel Kaplan of Facebook’s Washington office was worried if the company also publicly implicated the Russians, then Republicans would accuse Facebook of siding with the Democrats. And, he added, if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived.
The U.S. Senate started its own investigation and The Times reported that during the spring and summer, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate concerns about the company, claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook.
But inside the company they were finding more and more evidence of Russian involvement to the point where one executive said the situation was akin to a “five-alarm fire.”
The article on Facebook is long and detailed even by New York Times standards. This brief summary barely skims the surface.
What stands out, is Facebook’s preoccupation with itself and its seeming lack of concern about how it was used by a hostile, foreign power to manipulate the American democratic system. While the report focuses on how Russia inserted itself into the American presidential race, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat and all the other forms of social media could also be used to spread hate and propaganda.
When the American politicians were investigating Russia’s role in their election, Facebook was disingenuous and un-cooperative. And when they sought to require some transparency and regulation to ensure fair elections, Facebook’s initial reaction was to push back and lobby against any form of control.
Back in the pre-digital age it used to be said when an election was over, ‘The People Have Spoken.’ Now after Trump’s election, we’re not so sure who has spoken, Putin or the American people.
- Alan Holman is a freelance journalist living in Charlottetown. He can be reached at: [email protected]
