INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Heaven forbid a political candidate Facebook account gets hacked
They might spread disinformation…like they&re already allowed to do in Facebook ads…
Today Facebook made a slew of announcements
designed to stop 2020 election interference
The bottom line here is that elections have changed significantly since 2016,& and so has Facebook in response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on
&We&ve gone from being on our back foot to proactively going after some of the biggest threats out there.
One new feature is called
By hijacking accounts of political candidates or their campaign staff, bad actors can steal sensitive information, expose secrets and spread
So to safeguard these vulnerable users, Facebook is launching a new program with extra security they can opt into.
Facebook Protect entails
requiring two-factor authentication, and having Facebook monitor for hacking attempts like suspicious logins
Facebook can then inform the rest of an organization and investigate if it sees one member under attack.
Today other announcements
include:
The takedown of foreign influence campaigns, three from Iran and one from Russia in order to protect users from deception.
Labeling
state-owned or controlled media organizations like Russia Today on their Facebook Pages and the Ad Library to help users identify potential
propaganda.
Added Page ownership transparency for ePages with large United States audiences and those verified to run political ads, which
will have to display their owner organization legal name, city and phone number or website so it clear where information comes from.
New
transparency features around political ad spend, including a United States presidential candidate spend tracker, more geographic spending
details, info on which apps an ad appears on and programmatic access to downloads of political ad creative.
Much more prominent
fact-checking labels will now run as interstitials warnings atop photos and videos on Facebook and Instagram that were fact-checked as
false, rather than smaller labels attached below the post to make sure users know information is false before consuming it
Users will also be warned before they share posts fact-checked as false to keep them from going viral.
A wider ban on voter suppression
ads that suggest it useless to vote, provide inaccurate polling or voter eligibility information or threaten people if they vote or based on
the outcome of an election to prevent intimidation and confusion.
A $2 million investment from Facebook into media literacy projects to
develop new methods of educating people to understand political social media and ads.
Facebook Protect offering hack monitoring services to
elected officials, candidates& political party committees, government agencies and departments surrounding elections and verified users
involved in elections.
Combined, the efforts could protect both campaigns and constituents from misinformation while giving everyone more
clarity about where content originates
Yet the approach highlights Facebook tightrope walk between policing its networks and overstepping into censorship.
In a speech last week,
Zuckerberg tried to firmly plant Facebook as erring on the side of giving people a voice rather than stifling speech
He raised the threat of China influence over foreign businesses by dangling its giant market in exchange for adherence to its political
And he tried to defend allowing lies in political ads, arguing that banning political ads on Facebook as I&ve recommended the company do
would benefit incumbents and silence challengers who don''t have media attention.
A Trump ad spreads misinformation claiming Democrats want
to repeal the second amendment
Yet throughout the call, Zuckerberg was hammered with questions about Facebook willingness to fact check what
users share with friends, but not what politicians pay to show to millions of voters.
People should make up their own minds about what
I don''t think those determinations should come from tech companies
People need to be able to see this content for themselves,& Zuckerberg insisted
Yet if Facebook is willing to cover photos containing misinformation with a warning label you have to click to see past, it strange that it
unwilling to do the same for political ads
Like farming out fact-checking to third-party news outlets as Facebook already does, banning political ads wouldn''t force Facebook to
judge the truth of individual statements, and they&d still have the right to share what they want to their own followers.
Facebook should
End the lies.
When I asked why he believes banning political ads would favor incumbents, Zuckerberg admitted, You&re right that incumbents
can raise more money,& and he wasn''t sure there&d been a comprehensive study on the matter
His defense relied on anecdotal beliefs of unnamed sources:
I&ve talked to a lot of people
The general belief that they have, when they&re a challenger, is that they rely on different mechanisms like ads in order to get their
voices into a debate more than incumbents do
.
From all of the conversations that I&ve had, the general overwhelming consensus from people who are participating in these things and who
work on them has been that removing political ads would favor incumbents.
While the rest of Facebook announcements today felt like sensible
steps in the right direction, the company will need stronger arguments for why it polices misinformation shared by users but not political
ad campaigns.
If it wants to find a better middle-ground, it could offer standardized ad units for political campaigns that endorse the
candidate and ask for donations, but can''t make potentially untruthful assertions about them or their competitors
Alternatively it could apply fact-check labels to political ads without making calls of veracity itself
Facebook could also build other ways for challengers to grow their voice outside of ads so it could ban them without supposedly empowering
incumbents.
Otherwise, it faces a political ad misinformation arms race in stern contrast to its other pro-truth efforts announced today
What will Facebook do if campaigns make increasingly malicious and inaccurate statements about their rivals via ads, claiming only donations
to their candidate can save society? And what if they keep pouring all the money they unscrupulously raise into more ads? &My opponent eats
Only I can stop them from becoming America dictator.
At least most of the time, users can try to avoid politics by ignoring campaign pages
and unfollowing their crazy uncles
