Pence vows to defend elections

Facebook finds ‘sophisticated’ efforts to disrupt elections

NEW YORK, Aug 1 (Agencies): US Vice-President Mike Pence vowed on Tuesday to protect domestic elections from foreign interference, hours after Facebook said it had identified a new effort to use its site to influence November’s US congressional elections.

Facebook Inc disclosed it had taken down dozens of fake accounts after identifying a new coordinated political influence campaign to mislead users and organize rallies ahead of this year’s elections.

“Any attempt to interfere in our elections is an affront to our democracy and it will not be allowed,” Pence told business executives, government officials and security experts at a Department of Homeland Security cyber summit in New York. “The United States of America will not tolerate any foreign interference in our elections from any nation state.”

Pence did not specifically mention Facebook’s disclosure. But he said he and US President Donald Trump accepted the assessment by US intelligence agencies that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has made conflicting statements on that assessment, sometimes saying he is not sure that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 race.

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller is probing whether Trump campaign officials worked with Moscow to try to sway the 2016 presidential election. Russia has denied meddling and Trump denies any collusion took place.

Earlier in the day, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen unveiled plans to set up a national cyber risk management center, bolstering collaboration with the private sector to defend the nation against hacking.

The government will initially work with financial firms, energy companies and telecommunications providers to conduct 90-day assessments to identify industry security weaknesses, develop response plans and run cyber drills, Nielsen said.

Effort

The effort will operate using existing Homeland Security resources and budget, an agency official told Reuters. It marks the latest in a long series of government plans to combat cyber threats.

Executives from companies including AT&T Inc, Mastercard Inc and Southern Co addressed the gathering, sharing advice for fighting hacking by criminals and nations. The US government has charged hackers from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia with carrying out a string of digital attacks on US soil in recent years.

Facebook elevated concerns about election interference Tuesday, announcing that it had uncovered “sophisticated” efforts, possibly linked to Russia, to manipulate US politics and by extension the upcoming midterm elections.

The company was careful to hedge its announcement; it didn’t link the effort directly to Russia or to the midterms, now less than a hundred days away. And its findings were limited to 32 apparently fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram, which the company removed because they were involved in “coordinated” and “inauthentic” political behavior.

But official Washington connected those dots anyway, not least because the reported activity so closely mirrored Russian influence campaigns during the 2016 presidential election. Nearly 300,000 people followed at least one of the newly banned accounts and thousands expressed interest in events they promoted.

“This is an absolute attack on our democracy,” said Virginia Sen Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, which Facebook had briefed in advance. Warner expressed “pretty high confidence” that Russia was behind the assault.

A spokesman for Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley said Facebook had informed his office that “that a limited group of Russian actors has attempted to spread disinformation using its platform and that the affected groups are affiliated with the political left.”

The identified accounts sought to “promote divisions and set Americans against one another,” wrote Ben Nimmo and Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in a blog post Tuesday. The nonprofit is working with Facebook to find and analyze abuse on its service.

Careful

The perpetrators, Facebook noted, have been “more careful to cover their tracks” than in 2016, in part because of steps Facebook has taken to prevent abuse over the past year. For example, they used virtual private networks and internet phone services to mask their locations, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf.

After it became clear that Russia-linked actors used social media to try to influence the 2016 US election, Facebook has escalated countermeasures intended to prevent a repeat.

It has cracked down on fake accounts and tried to slow the spread of fake news and misinformation through outside fact-checkers. The company has also announced new guidelines around political advertisements, requiring disclosure of who paid for them and keeping a database.

Facebook has ramped up spending on these and other measures, so much so that it finally spooked investors with a forecast of lower profitability last Wednesday. Facebook’s shares promptly dropped almost 20 percent and haven’t recovered.

While the company would not say who is behind the efforts, Facebook said it uncovered links between the accounts it just deleted and those created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency in the 2016 influence effort.

For example, the Atlantic Council’s researchers noted “language patterns that indicate non-native English and consistent mistranslation, as well as an overwhelming focus on polarizing issues.” The accounts seemed focused on building up an online audience and moving it to offline events, such as protests.

The earliest page was created in March 2017. Facebook says more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the fake pages. The most followed Facebook pages had names such as “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.”

Facebook didn’t provide detailed descriptions of those pages. But their names parallel those of 2016 groups established by Russian agents to manipulate Americans with particular ethnic, cultural or political identities. That effort targeted people with both liberal and conservative leanings.

Spectrum

This time, though, the pages Facebook found focused “exclusively at engaging and influencing the left end of the American political spectrum,” according to the Atlantic Council researchers.

Facebook says the pages ran about 150 ads for $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars. The first ad was created in April 2017; the last was created in June 2018.

On a Tuesday conference call, Facebook executives declined to say much more, including whether the pages spanned a range of political opinion and whether the accounts mentioned specific candidates or politicians.

California Rep Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said more work needs to be done before the midterm elections.

“Foreign bad actors are using the exact same playbook they used in 2016,” he said. They are “dividing us along political and ideological lines, to the detriment of our cherished democratic system.”

The intelligence panel is planning to hold a hearing in early September with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and an executive from Google.

President Donald Trump has offered mixed messages on Russian interference, at times even calling it a “hoax.” After appearing to question whether the Russians would try again to interfere earlier this month, he acknowledged last week in a tweet that the midterms were a likely target. But he said that Democrats, not his fellow Republicans, would be the ones supported by Russia.

On Tuesday, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said that Trump “has made it clear his administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our electoral process from any nation state or other malicious actors.”

As alarms blare about Russian interference in US elections, the Trump administration is facing criticism that it has no clear national strategy to protect the country during the upcoming midterms and beyond.

Both Republicans and Democrats have criticized the administration’s response as fragmented, without enough coordination across federal agencies. And with the midterms just three months away, critics are calling on President Donald Trump to take a stronger stand on an issue critical to American democracy.