Social media giant’s pledge
Facebook CEO plans to fight disinformation
Hours after Facebook reported that a political data-sharing scandal affected almost 40 million more of the social network’s users than previously believed, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday outlined a multiyear campaign to fight election interference by foreign governments and Internet trolls.
In an hour-long phone call with reporters, Zuckerberg acknowledged that disinformation campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign caught his company unprepared, a mistake he said he was determined not to repeat.
“I’m confident we’re making progress against these adversaries, but they’re very sophisticated,” Zuckerberg said. “And it would be a mistake to think they’re going to give up or stop doing what they’re doing.”
His comments capped a whirlwind day of news in which Facebook reported that up to 87 million of its users may have had their data improperly
accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm connected to President Trump’s election campaign. The previous estimate had been 50 million. Facebook on Wednesday also significantly restricted the user data that apps and their developers can access through the social network.
A day earlier, the Menlo Park company removed 70 Facebook and 65 Instagram accounts, along with 138 Facebook pages, controlled by the Internet Research Agency, an organization tied to the Russian government and accused of running disinformation campaigns to benefit the Kremlin. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 12 agency workers for interfering in the 2016 election.
Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify next week at a joint hearing of the Senate’s Judiciary and Commerce committees and before the House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee, and his comments may have represented a preview.
He called it “a mistake” when shortly after the election he dismissed the possibility that fake news spread across the network had played a role in the election’s outcome. He acknowledged that the company now faces a crisis in public confidence — severe enough to trigger a “#deletefacebook” movement — and said Facebook could no longer take a hands-off approach to what people do with its worldwide platform.
“It’s such a big service that’s so central to people’s lives,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re not just building tools. We need to take responsibility for the outcome of how people use those tools as well.”
The company’s efforts to confront potential election interference, he said, involved dealing with three distinct problems, each with its own possible solutions.
Some of the people spreading disinformation online, he said, are government-connected actors who must be identified and blocked, even as they create a bewildering number of online accounts for disguise.
“People are setting up these large networks of fake accounts, like the (Internet Research Agency) had done, and what we need to do is track it really carefully so we can remove them entirely,” Zuckerberg said. “We take them down and treat that as a security issue.”
At the same time, others spreading disinformation do it strictly for economic reasons. Rather than pursuing some larger political strategy, they post sensational stories to attract readers and make money on advertising.
“If we can just make it so the economics no longer work for them, they’ll move on to something else,” Zuckerberg said. “I mean, these are literally the same people who were sending you Viagra ads in the ’90s.”
Finally, there are users posting political content that isn’t fraudulent but is skewed, cherry-picking facts to make a point. Partnering with factchecking organizations and favoring stories from established journalism outlets can help address that issue, Zuckerberg said.
“I do think this is a multiyear effort,” he said. “My hope is that by the end of this year, we’ll have turned the corner on a lot of these issues, and people will see things are getting better. But these are big issues.”
Revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook user data reignited a longsimmering debate in Silicon Valley, Washington and around the world about whether online companies do enough to protect the vast troves of information they collect on their users.
“Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates,” said Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, in a statement. “Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.”
Facebook’s openness to third-party developers helped establish it as a force in social networking and fueled its fast growth over the past decade. But Facebook has reconsidered its policies following revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained data unscrupulously through an academic who tricked Facebook users into handing over information about themselves and their friends with an online quiz.
Facebook said Wednesday that it was closing down a range of services, known as application programming interfaces or APIs, that developers use, and tightening rules for others.
The company is restricting access to data, requiring advertisers to verify that users have opted in to data sharing and taking other steps to make it harder to obtain users’ data surreptitiously through apps.
Some of the new restrictions will hurt developers who build apps using Facebook’s relationships with billions of users and the information they post.
It’s a sharp reversal. In 2014, Facebook, facing criticism from developers that rapid-fire changes to the rules they had to observe were breaking their apps and forcing them to constantly update their software, promised to wait two years after announcing changes to roll them out. That would afford developers plenty of time to make adjustments.
Wednesday’s announcement was an explicit breach of that promise, with most of the changes effective immediately.
A Facebook spokeswoman declined to offer comment beyond Zuckerberg’s remarks in the phone call.
“Innovation demands iteration; it requires constant change,” wrote Ime Archibong, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships, in a blog post announcing the tightening of rules. “And, while change is never easy, we believe the immediate platform updates we are announcing today will build stronger connections for people, developers and businesses in the future, while maintaining their privacy and security on Facebook.”