Facebook’s fake news battle extends to Mexico
MEXICO CITY >> This spring, a doctored image claiming that the wife of the leading Mexican presidential candidate was the granddaughter of a Nazi ricocheted across Facebook and its messaging service, WhatsApp.
The post, shared 8,000 times before it was disproved, was among a flood of fabricated stories that spread on Facebook and its other services, Instagram and WhatsApp, ahead of Mexico’s presidential election held Sunday — the country’s own version of the divisive misinformation that sought to influence the 2016 campaign across the border.
Determined to prevent a repeat of the abuses of its platform ahead of November’s U.S. midterm elections, Facebook has poured resources into election integrity, hiring thousands of content moderators and fact-checkers, deploying artificial intelligence, and conducting large sweeps of problematic accounts. Each new election is seen as a test: Facebook’s security and civic teams are actively tracking 50 different elections in 2018 alone — and triaging for those deemed “high risk” — amounting to a national election practically every week.
But the Mexican election reflects the constantly mutating ways social media can be weaponized against democracy — and the immensity of Facebook’s global challenge.
Easy targets
Most of Facebook’s users live in countries like Mexico, where government corruption is endemic, distrust of the mainstream media
is widespread, viral memes and WhatsApp messages are often perceived to be as credible as news stories, and the forces manipulating debate online are internal, tied to domestic political parties and other local actors.
“The hardest part is where to draw the line between a legitimate political campaign and domestic information operations,” said Guy Rosen, a top security executive at Facebook. “It’s a balance we need to figure out how to strike.”
In a talk for security experts in May, Facebook security chief Alex
Stamos called such domestic disinformation operations the “biggest growth category” for election-related threats that the company is confronting — groups, he said, that are copying Russian operatives’ tactics to “manipulate their own political sphere, often for the benefit of the ruling party.”
This area is also the trickiest: While most democracies bar foreign governments from meddling in elections, Facebook sees internal operators as much harder to crack down on because of the free speech issues involved.
In interviews, executives conceded that determining the origin and motivation of many page operators is too great an effort for a private company to manage. Instead, the focus is on limiting the reach of serial offenders, punishing behaviors without often being able to get to the source. The brunt of Facebook’s news vetting in Mexico falls to a small group of third-party fact-checkers, whose job is to play whack-a-mole — debunking one story at a time, with each taking several days to disprove.
Resources
Facebook’s limited forensics around false news in Mexico show how the company’s aspiration of keeping elections honest globally is still out of reach for the social network, despite the prominent role its service has come to play in many societies.
“This is the scale of [Facebook’s] challenge,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and an expert on social media and politics. “It is almost impossible to wrap your mind around.”
The company didn’t have fact-checking partners outside the United States and Europe until March, when it funded a group in Mexico. Until last month, fewer than a dozen fact-checkers were tasked with debunking Mexican disinformation for the country’s 84 million Facebook users, along with tens of millions who use WhatsApp. In addition, several of the tools Facebook is launching in the United States, such as identifying the publishers of political ads and verifying pages with large followings, will not be operational before Mexico’s election.
One scalable product —
first launched in the Alabama Senate race last year — that the company plans to deploy in the days before the Mexican election is a dashboard to monitor potentially false stories as they bubble up.
“It’s not fair to have a high set of standards in one country and not in another,” said Esteban Illades, editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos and author of a recent book about the country’s disinformation landscape. “The biggest challenge for Facebook in Mexico is not Russia, and it is not Macedonian teenagers. It is our broken system.”
Widespread manipulation of Facebook’s service during the 2016 U.S. presidential election woke the company up to the ways the social network could be abused by malicious operators in countries like Macedonia, profiting off sensational news, and by Russian agents seeking to sow division in U.S. society, imperiling the democratic process.
Facebook for years pitched its service to government officials as a way to make the democratic process more transparent, and trained them in techniques to build their audiences and engage voters.
Specialist
Diego Bassante, an Ecuadorian diplomat who left his post in 2014 to join Facebook,
was the first Latin American hire in what was then a tiny division focused on helping candidates and governments across the world become power users of the service. He helped the mayor of Buenos Aires broadcast on Facebook Live, one of the first times a Latin American politician had done so.
In Mexico, he led workshops for politicians and candidates on how to use Facebook. This year, Bassante obtained permission from Mexico’s electoral commission for the platform to broadcast the presidential debates, which were viewed by 11.8 million people, the company said.
In a region where politicians seldom interact with the public, experts said these efforts helped facilitate a new form of transparency.
But after the 2016 U.S. election, when Facebook was reeling from the Russia controversy, a dramatic shift took place. All employees dealing with elections — even those in countries without Russian interference — had to consider what could go wrong, a directive that came straight from Zuckerberg.
“We in the region said, ‘Oh shoot, our job description just changed,’” Bassante said.
In the highly charged contest, experts say there’s a thriving underground
economy of political trolls for hire, groups allegedly funded by local candidates that spend their days flooding social media with sensational stories and attacks.
Bassante’s small staff coordinates with data scientists in Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters and with content moderators in Austin.
One morning last month, Bassante was conducting a manual sweep of accounts impersonating political candidates, something that violates Facebook’s real-name policy. The company wasn’t using its artificial intelligence technology, he said, “because we want to be very careful not to accidentally take down a page.”
Critics argue that Facebook may have developed too-cozy relationships with candidates and governments in weak democracies — opening the door to bad actors who abuse its service, said Monika Glowacki, a researcher for the Oxford Computational Propaganda Project, who is writing a case study about Mexico. “They invited them in,” she said.
And executives are aware that a broader crackdown can create thorny political questions when Facebook also cultivates relationships with officials, a strategy the company has doubled down on since the U.S. election.
Social media rise
One reason social media has exploded in Mexico — a country where every adult with an Internet connection is on Facebook — is because it is seen as a place where people can obtain alternative sources of information, an antidote to the climate of distrust.
Facebook, Google and the local branch of Al Jazeera have funded Mexico’s first independent fact-checking organization, Verificado 2018, which means “verified.” Launched in March, it has roughly a dozen employees,mostly in their mid-20s, who so far have debunked 310 Facebook posts. (In late May, Facebook announced a new fact-checking partnership with the Agence France-Presse news agency in Latin America.)
In such a cynical news environment, many “people don’t know the difference between an image and a news story,” said one factchecker, Maria Jose Lopez.
Verificado isn’t able to issue a verdict on all stories. Earlier this year, a story surfaced alleging that Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán had been ordered by the government to kill Mexican presidential candidate López Obrador. The story was shared 80,000 times, including by a popular Facebook account
that had a record of supporting the leftist candidate. Verificado said it didn’t attempt to research the story because it would be too difficult to reach Guzmán, who is imprisoned in New York.
Executives said they were working as quickly as possible to support a growing ecosystem of fact-checking groups around the world. Since March, Facebook has helped fund groups in India, Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Most countries staunchly oppose foreign intervention in democratic elections. On the other hand, deciding what motivates locals to distort political debate in their own countries, and sometimes hire themselves out to do so, is a thornier call, executives said.
Facebook chooses to clamp down on “coordinated inauthentic behavior,”said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s recently appointed head of cybersecurity policy and a former director in President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. But that allows for plenty of gray area: It prohibits fake accounts, but real people who post false information are permitted to do so.