Two things stand out to us after Facebook’s revelation that Russian trolls bought at least $150,000 worth of ads during 2015-16: what this tells us about Moscow’s chief goal in meddling in the US campaign, and what it tells us about Facebook and its Silicon Valley peers.
First, there’s the summary from FB Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos: The ads “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum.” That is, the aim was to deepen America’s divisions, and so help undermine the nation’s democracy — and not to win the election for Donald Trump.
Stamos says Facebook is working out how to prevent it from happening again, though Putin’s cyber-warriors will doubtless look for ways around new security measures.
The other issue, of course, is the way Facebook and the like are belatedly, and very reluctantly, starting to take some responsibility for their content. For years, they’ve insisted that they’re simply “platforms,” dodging any accountability for content (and also any effort to make them pay for content that others actually developed).
What seems to have moved them to action is the charge, levied loudly after Election Day, that Russian interference is what put President Trump in the White House. Would all this have gone undiscovered if Hillary Clinton had won?
Even now, their efforts to manage content seem focused on only some threats. Google, GoDaddy and others quickly banned the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in the wake of a repugnant post about Heather Heyer, the woman killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville.
Yet, as the Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn noted recently in The Post, Google still allows “major social-media platforms [that] have hosted ISIS activity, child-porn rings, facilitated drug dealing and carried live streams of murder, torture and other crimes.”
On top of it all, Google and Facebook are now huge and immensely profitable — and dominant in a way that no Western media company has ever been.
They could make a start on building public confidence by fully admitting that they’re part of the publishing industry, with all the moral and professional obligations that implies.