AN UGLY TRUTH

Reviewed 7/24/2022

Access to this book courtesy of the

AN UGLY TRUTH Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang New York: HarperCollins, July 2021				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN 978-0-06-296067-2	333pp.	HC/GSI	$29.99

Internet Research Agency

Indisputable Russian Activity

For some time it has been clear that, with the tacit approval of Russia's president Vladimir Putin, cyber warriors of the Internet Research Agency in the city of Saint Petersburg had carried out a campaign to hack America's Democratic Party in order to disrupt Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency in 2016. Putin had personal reasons to want to stop Mrs. Clinton from winning the presidency, and the IRA gave him the means.

There were multiple reasons for Hillary Clinton's loss. The IRA certainly played a part in her loss, and they would have done so without Facebook. However, Facebook made things a lot easier for the IRA. It did this by focusing on growing the number of users worldwide, and by ignoring or back-paging concerns of its teams devoted to privacy and security. Only after Trump had won the presidency in 2016, badly shocking everyone at Facebook, from Zuckerberg and Sandberg on down, was any coordinated action taken to understand the Russian threat.

This action involved retrieving long-retired hard drives archived in cavernous warehouses across the USA to analyze the historical data they contained. What was eventually revealed is remarkable. The team led by Alex Stamos uncovered 3,300 advertisements bought by the IRA for a total of $100,000; 120 Facebook pages run by them; and 80,000 pieces of content produced by them. In total, the IRA's effort reached 126,000,000 Americans.

Wherever there was a "seam line issue," a divisive position that could turn Americans against one another, there was the IRA. Gun control, immigration, feminism, race–the IRA ran accounts that took extreme stances on each of these issues. Many of their pages supported the Trump campaign and conservative groups across the United States, but they also ran pages in support of Bernie Sanders. "It was a slow, slow process, but what we found that summer, the summer of 2017, it just blew us away," recalled one member of Facebook's security team. "We expected we'd find something, but we had no idea it was so big."

While over the years some Facebook employees had speculated that the IRA was focused on spreading disinformation in the United States, no one had thought to go looking for a professional disinformation campaign run by the organization. The security team had not believed the IRA audacious or powerful enough to target the United States. Facebook's assurances to Senator Warner and other lawmakers that they had fully uncovered Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 elections were based on the assumption that they were looking for Russian military intelligence activity, but they had missed the forest for the trees. While they were chasing state-backed hackers spreading emails from the Clinton campaign, they had overlooked the IRA's highly effective troll army.

– page 132

The extent of this Russian interference in the 2016 election is by now thoroughly documented. It was not limited to Facebook; it affected other social networking services, online sites run by newspapers, and video hosting services. On 16 February 2018, based on information provided by the Mueller investigation, the Internet Research Agency was indicted by a U.S. grand jury along with two other Russian organizations and 13 individuals for criminal interference with U.S. political processes.1

Trump campaign influence

Facebook aided and abetted this interference — not knowingly, but deliberately — by giving political ads carte blanche on the platform.

"Our role is to make sure that there is a level playing field but not to be a political participant ourselves," Clegg proclaimed in his plummy Oxford accent. Peering at the audience, he slowed down to emphasize the gravity of his words. "That's why I want to be really clear with you today—we do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules," he added.

Political speech, Facebook spokespeople confirmed later, included paid ads by candidates and their campaigns. Clegg was confirming for the first time that political ads weren't fact-checked, which allowed politicians and their campaigns to pay to place lies on the site.

– pages 249-250

The largest purchaser of political ads in 2016 was the Trump campaign. As Steve Bannon pointed out, its strategy was to "flood the zone"2 with ads and posts by Trump, most often aimed at negative coverage of their candidate in the media. These ads were targeted at specific groups of Facebook users, and sometimes at specific individuals. It's been reported that campaign workers had active help from Facebook staff in learning how to best use the platform's targeting features.

There were other factors in Mrs. Clinton's loss. A major factor was that the media constantly focused on Trump's claims, and especially on the minor controversy of Mrs. Clinton's email server, while ignoring the more important policy differences between the candidates.3 But the IRA must not be discounted, because their interference continues. The U.S. shut down the Russian "troll farms" including the IRA on election Day 2018 and for several days afterward, in the first offensive action to secure a U.S. election.4

For more on IRA election interference in 2016 and later, see e.g. Internet Research Agency Twitter activity predicted 2016 U.S. election polls (Damian J. Ruck et. al, First Monday, 1 July 2019), Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017 (Christopher A. Bail et. al, PNAS, 25 November 2019) and My review of Cyberwar by Kathleen Hall Jamieson. These battles will go on until we Americans learn to better secure our computers — which includes installing software updates promptly and also avoiding "social engineering" tactics such as phishing.

1 See Wikipedia and the House Intelligence Committee.

2 Media Matters for America explains that strategy. See also Political Wire.

3 An extreme example was CNN showing the empty podium where Trump was scheduled to appear while failing to cover a speech by Bernie Sanders already in progress at the same time. The media in effect gave Trump millions of dollars worth of air time his campaign did not have to pay for.

4 See Cyber Command Operation Took Down Russian Troll Farm for Midterm Elections (Julian E. Barnes, The New York Times, 26 February 2019). See also Russian government-backed Internet Research Agency continues information operations meant to divide Americans (alliance for securing democracy, 12 March 2020).