How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda
How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of
Digital Propaganda
Some of unit’s clients stifle opposition, stoke
extremism.
By Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier December
21, 2017, 2:00 AM PST
Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for
political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his
mission is above partisanship. “We hope to give all people a voice and create a
platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg wrote in September after President Donald
Trump accused Facebook of bias.
Zuckerberg’s social network is a politically agnostic
tool for its more than 2 billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns
out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his
company actively works with political parties and leaders including those who
use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of “troll armies”
that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.
The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global
government and politics team that’s neutral in that it works with nearly anyone
seeking or securing power. The unit is led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a
former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy
Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since Facebook hired Harbath three years
later, her team has traveled the globe helping political clients use the
company’s powerful digital tools.
In some of the world’s biggest democracies—from India and
Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto
campaign workers. And once a candidate is elected, the company in some
instances goes on to train government employees or provide technical assistance
for live streams at official state events.
Even before Facebook was forced to explain its role in
U.S. election meddling—portrayed by its executives as a largely passive affair
involving Russian-funded ads—the company’s direct and growing role catering to
political campaigns raised concerns inside the social media giant.
“It’s not Facebook’s job, in my opinion, to be so close
to any election campaign,” said Elizabeth Linder, who started and ran the
Facebook politics unit’s Europe, Middle East and Africa efforts until 2016.
Linder had originally been excited about the company’s potential to be
“extraordinarily useful for the world’s leaders—but also the global citizenry.”
She said she decided to leave the company in part because she grew
uncomfortable with what she saw as increased emphasis on electioneering and
campaigns.
In the U.S., the unit embedded employees in Trump’s
campaign. (Hillary Clinton’s camp declined a similar offer.) In India, the
company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who
now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader. In the
Philippines, it trained the campaign of Rodrigo Duterte, known for encouraging
extrajudicial killings, in how to most effectively use the platform. And in
Germany it helped the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD) win
its first Bundestag seats, according to campaign staff.
By all accounts, Facebook has been an indispensable tool
of civic engagement, with candidates and elected officials from mayor to prime
minister using the platform to communicate directly with their constituents,
and with grassroots groups like Black Lives Matter relying on it to organize.
The company says it offers the same tools and services to all candidates and
governments regardless of political affiliation, and even to civil society
groups that may have a lesser voice. Facebook says it provides advice on how
best to use its tools, not strategic advice about what to say.
“We’re proud to work with the thousands of elected
officials around the world who use Facebook as a way to communicate directly
with their constituents, interact with voters, and hear about the issues
important in their community,” Harbath said in an emailed statement.
She said the company is investing in artificial
intelligence and other ways to better police hate speech and threats. “We take
our responsibility to prevent abuse of our platform extremely seriously,”
Harbath said. “We know there are ways we can do better, and are constantly
working to improve.”
Power and social media converge by design at Facebook.
The company has long worked to crush its smaller rival, Twitter, in a race to
be the platform of choice for the world’s so-called influencers, whether
politicians, cricket stars or Kardashians. Their posts will, in theory, draw
followers to Facebook more frequently, resulting in higher traffic for
advertisers and better data about what attracts users.
Politicians running for office can be lucrative ad
buyers. For those who spend enough, Facebook offers customized services to help
them build effective campaigns, the same way it would Unilever NV or Coca-Cola
Co. ahead of a product launch.
While Facebook declined to give the size of its politics
unit, one executive said it can expand to include hundreds during the peak of
an election, drawing in people from the company’s legal, information security
and policy teams.
At meetings with political campaigns, members of
Harbath’s team sit alongside Facebook advertising sales staff who help monetize
the often viral attention stirred up by elections and politics. They train
politicians and leaders how to set up a campaign page and get it authenticated
with a blue verification check mark, how to best use video to engage viewers
and how to target ads to critical voting blocs.
Once those candidates are elected, their relationship
with Facebook can help extend the company’s reach into government in meaningful
ways, such as being well positioned to push against regulations.
At the very least, the optics of directly aiding
campaigns or those in power may create the impression among users that Facebook
is taking sides. Its effort effectively helping the Scottish National Party to
victory in 2015 is recounted as a “success story” on Facebook’s corporate
website that lists business case studies, even though those who favor staying
in the U.K. might see it otherwise. In April, Vietnamese officials bragged that
Facebook would build a dedicated channel to prioritize takedown requests for
content that offended authorities. The company generally routes requests from
governments through a separate channel, and takes the content down if it
violates community standards. If it violates local law, it’ll only be
unavailable in the relevant country.
“They’re too cozy with power,” said Mark Crispin Miller,
a media and culture professor at New York University.
That problem is exacerbated when Facebook’s engine of
democracy is deployed in an undemocratic fashion. A November report by Freedom
House, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advocates for political and human rights,
found that a growing number of countries are “manipulating social media to
undermine democracy.” One aspect of that involves “patriotic trolling,” or the
use of government-backed harassment and propaganda meant to control the
narrative, silence dissidents and consolidate power.
Internally, Facebook executives are grappling with how to
distinguish between what constitutes trolling harassment and protected
political speech. Zuckerberg has long maintained the company doesn’t want to
play censor, but Facebook has drawn some lines—banning Greece’s Golden Dawn, the
ultranationalist party, for example. The company also often removes the most
extreme content, from white nationalists in the U.S. and from the Islamic
State, as well as content it catches violating its “community standards” on
hate speech and violence. Not all such content gets caught.
In retrospect, the nexus of power and data at Facebook
seems inevitable. In 2007, Facebook opened its first office in Washington. The
presidential election the following year saw the rise of the world’s first
“Facebook President” in Barack Obama, who with the platform’s help was able to
reach millions of voters in the weeks before the election. The number of
Facebook users surged around the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East
around 2010 and 2011, demonstrating the broad power of the platform to
influence democracy.
By the time Facebook named Harbath, the former Giuliani
aide, to lead its global politics and government unit, elections were becoming
major social-media attractions. They now rank alongside the Super Bowl and the
Olympics in terms of events that draw blockbuster ad dollars and boost
engagement.
Facebook began getting involved in electoral hotspots
around the world. They went to Argentina in 2015, where now-President Mauricio
Macri streamed campaign rallies live on Facebook and, once elected, announced
his entire cabinet on the site, complete with emojis. The same year, Poland’s
nationalist president, Andrzej Duda, became one of the first world leaders to
livestream his inauguration on the social network. Even as Duda has overseen a
crackdown on press freedom in the country, Facebook’s corporate website says
the company was “integral” to his electoral success and that his page is “one
of his office’s main communication channels.”
Facebook has embedded itself in some of the globe’s most
controversial political movements while resisting transparency. Since 2011, it
has asked the U.S. Federal Election Commission for blanket exemptions from
political advertising disclosure rules that could have helped it avoid the
current crisis over Russian ad spending ahead of the 2016 election, Bloomberg
reported in October. After a Congressional inquiry into Russian election
meddling, Facebook has pledged to be more transparent about ad buyers and said
it’s open to regulation.
The company’s relationship with governments remains
complicated. Facebook has come under fire in the European Union, including for
the spread of Islamic extremism on its network. The company just issued its
annual transparency report explaining that it will only provide user data to
governments if that request is legally sufficient, and will push back in court
if it’s not. Despite Facebook’s desire to eventually operate in China and
Zuckerberg’s flirtation with the country’s leaders, it’s still unwilling to
compromise as much as the government wants it to in order to enter.
India is arguably Facebook’s most important market, with
the nation recently edging out the U.S. as the company’s biggest. The number of
users there is growing twice as fast as in the U.S. And that doesn’t even count
the 200 million people who use the company’s WhatsApp messaging service in
India, more than anywhere else on the globe.
By the time of India’s 2014 elections, Facebook had for
months been working with several campaigns. Modi, who belongs to the
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, relied heavily on Facebook and WhatsApp to
recruit volunteers who in turn spread his message on social media. Since his
election, Modi’s Facebook followers have risen to 43 million, almost twice
Trump’s count.
Within weeks of Modi’s election, Zuckerberg and Chief
Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg both visited the nation as it was rolling out
a critical free internet service that the government later curbed. Harbath and
her team have also traveled there, offering a series of workshops and sessions
that have trained more than 6,000 government officials.
As Modi’s social media reach grew, his followers
increasingly turned to Facebook and WhatsApp to target harassment campaigns
against his political rivals. India has become a hotbed for fake news, with one
hoax story this year that circulated on WhatsApp leading to two separate mob
beatings resulting in seven deaths. The nation has also become an increasingly
dangerous place for opposition parties and reporters. In the past year, several
journalists critical of the ruling party have been killed. Hindu extremists who
back Modi’s party have used social media to issue death threats against Muslims
or critics of the government.
On the night of Sept. 5, a Honda motorcycle pulled in
front of the Bengaluru home of Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken critic of Modi who
had been targeted by patriotic trolls on Facebook and other social media. As
the Indian journalist was unlocking her gate, three bullets struck her in the
head and chest, killing her. No arrests have been made.
The final editorial Lankesh had written for her newspaper
was titled “In the Age of False News.” In it, she lamented how misinformation
and propaganda on social media were poisoning the political environment.
— With assistance by Benjamin Elgin
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