One week ago, Facebook sent a letter to Damian Collins, the chair of the Department of Culture Media and Sport Committee inquiry into fake news, which is trying to establish the extent to which the social network was used by foreign actors in order to influence the EU Referendum in June 2016.
In the letter, Simon Milner, the director of policy at Facebook UK, explained that its investigatory team had attempted to determine clusters of Russian activity around the Brexit vote that had not been identified previously, but had found "no additional coordinated Russian-linked accounts or Pages delivering ads to the UK regarding the EU Referendum during the relevant period, beyond the minimal activity we previously disclosed."
Milner's final paragraph began "I hope you appreciate the further work we have undertaken", as if the request for information by the government was an irksome task – equivalent to being asked to re-seal a bathtub after being hired to fix a leaking tap – rather than an investigation into the possible undermining of the democratic process.
Alas, the substance of the letter was a fragment of what the Committee hoped to establish. The research covered only advertising, not the possible proliferation of fake accounts which, when weaponised during the US general election, touched 126 million people, according to Facebook testimony submitted to the Senate judiciary committee at the end of October last year.
As well as asking for clarification of some of the points in Milner's letter, Collins responded that there are still outstanding pieces of information – which Facebook had promised the Committee during the hearing in Washington DC on February 8 (at which both Google and Twitter were also questioned); namely, the exact number of accounts that Facebook has suspended, how it is resourcing its fight against bots, its methodology regarding the identification of fake accounts and how it determines what country those accounts come from. Facebook says it will deliver this information on March 14.
The past months have seen calls for large technology companies to be regulated in the way that, say, Big Tobacco was tackled in the twentieth century. The parallel is an compelling one. As well as facing punitive taxes and a ban on advertising, the tobacco industry has effectively been forced to become more transparent – to list ingredients on products, ban flavoured cigarettes that mask the smell of tobacco, to introduce standardized packaging with graphic images of the damage that smokers risk doing to their health.
Read more: You don’t need to be rich (or Russian) to subvert UK democracy
Transparency is the way forward for Facebook – after all, those who sought to influence the US election didn't hack the social network in any way, they used the platform in exactly the way it was intended. One of the challenges researchers share with the members of the DCMS Committee is that Facebook is a black box – no one outside the company has any idea what is happening under the hood. Unlike Twitter, which is relatively transparent, public and shares some of its data, Facebook is a walled garden that shuts researchers out or makes it difficult to analyze at scale.
If Facebook was willing to reveal its advertisers, give users more control over their data, explain the workings of its algorithms for its News Feed and targeting of advertising, share more data and commit to reveal the truths about the enormous challenges it faces in verifying users and false information, that would be a start.
There also needs to be transparency around identity. The Mueller indictment, in which Facebook was mentioned 35 times in 37 pages, lists the ways in which various Russian actors had established fake accounts with plausible names like Tennessee GOP, South United and Army of Jesus. Facebook is founded on the idea of identity and the conviction that leads from that, yet the company has not informed the 126 million people who encountered manipulated messages during the 2016 Presidential election that they may have been victims of a malicious attack. For an organization whose founder talks so much about trust, some form of communication on the subject – an attack by foreign actors intended to disrupt and misinform – is the very least that can be expected. Any other industry with a faulty product would issue a recall or some form of redress.
It's worth remembering that the process of regulating Big Tobacco took decades – both the Royal College of Physicians and the US Surgeon General published reports on the harmful nature of tobacco in the early 1960s. Lawmakers intending to take on Facebook are likely to face years of trench warfare in the courts, prolonging any substantive progress in what – as we approach significant elections in Egypt (35 million Facebook accounts), Bangladesh (28 million), Pakistan (32 million), Thailand (46 million), Mexico (69 million) and Brazil (111 million) – has become an issue of enormous scale and great urgency as Trump-like demagogues and populists sense opportunity for office. "Thank god for the internet, thank god for social media, thank god for Facebook," said the pro-Kremlin populist Matteo Salvini after his party, the League, made big gains in this week's Italian general election.
Clearly, the best solution for Facebook is to urgently and openly address the alarming defects of its product – or, as Mark Zuckerberg (ever the engineer) – describes it, "fix" itself. But Zuckerberg's answer when facing the problems of Facebook tends to be more Facebook. He, along with his senior executives, can and need to do better.
Big Tobacco routinely sent its policy heads and general counsels out to offer a straight bat to legislators and investigatory committees. In order to drive through changes, the World Health Organisation recommended that legislators limited their contact with tobacco companies – whose executives and lawyers were continually stalling for time, hoping that a lack of progress would undermine attempts at change.
Big Tech must not follow the same playbook. Facebook's opportunity is that it can demonstrate meaningful accountability to lawmakers and others attempting to understand the way in which the platform was used to undermine democracy – and to prevent further abuses by working with government and civil society.
Facebook would do well to remember that institutions are there to represent the very people that it says that it cares about – and that we're extremely thankful for the work that the world's largest social network is undertaking on our behalf.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
