Facebook to only run verified political ads ahead of elections in Pakistan

[waqar goraya]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that the social media portal will require all political ads on its platform to clearly mention who is paying for the message and for their identity to be verified, "in a bid to curb outside election interference".

The announcement comes as an important development in the face of general elections due in a few months in Pakistan.

"With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one of my top priorities for 2018 is making sure we support positive discourse and prevent interference in these elections," Zuckerberg revealed in an official post on Facebook.

Zuckerberg assures that in order to require verification for all of these pages and advertisers, Facebook will hire thousands of more people.

"We're committed to getting this done in time for the critical months before the 2018 elections," he said.

According to the founder of the social media platform, Facebook took down a large network of Russian fake accounts earlier this week that included a Russian news organisation.

“These steps by themselves won't stop all people trying to game the system,” the Facebook chief said. “But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads.”

"Election interference is a problem that's bigger than any one platform, and that's why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online," the post concluded.

Zuckerberg announced that starting Friday Facebook would be taking more big steps:

First, from now on, every advertiser who wants to run political or issue ads will need to be verified. To get verified, advertisers will need to confirm their identity and location. Any advertiser who doesn't pass will be prohibited from running political or issue ads.

Facebook will also label them and advertisers will have to show who paid for them. Initially its starting in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months.

For even greater political ads transparency, Facebook has also built a tool that lets anyone see all of the ads a page is running. It’s testing this in Canada now and will launch it globally this summer.

Facebook is also creating a searchable archive of past political ads.

It will require people who manage large pages to be verified as well. This will make it much harder for people to run pages using fake accounts, or to grow virally and spread misinformation or divisive content that way.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1399982/f...-political-ads-ahead-of-elections-in-pakistan

 

[AssassinatedDevil]

With all the talk about Russian interference etc. during the 2016 Elections in US, this is the least that Zuckerberg can do.

 

[PakLFC]

There will be no elections soon.

 

[MenInG]

REUTERS) - FACEBOOK Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told Congress in written testimony released on Monday that the social media network did not do enough to prevent misuse and apologized.

"It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm," he said in written testimony released by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Read the full testimony https://tmsnrt.rs/2IDTHwF

"We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," his testimony continued. "It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here."


He also said that Facebook's major investments in security "will significantly impact our profitability going forward." Zuckerberg is meeting with U.S. lawmakers Monday ahead of two days of congressional testimony starting on Tuesday.

Facebook shares were up 1.7 percent in midday trading.

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-new...s-company-did-not-do-enough-to-prevent-misuse

 

[sweep_shot]

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he does not think it is right for a company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy.

He was giving a speech in Washington DC following weeks of criticism over the firm's decision not to ban political adverts that contain falsehoods.

He added he had considered barring all political ads on his platforms.

But he said he believed the move would favour incumbent politicians and whoever the media chose to cover.

And Mr Zuckerberg said that even if he had supported the idea, it was not clear where his firm would draw the line.

Instead, he said, he had decided the company should "err on the side of greater expression".

"We're at another crossroads," he said.

"We can either continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply temporary.

"The future depends on all of us," he added.

"And whether you like it or not. I think we need to recognise what is at stake, and come together to stand for voice and free expression at this critical moment."

Mr Zuckerberg referenced Martin Luther King Jr's imprisonment in Birmingham Jail, Alabama as an example of a previous backlash against free expression.

But the comparison drew criticism from the late civil rights campaigner's daughter, who said that disinformation spread by politicians had helped lead to her father's murder.

China ban
The speech was delivered at Georgetown University in Washington DC, after which the audience was invited to ask questions. However the question-and-answer section was not broadcast on a livestream provided to the public.

During his talk, Mr Zuckerberg also took the opportunity to make a dig at Chinese rival TikTok, which he said was censoring news of political protests.

And he suggested that his thwarted attempts to bring Facebook and Instagram to mainland China had worked out for the best.

"I wanted our services in China because I believe in connecting the whole world and I thought maybe we can help create a more open society," he explained.

"But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there there, and they never let us in.

"And now, we have more freedom to speak out and stand up for the values that we believe in and fight for free expression around the world."

Misleading ads
The event came three days after it emerged that since July, the Facebook chief executive had hosted private dinners at several of his homes to which he had invited conservative journalists, commentators and at least one Republican politician. These social events followed claims that the firm had shown bias against the right.

Facebook has also recently been attacked on the left, by two of the leading candidates in the contest to be the Democratic Party's candidate for the 2020 presidential election.

Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren paid to run an intentionally misleading advert on its platform that claimed Mark Zuckerberg had personally endorsed Donald Trump for re-election.

She said she had done so in protest against the firm's decision to allow politicians to run ads containing" known lies".

"When profit comes up against protecting democracy, Facebook chooses profit," she claimed.

A spokesman for Joe Biden had previously criticised the firm for refusing to remove a video posted by Donald Trump's re-election campaign which promoted an unproven conspiracy theory involving the former vice president and his son.

"It is unacceptable for any social media company to knowingly allow deliberately misleading material to corrupt its platform," Mr Biden's press secretary said.

'New tobacco'
Mr Zuckerberg has also faced recent criticism from some of his Silicon Valley peers.

On Wednesday, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff described Facebook as being the "new cigarettes - it's addictive, bad for us, and our kids are being drawn in".

He also said that the company should be broken up to prevent it gathering so much data on the public.

"Why they can't say that trust is our highest value is beyond me," he added.

Apple's Tim Cook has also criticised Facebook in the past. He has claimed it lets people's personal data be patched together and used against them, and suggested that its cryptocurrency plans go beyond the bounds of where private companies should operate.

However, he has done so without mentioning the social media's firm by name.

I think Mark Zuckerberg may have prepared by watching Barack Obama's speeches.

The Facebook chief gave emphasis to his key points by delivering them in short bursts.

"At least we can... disagree!"

"That's what freedom of expression...is!"

I could almost hear the 44th president's accent.

There was a time, of course, when we thought Mr Zuckerberg fancied himself as a future president. But if it's no longer likely he'll lead the US, he perhaps sees a chance to lead on a defining issue: the changing nature of free expression.

Progressive regimes in history, he noted, have allowed more speech, not less. And, in what will play well in the corridors of western power, he repeated his view that restricting what people say on the internet - he meant Facebook - could cede power of the internet to China's tech giants rather than Silicon Valley's.

I often flip between thinking Mr Zuckerberg is right to say Facebook should take a light-touch approach to limiting what people can post, and seeing a chief executive who is reneging on a responsibility to fix his creation.

Ultimately, I believe, a big part of the problem isn't that people use Facebook to express themselves, but that it then tends to amplify the most outrageous, divisive content.

Even so, Mark Zuckerberg has achieved some important things today. First, he's clearly and openly asked for help.

And second, he's elevated the current debate on online speech into one of historical importance, a "crossroads" in line with the American civil rights struggle.

A hero of that movement, Congressman Elijah Cummings, died on Thursday - and Mr Zuckerberg paid tribute.

Cummings was a legendary advocate of free speech - but also a man who called loudly for Mr Zuckerberg to get his house in order.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50083731.

 

[sweep_shot]

Facebook has set out extra measures for fighting the spread of disinformation at the next UK election.

These include extending its partnership with fact checker Full Fact and improving the ad library in which political ads are archived.

In addition, it announced separate plans for the 2020 US Presidential vote, including a way to track how much each candidate spends on Facebook ads.

It also confirmed it continues to be a target for foreign influence campaigns.

The company's cyber-security chief said his team had just removed four distinct networks of accounts, pages and groups from Facebook and Instagram earlier in the day.

"Three of them originated in Iran, and one in Russia - they targeted a number of different regions including the United States, North Africa and Latin America," said Nathaniel Gleicher.

"The Russian operation showed some links to the [St Petersburg-based] Internet Research Agency and had the hallmarks of a well resourced operation.

"They took consistent operational security steps to conceal their identity and location, and it appears that this operation was still in the early stages, and was focused on trying to build its audience when we took it down."

'Transparent and trackable'
Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president of policy solutions, detailed its plans for an expected UK election in an article for the Daily Telegraph.

He said it would also set up "a dedicated operations centre" for the UK if an election is declared.

The centre's job would be to quickly remove content which breaks Facebook rules, said

However, he reiterated that it would not be Facebook's job to "fact check or judge the veracity of what politicians say".

All political ads, including ads in the UK on social issues such as immigration, health and the environment, will be subject to verification of the identification of the poster, and stored in the firm's political archive, searchable by anyone, whether or not they are a member of Facebook.

The library, designed to make political ads more transparent and trackable, has faced criticism for being difficult to use because of bugs and crashes.

In July 2019 the New York Times covered the case of a researcher from Mozilla who reported a bug which crashed the library after 59 pages of results.

Facebook replied that the issue was "unfortunately a won't fix for now" although it later said it had resolved the problem

Mr Allan also pledged to offer all political candidates a dedicated channel for reporting harassment.

Full Fact
Full Fact was co-founded by Conservative party donor Michael Samuel in 2010, and it operates as a charity.

In September it identified that a Conservative party advert had featured a BBC article with an altered headline.

Facebook later removed the ad. Full Fact said that various versions of the headline would have received up to 510,000 impressions, although that could have included multiple viewings by one person.

"Images, videos and articles on Facebook which [Fact Check] assess to be untrue will now be more clearly labelled as false, and we'll continue pointing people to reports which debunk the myth," said Mr Allan.

"Our algorithm also heavily demotes this content so it's seen by fewer people and far less likely to go viral."

Mr Allan stopped short of saying that the extra measures would be sufficient to prevent election interference in the next UK election.

"While we can never say for sure that there won't be issues in future elections, we are confident that we're better prepared than ever," he said.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50128055.

 

[sweep_shot]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to reassure sceptical US lawmakers over the safety of the social network's proposed digital currency Libra.

At a fractious hearing in Washington, members of Congress attacked plans for the payment system, warning it could be abused by criminals and terrorists.

Mr Zuckerberg was also challenged over claims that he had lied to US regulators in the past.

But he promised Libra would not be launched without government approval.

He said Facebook would leave the Libra Association if the consortium tried to launch a cryptocurrency without the permission of US regulators.

What are the concerns about Libra?
Mr Zuckerberg's appearance before the House Committee on Financial Services comes after a tough month for the Libra project.

Eight of the 28 founding members of the Libra Association - set up to independently govern the currency - have pulled out. They included Mastercard, Visa, eBay and PayPal.

Meanwhile, regulators around the world continue to express concern about the project. The G7 group of nations has vowed to block it unless Facebook can prove it is safe and secure.

There are concerns the currency could be used for money laundering, disrupt the global financial system, or give Facebook too much control over user data.

How did Zuckerberg respond?
He told the hearing that he understood the reservations about Libra but was determined to persevere.

"I get that I'm not the ideal messenger for this right now. We've faced a lot of issues over the past few years and I'm sure there are a lot of people who wish it were anyone but Facebook that was helping to propose this," he said.

"But there is a reason we care about this and that's because Facebook is about putting power into people's hands."

He said Libra was a prime example of "American innovation" and could help more than a billion adults without a bank account worldwide.

Facebook would not control the Libra Association and would instead occupy one seat on a governing board of five, he added.

Grilling or roasting?

As is often the case when Mark Zuckerberg is in Congress, the agenda deviates from the subject at hand.

One exchange stood out, and it wasn't about Libra. Ann Wagner, a Republican congresswoman for Missouri, said that Facebook's plan to introduce end-to-end encryption on its Messenger app would make it harder for authorities to discover instances of images of child sexual abuse being shared.

That matters: 12m such images were shared on Facebook last year. It's by far the biggest platform for that kind of illegal material sharing.

While other services, like WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage, are encrypted, experts in child safety say the main Facebook platform is of greater concern when it comes to paedophiles searching for, finding, and grooming children - all on the same platform.

"What are you doing to shut this down?" Ms Wagner demanded to know.

Mr Zuckerberg cited tools developed by Facebook to detect the material, but eventually admitted: "It will be harder to find some of this behaviour."

He'll need to find better answers - or face a scandal that may well dwarf all the others.

What did other panel members say?
Mr Zuckerberg's testimony was largely met with scepticism as members of Congress focused on the social network's past failings in areas such as data protection.

Maxine Waters, the Democratic chairwoman of the panel, pointed out that the social network was the subject of an antitrust investigation. She said it had "allowed" Russia to interfere with the US election in 2016.

It had "huge" reach, with an audience of 2.7 billion users, she said, adding: "Perhaps you feel you are above the law?"

She said it would be "beneficial for all if Facebook concentrates on addressing its many existing deficiencies and failures before proceeding any further on the Libra project".

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50152062.

 

[sweep_shot]

Facebook has removed an advert from a tax campaign group for breaking its rules on political advertising.

The Fair Tax Campaign, run by a former Boris Johnson aide, has been running an ad with the message "could you afford an extra £214 each month?"

It claims that this is what Labour's tax plans would mean for everyone.

Labour is yet to publish its tax plans or manifesto for the 12 December general election.

But Shadow chancellor John McDonnell this weekend said that if it won the election, the party only planned to increase income tax for the top 5% of earners to help fund increased public spending.

"In terms of income tax, we've said very clearly the top 5% will pay a bit more, 95% of the earners will be protected," he told the BBC.

A Labour spokesman called the banned Facebook ad "fake news" and said it was right that it had been swiftly removed.

The Fair Tax Campaign is run by Alex Crowley, a former aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson who left Downing Street in late September.

He told the BBC the ad made a "legitimate charge" that was based on a New Economic Foundation Report from August this year. He said the campaign had no links with the Conservative Party.

'Provide clarity'
The message in the ad says "sponsored" but does not reveal who has paid for it. Under Facebook's rules, political advertisers have to register with the social media firm and every advert has to show who has paid for it.

Facebook removed the ad after being contacted by the BBC.

The company said it should have carried a "paid for by" disclaimer and the advertiser has been contacted "to provide clarity" on its policies relating to ads about politics, elections and social issues.

The Fair Tax Campaign will be able to switch the ad back on if they register and insert the "paid for by" disclaimer.

In the meantime the advert can be seen in Facebook's Ad Library, with a message explaining why it has been removed.

The BBC has contacted the Fair Tax Campaign via its Facebook page which was created on 13 October this year. So far there has been no response.

It is unclear who is behind the group, which says on Facebook that it believes Labour's tax plans must never be allowed to happen and calls on voters to oppose them in the 12 December general election.

Three Facebook users contacted the BBC to say they had been shown the advert. They were responding to a crowd-sourcing initiative designed to reveal how the different parties are targeting paid adverts during the UK election campaign.

Facebook has come under fire on both sides of the Atlantic over its policy of not policing misinformation in political adverts.

Boss Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly defended the policy, insisting that free expression must be his company's priority.

As the UK general election campaign gets underway, the social media platform is bound to be a vital campaigning arena, indeed it is likely to be the principal focus for party spending.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50296664.

 

[sweep_shot]

Former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser, recognisable to many as the unlikely star of the Netflix documentary The Great Hack, has appeared at Web Summit in Lisbon.

The documentary followed the self-styled whistleblower as she testified to the UK parliament about what she knew when she worked at the firm as a business development manager.

Now with a book out, she has reinvented herself as a data privacy guru aiming to educate youngsters about disinformation, and planning to put data back into the hands of users via blockchain technology.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2016 when it emerged that the data of up to 87 million Facebook users had been harvested via a personality quiz - and it's never been exactly clear how it was used.

The consultancy aided Donald Trump's election campaign. And Ms Kaiser appeared on the firm's behalf at a Leave.EU Brexit press briefing - the two organisations say they never signed a contract to work together but Ms Kaiser has alleged that "chargeable work was done".

In an interview with the BBC, Ms Kaiser said she wanted to see political advertising on Facebook banned.

She said she feared little had changed. Hundreds of companies around the world are still crunching through personal data and throwing it back at people in the form of political ads, she said.

"It is sad that we have to ban all forms of political advertising to stop people being manipulated. But it has to be done," she added.

"Our electoral laws are not fit for purpose. Facebook functions pretty much the same and now it is not going to ban any politicians who are sending disinformation our way."

While Twitter has moved to ban political advertising, Facebook has not, and she thinks it will need government regulation to force it to.

It's important, she said, because of the way data is being "weaponised" in political campaigning.

"Data-driven campaigning gives you the edge that you need to convince swing votes one way or the other, and also to get certain people to show up to the polls," she said.

"It can also be used to turn off your opponents and get people not to show up to the polls."

In her book Targeted, she provides new details about the methods she claims were used by Cambridge Analytica in the US presidential election, in particular how it gathered information on different personality types and sent them adverts most likely to resonate with them. The use of so-called psychographics in the Trump campaign had been denied by the firm before its collapse.

"What I saw when I was at Cambridge Analytica was that individuals were deemed persuadable, I don't mean persuadable to vote for Donald Trump, but persuadable to not vote for Hillary Clinton," she told the BBC.

"So it was to deter them from going to the polls. And that is the type of tactics where you can use this information in order to persuade certain people to disengage from the political process."

She gave specific examples of her claims: "We saw an old quote from Michelle Obama being turned into an advertisement that made it look like she was criticising Hillary for staying with her husband, who cheated on her, and that was being targeted at conservative women to get them to not support her."

An old 1996 speech by Hillary Clinton in which she talks about young black men joining gangs was targeted at African Americans, she said, to dissuade them from voting for the Democrat.

Ms Kaiser said the personality profiling done by Cambridge Analytica was good at targeting "people who are neurotic, and sending them fear-based messaging".

"Sending messages to people who were extroverted and open-minded wasn't very effective," she added.

Some regard Ms Kaiser as an unreliable witness, and question whether her whistleblowing was done more to save herself than to expose the company she worked for.

Prof David Carroll, a data privacy expert who also played a pivotal role in The Great Hack, told the BBC that he thought she was "an important witness to history".

But he believes that in her book she "obfuscates and omits key aspects, to protect her reputation and her friends".

In her BBC interview, Ms Kaiser addressed her critics: "Most of those people have no idea how hard it is to be a whistleblower."

"I spent the past year and a half being unpaid, doing pro-bono work for governments around the world by being an expert witness... never knowing if I'd ever get a job again, never knowing if I was going to be persecuted or if I would be threatened with physical violence.

"You really start to wonder who's going to come after you."

It is all a long way from when she entered the world of politics and data, in the Obama campaign, to "figure out what got people excited about politics".

"I never expected when I joined a company that was going to teach me more advanced forms of data science, that there was going to be anything malicious about it," she said. "It's never too late to decide to do the right thing."

Critics question what she did during her time at Cambridge Analytica. She has been accused of deploying Israeli hackers to influence the presidential election in Nigeria in 2015, something she denies.

"In Nigeria I met with clients who are actually private businessmen, not the campaign itself, who wanted to fund an external campaign. And so I helped, put together a team and sent people out there. They were only there for three weeks, so nothing that they did was really that big or that effective," she told the BBC.

And what of Alexander Nix, her former employer with whom she is portrayed as having an affectionate friendship in the Great Hack?

She told the BBC she was no longer in contact with him - in fact a text message wishing her luck in her testimony to the UK parliament in 2016 was the last time she heard from him, she said.

But she said she believes he is still involved in political consultancy work.

"I hope he has learned from his mistakes and is working more ethically."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50234144.