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for the current president, Mitro Pola Crisena. As proof, he sent me his offer letter for the job with the president working on social media for the state. He also sent me a picture of his government I d Oshalla said he'd been in contact with Facebook while he was working for the government. He sent us a link to a photo from a meeting that he said took place in six It showed Oshalla standing next to the president

as well as a woman called Anki. Thus, she's Facebook's public policy director for India and South and Central Asia. So we started talking politicians in Sri Lanka. Now they are doing a lot with Facebook. They advertise they maintained pages, most of them have teams managing them. UH new media websites planting news good news better so they U see. Oshalla wanted to talk about the Sri Lankan government and

the way the president was using Facebook. He claimed that Facebook had allowed the Sri Lankan government special privileges and that the government was using it to silence its critics and cemented its script on power. Hi, I'm Pa got Cary and I'm Sarah Fryar. And this week on Decrypted, as part of our special series on Unintended Consequences of technology, will take a look at how Facebook has courted policy co leaders looking to curry favor in new markets in

its mission to connect the world. But the company of policy of offering special services and training to political candidates and government officials may have also inadvertently created an opening for some leaders to manipulate the platform. Facebook pages can give politicians a way to spread their message, monitor the opposition, and make a person or agency seem more popular than perhaps they really are. Behind the scenes, Facebook was poorly

equipped to stop the misuse. You've probably already heard about how Russia tried to use social media in the run up to the US presidential election, but in other countries, the manipulation is coming from inside the government itself. Stay with us. So, Sarah, let's go back to the end of the year. A brutal civil war had just ended a few years earlier, and Sri Lanka was under the rule of President Mahinda Rajapaksa Russia. Paksa had already been in power for a decade and had a growing reputation

as a strong man without much regard for democracy. In the final weeks of the year, he called a snap election. Initially, nobody was running against him. That's when his former health minister, a man called ma Tripala Sirisena, stepped forward. Amad me on. When I spoke to Shaala Hara, the man who reached out to me on Twitter, he said he had felt electrified by Sara Sanna's decision to run the previous regime. He was like a bit of a dictator and the

media was suppressed and so on and so so. The I also personally decided that you should do something suppout the common candidate. Shalla called Citizena the common candidate because he became the common choice of all the political parties to run against Rajapaksa. Even the main opposition party supported him instead of their own candidate. At the time, Oshalla said he was running a Facebook page called u p f A A Brighter Future, which he says was pretty popular.

U p f A stands for United People's Freedom Alliance and it's one of the political parties in Sri Lanka. He said he started it in two and used to post mainly about politics. Oshalla said he thought this new candidate, Citizener, would be a change for the country, so he decided to use the reach of his Facebook page to help and the next forty days we just volunteered in his campaign, and within forty days the page members grew from thirty to about two hundred fifty thou and every day we

were getting about three d likes. Three hundred thousand likes on Facebook was a big number back in Sri Lanka is an island nation of about twenty one million people and Facebook was still catching on. But Servisna recognized this platform offered away for him to connect directly with potential voters, and Oshalla was ready to help. I wanted to do so many things with social media because people saw that

election as a revolution through social media. Because all mainstream media was on one side with the previous UH regime only one TV channel. One series was like UH supporting the common candidate or being opened with the election, So the social media was the one with was the open platform. Then in January, citizen and won the election. Sri Lanka took Matthew are a commas artist mind the days. Mama main than my family lives in Sri Lanka and I

remember this was a big surprise when it happened. Internationally, his victory was seen as a sign that Sri Lanka was rejecting a strongman leader and respecting the democratic process, so there was a lot of hope. Oshalla told me that after Service Sanna's victory, he was offered a job on the president's social media team. He said yes, and soon after starting he reached out to Facebook. Oshla says he wanted to work with the company to help more

Sri Lankan's get online. At the time, Facebook was actively trying to spread the Internet as part of its mission to make the world more open and more connected. It's easy to see why this has been a goal for the company. There are humanitarian reasons internet access is good. At the same time, having more people online equals more connections on Facebook. More connection means more activity, and ultimately,

more activity means more growth for the company. So Facebook started ramping up its work with governments around the world. It connected with them to spread internet access, but it also worked on more mundane things like official Facebook pages and campaign ads. The role that Facebook has played with governments across the world has really grown as the company has grown. That's Lauren Etta. She's our colleague here at Bloomberg who has done a lot of reporting on how

governments have used Facebook around the world. And Facebook would pretty much work with anybody. They would work with any candidate that was speaking to increase their outreach, increase the reach and brought in their based on the platform. Oshaa says he connected with the company's political unit, and before long a team from Facebook arrived in the country ready

to help. In the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken frequently about how more openness is generally a good thing and has vowed to combat misuse on his platform. I also recently talked to the head of Facebook's political unit, who told me that she's making sure that governments follow the same rules as everyone else. So Facebook had put down roots in Sri Lanka and it had spread quickly across the country, but before long problems started to crop up.

What we saw on Facebook was um that bad fat actors, um we're coming increasing in increasing numbers and producing and promoting content from an extremist Buddhist nationalist perspective that was inciting hit and violence that san Janatata he's a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Alternatives in a founding editor of Groundview Style or a journalism organization in Sri Lanka. Interestingly, this was around the same time that this started to

happen in Myanma as well. This hateful content that Sanjana was seeing was a total contrast to the narrative around Facebook and other parts of the world at that time. This was a time when Facebook was basking in the glow of the Arab Spring, and there was a general euphoria and optimism about the potential of the platform to contribute to democracy and bringing the word closer together. As far as Sanjana knew, Facebook didn't have any content moderators

who were fluent in Sri Lanka's local languages. Simila and tamiel So Ground Views, the organization he helped to found started publishing reports about this hate speech and hoping to raise awareness of the problem. Oshana told me that even though he was working for the government, he saw the trends too. It was an easy platform for people with listed interest to plant fake news, insult people, harass people. There is no way to find out who is doing it or it's like people can do any damage to

any person anonymously. He told me that he even tried to talk to Facebook about it when its team came to Sri Lanka. So we at that point President requested Social Facebook to have some sort of a system to regulate all these things, and we asked them to, if possible, to help us to teach do programs to help people to have move awareness of how to use Facebook Facebook

tools in order to protect themselves. But Oshalla says Facebook wanted to help with other things like verifying political pages and expanding in the country, and wasn't as concerned with the other problems that across being up. We'll be right back. Facebook was quickly becoming a critical part of how people got online and got the news, and governments around the

world we're realizing this too. Sometimes officials worked harmoniously with Facebook to connect people and make more public information available, but they also leaned on the platform as a campaign tool his Lauren again, So slowly, Facebook became kind of an appendage to many of these political campaigns to the point where they would they would essentially have a Facebook operative inside many of the major campaigns around the world,

from the Philippines to India, UM to the United States. UM. As we know in the United States, Facebook was was critical to a Trump campaign. Governments became acutely aware of Facebook's power to either help them or hurt them. They started to realize that social media was an extremely high stakes game. So basically Facebook predicated this notion that they were going to change the world, and they you know,

they were. They were very prominent during the Air Spring and critical to these uplisings that happened across the Middle East, and everybody widely viewed Facebook as the platform for democratic action, and it was. But as the tools spread from countries from around the Middle East to other places around the world, you inevitably and inevitably ended up in the hands of

governments and leaders that were not interested in democracy. So you have this tool that's supposed to be neutral in this platform that's supposed to be this great equalizer for the public and governments in many cases are using it to share public information, but they're also using it for their own political ends. And this strategy worked great for Facebook, which was making money from political content people were posting

and sharing on the platform. For Facebook, they saw very early on that elections were like any other major event that drew lots of people to their platform. In time, elections became like they drew in the same number of users as say the Super Bowl or say the Olympics. So because Facebook is essentially an advertising platform, they saw this as a huge opportunity to cash in on a massive audience. And not only was it a big audience, but it was a very engaged audience, And that's a

very critical point to understand. In Sri Lanka. It was so successful that people spent most of their time online on the platform, but Facebook didn't seem to take into account what could happen when online communities became the main source of news in a country with unstable politics. By the start of this year, long standing tensions were running high in Sri Lanka. Rumors were going viral on Facebook saying that the country's small number of Muslims wanted to

wipe out the country's Buddhist majority. One of the fake posts alleged that Muslim pharmacies were distributing sterilization pills and putting them into people's food. The toxic content Sanjina had been tracking on Facebook for years had finally broken into the real world. Extremists from the Buddhist community, people with large followings, were using the social network to plot real world attacks. Sri Lanka declared a state of emergency after

mob attacks on Muslim communities by hardline Buddhists. A curfew has been put in place in the district of Candy. At the groups of Buddhists attacked Muslim owned businesses, homes and a mosque. A few days of panic followed. Violent incidents seemed to be spreading out from Candy to elsewhere in the country, spurred on by social media. Then the

government decided to act. It took an extraordinary step. The government shut down Facebook access, blocked access to the platform in the country and I think that is what for you know, raised the profile of the country at Facebook's officers. So Facebook was blocked across the country and in some areas, the whole Internet went down. I remember this vividly because my family lives in Sri Lanka and without access to WhatsApp and other internet calling services, we were cut off

for a few days. The government justified the internet shutdown by saying it was trying to stop the flow of false information. The violence subsided after a couple of weeks. The Internet was restored across Sri Lanka and Facebook service resumed as normal. But the incidents showed not just how dangerous online networks can be, but who ultimately controls access to them. Until the shutdown, san Jana never knew for sure whether his research flagging Sri Lanka's hate speech problem

on Facebook ever even registered with the company. We you know, sent it to the publicly available email interessers of Facebook that were available to us. They were the individual they were institutionals, So we don't know who it was read by, if any, and if it was read, how it was escalated within the company and to whom, when, why, or where. So we didn't get any response whatsoever in all the years that we did the research, But after the shutdown,

Facebook started paying attention. His lack of access is not unusual a lot of people outside the government try to get in touch with Facebook and just can't find anyone to talk to. And once Charlotte left, supposed to the government, he tried to flag abuse to his old contacts of the company. When he did, he got blocked. He actually showed me the messages. Oshalla's issues were separate from the

violence that had broken out across the country. He was trying to tell Facebook that the government itself was manipulating pages on the platform. Here's an example. One wrong thing is what government did changing a page name and using audience which are not truly their followers as they are, to show that they are a bit popular and they have numbers. And the second thing Facebook, without looking into it,

they endorsed it and they verified it. This might not sound like a big deal, but this is an example of how easy it is to be deceptive on Facebook. Oshalla told us he found out that the government took a popular joke page and branded it as a political page. They basically co opted a page with a bunch of followers already making the administration look more popular online, and then Facebook actually verified the page, putting a blue check

mark by it. Oshalla was able to see what the government was doing because of a transparency tool that Facebook itself added recently. It lets people know things like who owns a page and previous names the page used to have. We looked and it showed that the page was in

fact previously a joke page. Facebook would of course have had access to this information, but it appears the company verified it anyway, so that page is still up and meanwhile, Oshalla is still blocked by the Facebook rep he reached out to. We reached out to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka to ask them about the government's practice of renaming Facebook pages, but we never heard back. This isn't the only case of a government finding a way

to manipulate public perception on Facebook. Researchers have found that the tactics that the Russian government used to influence public opinion in the US presidential election were honed and perfected on Russia's own population first and in the Philippines. Bloomberg has reported how the journalist Maria Ressa tried at least three separate times, including in person, with Mark Zuckerberg, to ask the company to take action against fake news and

online harassment. A Facebook director said at the time that it would take down hate speech targeted at journalists when it was reported to the company. Facebook said that its policy allows negative comments, but will act when it crosses the line into hate speech or threats. Going forward, there are a few things Facebook can do better to serve its users in countries like Sri Lanka. Facebook knows that it needs to dedicate more resources to low called language operations.

Sri Lanka has two main languages, Sinhala and Tamil, and until recently, Facebook had very few people working in these languages, so the company couldn't tell if a post was full of hate speech, for example, and the things in Sri Lanka mostly people communicated language and our own to take single language and Facebook, that's a huge gap. They don't They can't uh understand the content even though it is here speach whatever. Oshalla says that it's easy to create

fake accounts. That's because people in Sri Lanka often have multiple names, so if Facebook asks for verification, one idea could cover several accounts. He also explained how easy it was to buy popular pages from others. He showed me a couple of marketplaces that were active, but Facebook executives

are investing in learning more about Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is the first country in the world in all its markets that it does announced that it's going to proactively take down missingful that are escalation channels now available for civil society to report content. Fake news isn't against the rules on Facebook, but the company recently made a policy banning fake news that incites violence, so it took down those pages we talked about that were related to the

sterilization pills and food. Facebook itself, I think has undertaken reviews of its content curation, moderation, oversight capabilities and capacities. They have assured us that there are more moderators or people who are responsible for kind of maintaining the health of the public discourse on the platforms. What we don't know, however, is how many they are. Well. Santina is waiting for Facebook to say how many moderators they now have focused

on Sri Lanka. He did say that he's been in contact with the company about related matters in recent months, and finally, executives are making trips of the country and working with local organization now to talk about threats. So Sarah I mean, one of the things that really struck me as we were working on this episode together is Facebook wasn't better prepared for the fact that politicians might

try to use the platform to spread propaganda. One thing that's been clear overall about Facebook in the past years is that they kind of just focused on growth. They just wanted to get bigger and do whatever it took to get people connected to Facebook, and their mission is, you know, connecting the world and didn't quite think at all about the consequences of that connection or really the strategy to achieve it. So are they now trying to

recalibrate their approach to training political candidates. Well, the United Nations has come out and called them out for their role in some violence in Myanmer and other countries. I mean, it's coming to a head. There's a lot of screw me over Facebook's sort of way of working, and the company is looking into this and trying to invest in

it more. But you know, for people like sanjoh, it like this is this is stuff that Facebook should have been aware of, that they were alerted to as early as and it shouldn't have taken until raging violence in a country for them to really get to it. Yeah, well, I guess on that point, Sanjina definitely has a point. I wonder in light of all of the scrutiny and also these kind of changes that they're making to their approach, is the company kind of moderating the way the activities

that it's political unit get involved with. That's like the central problem here, right, is that, like in these countries or people don't necessarily have as much experience with the Internet, the governments are getting trained and the users are not, and there's this advantage that the governments have in manipulating their populations, and that's not a good setup. All that Facebook has told me so far is that they are focused on making sure that the governments know that they

have to adhere to Facebook's community standards. So they're not stopping this kind of training that they do or getting governments up to speed on how best to use the tools. They think of government's kind of like they think of sports stars or celebrities just people that everyone wants to follow on Facebook, so why not give them v I P Attention? So but at the same time, it sounds like they're stopping short of being um like very explicit about new measures that they would introduce to make sure

that governments aren't breaking the rules. I mean, as a contrast to the way they've they've really started talking about measures they're taking to crack down on things like fake news and hate speech. Well, the government's control what is very important to Facebook, which is access to Facebook. So you know, they want to make sure when Oshana introduced Facebook to the country for the first time, they also

wanted to meet with the telecom regulators. They wanted to meet with, you know, the sort of the people that would be in control of the business relationship as well. And I think that that's you know, those are the incentives that Facebook operates on, and they're trying to make sure that they clean up their procedures and policies and improved training and investment. But there are some fundamental ways that the platform works with the government that maybe the

government will always have this advantage. Yeah, so it sounds like Facebook is still racing to catch up with the reality that helped create. I would say that's true. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story about Facebook in your country, We want to hear from you. You can email us at decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Sarah Fryer and I'm at Pia gad Cary. If you're a fan of the show, please take a moment to

rate and review us. It really helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pierre Goodcary and Liz Smith. Our story editor was Anne Vandermain. Thanks also to Austin Weinstein, Brad Stone, Akido, Emily Busso, and Magnus Hendrickson. Francesca Levi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.