Between June two thousand fifteen and May two thousand seventeen, four hundred seventy Facebook accounts purporting to be legitimate American organizations flooded Facebook with political ads. The big problem these profiles linked back to Russia. I'm John and Strickland and this is tech stuff Daily. Let's start at the beginning. In two thousand fifteen, as the road to the election was solidifying, political ads and related content found their way
on all major forms of media. That includes everything from billboards on the side of the highway up to expensive television. Add time, social networks like Facebook were also popular platforms. An ongoing investigation into the ten election and the possibility that foreign powers interfered with it uncovered an issue with
some of those ads. A collection of them on Facebook, numbering more than three thousand ads in tow total, came not from legitimate sources in America, but rather from Russian accounts. Those three thousand ads may have reached as many as ten million people and yet cost only one thousand dollars. That's a pretty big reach for relatively small investment, and considering the goal was to influence the outcome of a major election, it's a real wake up call. But wait,
it gets worse. According to the Pew Research Center, of Americans get their news from Facebook rather than from traditional sources like newspapers or television, and researchers have been looking into how clickbait sites use tools like Facebook's early ads spending to get widespread notice. By spending some money on Facebook, you can boost a post's reach to hit a larger audience.
Numerous clickbait sites, which exists solely to rack up as many page views as possible, use these tactics to entice people into clicking on various articles, and both the Russian ads and the clickbait articles tend to rely heavily on some ugly tactics. The ads, for example, didn't focus so much on specific candidates. Perhaps this was the Russian actor's attempts to create a plausible distance between Russia and the
specific people running for office. Instead, the ads focused on divisive issues, including ones about racial equality, gay rights, gun control, immigration, and similar subjects. Most of the ads didn't point at a specific candidate to support or oppose, but implied very
heavily a support for Donald Trump as president. And so we now have an investigation looking at Facebook as well as other online platforms including Google and Twitter, to see how foreign agents may have used those platforms in order to sway the American public to support or oppose particular candidates. The evidence seems to suggest that this sort of hanky panky was definitely happening. The extent of its effectiveness is
still up for debate. Facebook's chief operating officer, Cheryl san Berg, has said the company apologizes for its permissive ad policies. She also says that people at Facebook are sad and angry that their tools have been used to manipulate voters. According to some x Facebook employees who spoke with Variety on the subject, many feel a deep sense of regret for having developed the tools in the first place. To be a little fair to Facebook, the company is a business.
It's a business that makes its revenue from advertising. Add companies pay Facebook to serve ads up against the social media content on the site. From a purely financial standpoint, Facebook had little incentive to look too closely at any particular ad. After all, that was money coming into the company. Why look a gift horse in the mouth. In the wake of this scandal, Facebook is taking steps to make
sure similar scenarios don't play out in the future. There's another election coming up in eighteen in the United States, and Facebook doesn't want to repeat of sixteen. To that end, the company is hiring one thousand people to help hand review ads that are political in nature or ones that target issues like racial equality. The reviews will attempt to determine the real origin for such ads and make sure foreign entities aren't meddling in the political affairs of the
United States. Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, has said that the company's goal is to create automated technical solutions to this problem. Facebook is an enormous platform that serves more than a billion people. At that scale, reviewing everything by hand isn't really feasible or practical, but the company needs to make sure that the automated approach is a
really reliable approach before handing over the controls. Meanwhile, Russia has denied all allegations that any state agents were responsible for meddling, and Donald Trump's administration has dismissed any suggestion of collusion, and Facebook's general counsel is preparing to stand in front of an investigative panel acting on behalf of the United States House of Representatives. The panel also expects to hear from representatives from Google and Twitter on the matter,
and that will all begin on November one. You as politicians have started to formulate demands that social networking sites disclose who is actually funding online political advertising. The industry is mobilizing efforts to put lobbyists and lawyers in place to help shape any potential legislation and presumably minimize the financial impact the companies would encounter as a result of
new laws. The bottom line is that while the Internet continues to play an increasingly important role as a source of information, there are not nearly as many measures in place to guide how that information is funded and rolled out to an audience. The question now is will social media companies find ways to address this problem that will stave off regulatory legislation. That's all for today. To learn more about the power of social media and everything else
tech related, subscribe to the Tech Stuff podcast. I'll see you again soon.