Why is Meta's Andy Stone wanted by Russia?

bell now. Unlike a lot of the other folks that I talk about on the show, you know, like geniuses like Ada Lovelace or Nikola Tesla, or you know, company founders like Gordon Moore or Steve Wozniak, or even controversial corporate leaders like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Stone isn't that deeply rooted in the world of tech. In fact, until twenty fourteen, he spent his professional career working in

government and campaign positions and stuff related to that. And now, according to reports, Russia's Interior Ministry has added Andy Stone's name to its wanted list. So I thought we could do a short episode about Stone, the job he's held since twenty fourteen, and what might have led him to be considered a criminal in Russia. Here in the States, there are people who certainly take issues with some of the things Stone has said, but I'm not sure anyone would go so far as to call him a criminal.

Here in the US, Stone's forte is at least presumably in communications. He attended George Washington University, a prestigious college here in the US, and he studied political communication while he was there. That school happens to be located in Washington, d C. There are a couple of other schools in that area where typically the students who are going to those schools often end up working with the government in

some form or another. It's pretty common, like a lot of jobs are directly or indirectly connected to the US government or at least a government there. Because my partner attended Georgetown, which is in DC, and worked for the French embassy for a while, so again it's a place where you make connections. Stone worked for presidential candidate John Kerry's campaign in two thousand and three, and in late two thousand and four he joined M and R Strategic

Services as a consultant. Now that's a company that primarily focuses on political communications, so not affiliated with any specific candidate or party, but is there to act as a consultant for the purposes of creating political communications, so again very much in line with what he had already been doing. He would then become the communications director for Congress in two thousand and seven, and you kind of see where

this is going. The nature of politics here in America means that any role you hold in government, like if you're actually connected to a governmental party, it's likely on borrowed time election cycles change up who's in charge on the rag. Now there are, of course, federal employees who typically hold positions from administration to administration, and they don't necessarily change each time there's a change in leadership, although there are efforts to make that be very different. Anyway,

that's getting into a whole different realm. But from two thousand and three to twenty fourteen, pretty much all of Andy Stone's work focused on political communications, either as part of a campaign or part of a governmental body or part of the private sector, but still catering to politics. Now that changed in the spring of twenty fourteen, That is when Meta, then known as Facebook they had not changed their name yet, offered Stone a gig as a

policy communications manager for Facebook. Now, by this time, Facebook had already sailed past the incredible milestone of having a billion active users per month. That had happened actually back in twenty twelve, so it was definitely already a huge company by twenty fourteen. They had also acquired Instagram. Also back in twenty twelve, and just before Stone would join

the company, Facebook had announced it was acquiring Wattsapp. This was a truly huge acquisition deal in the billions of dollars, so a lot was going on. In fact, when Stone joined Facebook, that very same month, the company announced its intention to acquire Oculus VR, so a lot of the components that make up you know, various foundational elements of Meta today, those were all being acquired around the same

time that Andy Stone joined the company. Now, on top of all that, the company was also launching some very progressive features. For example, one month before Stone joined Facebook, the company updated its platform to allow for different gender designations in support of the LGBTQ plus community, So you suddenly had a lot more pronouns that you could use when you were creating your profile and thus represent yourself

more accurately. This was a pretty progressive approach, especially in twenty fourteen, and Andy Stone had focused a lot of his career on how to communicate progressive policies to the public, because most of the time he was focusing on socially progressive democratic campaigns and policies, So this kind of was a type of synergy when he joined Facebook. I don't have very much background about Andy Stone beyond this. I'm

sure there's stuff that's out there. Right now, the news cycle is just flooded with this story about Russia putting him on a wanted list. But when I started trying to dig around and just learn a little bit more about him, I mean, I've seen his name dozens of times. When I tried to learn more about him, there really

wasn't a whole lot to find. Again, I'm sure if I did a super deep dive, I could change that, But it is interesting to me that someone who has dedicated his career in public communications has also managed to maintain a pretty low profile. Stone's name pops up a

lot since twenty fourteen. These days, according to LinkedIn anyway, his title is communications director, and that means that when you come across a story that includes something like Facebook says it's disappointed in the EU's decision or whatever, there's a darn good chance that Facebook was actually Andy Stone who said this. He's been the spokesperson for the cum in many of its trials and tribulations over the last

several years. Stone's job is really to serve as the mouthpiece for the company and to craft communications on the company's behalf, and I imagine his job has grown a lot more challenging over recent years in the wake of a series of scandals and difficult events, such as the unraveling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now, if you don't

remember the Cambridge Analytica story, good for you. But it refers to a political consulting company that leaned on an app that was used to scrape data from Facebook without first getting user permissions. And they were able to do this because for a while, Facebook really didn't provide adequate

protections with its application programming interface. So essentially, before Facebook actually addressed this issue, a developer could create an app for Facebook that, when installed, could access way more information than what was actually needed for the app to work.

For example, maybe you create a game, a very simple game that is within Facebook or just uses Facebook credentials in or for you to log into the game, but as part of that installation process, the app gets permissions from the user to access all kinds of data, like maybe everything that is personal information related to the user gets sent to the developer. Maybe it gives the developer access to view all of that user's friends and contacts on Facebook, and none of that is necessary for the

game to work. But really, until the mid twenty tens, Facebook kind of let that go, like they just let developers get access to all sorts of information, whether it was necessary for the app to work or not. So in the case of Cambridge Analytica, the company was making use of a survey app, and this particular survey would actually offer a fee to users. It would pay people to take the survey. Folks like getting money, so that

was a huge incentive. A lot of folks said sure, and they ended up installing this little app so they could take the survey. Now, what they may not have realized is that by installing the app, they were essentially opening up all of their connections to scrutiny, because now Cambridge Analytica, through this app, could view not just the survey taker's information, but all the people who that person was friends with. They could view those profiles as if

they were the person who took the survey. So it suddenly opened up the opportunity to scrape data on a much larger scale. In fact, millions of accounts were affected by this, and so you didn't have to be the person who downloaded the survey. You just had to have a friend who did it. And if they did it, you were affected too. So Cambridge Analytica accesses millions of people's profiles without their permission, and Andy Stone had the un inviewable task of announcing findings to the media about

that situation. So when Facebook did an investigation and estimated that around eighty seven million accounts were affected, this number would fluctuate quite a bit throughout the investigations, but this was an early one. Well, Andy Stone was the person who had to actually deliver that information to the media. Not a whole lot of fun. Anyway, we're gonna come back to talk more about Andy Stone in just a moment. Before we can do that, let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsors. So I was talking before the break about Andy Stone having to deliver rough news about the Cambridge Analytica to the media as this scandal was unfolding. But This was around the same time where Stone began to build a reputation for being let's call it assertive on platforms like Twitter and using that platform to refute or criticize Facebook's own critics, kind of like striking back

at the critics. One of the journalists who covered the Cambridge Analytica story was Carol Cadwaller, So on top of being a journalist, Cadwaller became a member of the independent Oversight Board for Facebook. You might remember this board reviews Facebook's decisions to determine if the company is actually aligning

with its own policies. You may also remember that the board can make recommendations to Facebook, but the company is under no obligation to actually adopt those recommendations, which obviously brings up the question how effective the board can actually be. But anyway, Cadwaller says that Stone attempted to discredit her by sharing quote deliberate deceptions regarding Cambridge Analytica and deliberately

trolled me. It was just in no way appropriate for the corporate pr of a trillion dollar company to behave like that toward a journalist end quote. So this would not be the last time the journalists as well as others would complain of Andy Stone's approach, particularly on Twitter. Another high profile case was when former Facebook employee Francis Hogan came forward in late twenty twenty one with a

whistleblower report on the company. She shared thousands of internal documents that didn't exactly put Facebook in a good light. In fact, we're still learning about stuff that was in those documents, and a lot of the stuff in there suggests that the people in Facebook now known as Meta were more aware of negative aspects that the company and

its platforms had on certain users than had been previously disclosed. Anyway, Andy Stone frequently had to go to bat for the company and defend it, as report after report filed in about issues like the company's influence on young users in particular. And I'm not sure that Stone's efforts were always effective when it came to deflecting her testimony in front of Congress, because again he took to Twitter to try and discredit her or to hang some doubt upon her and her point.

One message he posted to Twitter, of course, now known as x read quote just pointing out the fact that Francis Hogan did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues, and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook. End quote, which, if you were to ask me, that seems like a

pretty darn weak defense. Because if someone dumped tens of thousands of actual corporate documents in my lap and then told me that this stuff comes from inside company so and so, and it says the company has knowingly engaged in some questionable stuff and continues to do so, even knowing the potential consequences for that, I wouldn't really be

concerned about that person's expertise in whatever the field was. Right, assuming that I could determine that the documents are legitimate, that they in fact came from within the company that was claimed, then it doesn't matter the level of expertise of the person who brought them to me. I would be more concerned about the actual content of the documents, and the people who produce those documents presumably were experts in their field. It doesn't matter if the messenger is

an expert. In fact, Andy Stone should know that quite well because he has been the messenger many times. He is not the person who creates the different message or the different policies. I should say, he creates the messages around them, So you should know that a person's expertise isn't really the matter of concern when you're talking about documents that have some pretty damning content in them. Now, Stone's posts on Twitter prompted some pretty interesting responses around

the journalist field and beyond. So for example, Bob Pickard, who is the CEO of Signal Leadership Communication, This is a consulting group that helps executives create communications to the public so that they can do so in a way that is responsible and accountable, that's going to have the best impact, that's not going to run a foul of the law of that kind of stuff like this is

high level communications we're talking about here. Well, Pickman said, quote Facebook's crisis comms on this issue are embarrassingly bad. Everyone is talking about Facebook's poor PR, which is often a proxy for other issues, but I think the comms themselves are in d crap end quote. Now, that wasn't just referring to Andy Stone, but certainly Stone was being lumped in with this criticism. Several PR professionals question why Stone was even posting on Twitter at all about this stuff,

why he was taking this particular tactic. They said it was antithetical to the way you would typically try to build up a communications department within a company. They said that, you know, usually you want to build relationships with the press so that you can get more favorable coverage, and using Twitter to snipe at journalists who have posted stories that critique the company isn't really conducive toward doing that.

They compared it more to his work in politics, and that in politics, often communications leads to a quote unquote zero sum game where there has to be a winner and a loser, and in those sort of of avenues, it was more common to see this kind of banter going back and forth between a PR person and the press. Less so when it comes to corporate communications now. Earlier this year, Stone served as the messenger for another sticky situation see Meta slash. Facebook has a strict policy against

data scraping. The most valuable asset that Meta has is access to our information. We are the product. You've often probably heard that that if you go someplace and the thing is free, then it turns out you are the product that's for sale. That's definitely the case when it comes to Meta's platforms. All of our interactions, everything we post to the platform, everything we look at and engage

with on those platforms. All of that is valuable, right, That's all data that's incredibly valuable because Meta can pack it this up and then sell it to advertisers. So the more you use Meta's products, the more valuable you become, and the more information you share about other people in your life, the more valuable you become. We are a gold mine for Meta, and Meta guards that gold mine jealously.

The fact that people don't flip out. More over, how their personal information is exploited for the benefit of a truly massive corporation amazes me. I guess, I guess not everyone fully understands it, and the people who do understand it ultimately think, ah, it's not that big a deal. I mean, it's just some personal information. But it's really not. I mean, it's really a big deal. It's really not

something you should just dismiss. It's important, and the point where it can become important for you specifically as opposed to just in the general, then it's too late. But this is a potentially fragile arrangement. Meta records that Meta recognizes that if people wake up to the fact that they really need to protect their personal information in a more aggressive way. And if you start to see governments around the world pass laws to help actually achieve this goal,

Meta's revenue is in danger. So Meta is very very careful to not really bring too much attention to this part of its business, at least not in a way that is obvious to users. But it also means Meta is very jealous of this information. If some other company swoops in and starts to crawl Meta's platforms in order to build out databases, that can threaten Meta's own business model, because if we notice that this other company is doing it, and we're worried about this other company, we might start

asking questions about Meta itself. So take Clearview AI for example. This company created a huge facial recognition database. But in order to do that, you first have to grab a whole bunch of pictures of people. Now that's obvious, right, Like you have to get the pictures in order to actually have a database of facial recognition photos. But where do you get the pictures from? Right? You know, you're

not just going door to door and snapping photos of people. No, what clearview AI did and the CEO admitted as much. The company scraped various social network platforms, including Facebook to build out its database of thirty billion photographs, and clearview AI's customers included authoritarian organizations you know we're talking about like law enforcement agencies, that kind of thing that would use clearview AI's databases to try and do things like

like identify suspects that sort of stuff. So it kind of ties into issues like a surveillance state. So obviously this kind of story can have a negative impact on companies like Meta, and Meta has made it clear that it is against its terms of service for other companies to scrape Meta's platforms, you know, like Facebook or Instagram or to get data. But what if journalists discover that Meta is also engaged in data scraping from other websites. And this brings us to the curious case of Meta

and a data collection company called Bright Data. So Meta recently sued Bright Data in January of this year, twenty twenty three, and accused the company of scraping data from Meta platforms. However, it has also come to light that Bright Data and Meta have been engaged in a subcontractor relationship that Bright Data has worked for Meta and has pulled data from other websites so that Meta could do stuff like build out brand profiles and reportedly do things

like identify potential bad actors out there. So, in other words, Bright Data was pulling data or scraping data off of other sites in order to supply that information to Meta. So Stone was pulled into action to comment on this, and he said, quote, the collection of data from websites can serve legitimate integrity and commercial purposes if done lawfully

and in accordance with those websites terms end quote. This was a really awkward situation because he had to defend Meta's work with a data collection company, while Meta is famous for going after companies that were data scraping its own platforms. So, in other words, Meta saying, it's not cool for you to do that to us, but it's totally cool if we do that to other websites. You know that's fine. So do as we say, now as

we do. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about the actual lead into Andy Stone being named a wanted individual by Russia's government. The first a word from our sponsors. Okay, why was Andy Stone, a communications director for Meta, put on a wanted list. In fact, some outlets call it a most

wanted list for Russia. Well, it relates to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and potentially to some temporary changes to Meta's policies regarding violent content on Facebook or calls for violence to be more specific on Facebook, and so in that regard. If that's all true, this very much becomes a shoot the Messenger kind of story. I should point out apparently Stone's name has actually been on this wanted list since

February twenty twenty two. We only learned about it this week when a media outlet that keeps an eye on such things posted a story about it and it went in viral from there. But to be clear, the actual charges against Stone remain undisclosed. The media reports simply that Stone is quote wanted under an article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation end quote. That's not helpful.

It's not descriptive at all. We don't know what code, what article he's wanted under, right, we don't know what law he supposedly broke under the Russian Federation law. But let's look back at the early days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine to kind of at least get a working hypothesis here. There had been aggressive actions between Russia and Ukraine dating back since at least twenty fourteen, but the actual invasion began on February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two.

On March tenth, Meta made a really big change. And traditionally, posts on Meta's platforms that include calls for violence against people are a huge violation of Meta's rules that Meta would take such things down immediately or at least investigate them, assuming that someone had flagged the post. That's at least

according to the policy. Whether or not that's actually how it plays out depends on the situation, but often it means that that Meta ends up sending the flag to someone like a subcontractor to review the incident and determine whether or not it was actually against Meta's policies and then figure out where to go from There. Doesn't mean removing the post or banning the person for a given amount of time. It all just depends on the situation.

But on March tenth, Meta announced it would allow users, at least in certain countries to post calls for violence against Russians and specifically Russian soldiers, and this was all within the context of the Ukraine invasion. Reuters reported that internal messages within Meta even indicated that posts that would call for the deaths of Russia's president Vladimir Putin or

the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashinko were fair game. Again, this is something that typically is very much against Meta's policies, and Reuters reported that, well, they didn't name the Meta spokesperson,

but later it was revealed to be Andy Stone. They revealed a spokesperson release the statement quote as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as death to the Russian invaders. We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians end quote. A couple of weeks later,

a Russian court declared that Meta qualifies as an extremist organization. Effectively, this banned Meta's platforms inside Russia, with the exclusion of Watsapp because that's not a public platform. Facebook and Instagram both banned, and Watsapp still was allowed to operate within the country. Interestingly, Again, by that time, Andy Stone had already been on the wanted list according to this independent website it's called media Zona. By the way, media Zona

monitors the Russian prison system, among other things. And again they had said that he had been on the list since February twenty twenty two, even before Metta had made the announced change to the policies, and right around the time when Russia was actually invading Ukraine. So while that was the precipitating factor that would see Russia slap at terrorist label on the company, according to media Zona, Stone

had already been in Russia's crosshairs. It's just that no one in Russia actually announced this, so it never made the news. So, in other words, they had put his name on the list, but they didn't announce the fact that he was on the list. Also, interestingly, Mark Zuckerberg himself wouldn't be singled out by Russia till April twenty twenty two, that's when Russia formally banned with Zuckerberg from entering the country. So what the heck got Stone on

that list so early? Well, first, there's a chance that the report is wrong and that Stone's name maybe joined this list after the announced changes in Meta's policy. That's my best guess that Russian officials, in an effort to push back against the company, named Andy Stone as a wanted individual, not keeping in mind that he's really just a mouthpiece for Meta, because again, Andy Stone doesn't create

the policies, he communicates them. He's not the one responsible for determining that Meta's going to allow this to happen. He just has to tell the world that that's what's happening. Now. He sometimes does communicate in a way that's combative and insulting, so perhaps this has contributed to the issue. But Stone, again is not responsible for whether or not Meta allows for calls of violence against Russian invaders. It really is a shoot the messenger kind of situation here, if in

fact that's why he was put on the list. But maybe there's some other reason for Russia to name Stone as a wanted individual. That's possible, but based off what we know, it seems to me that this is mostly a symbolic gesture made by a country that's in a position that's very difficult to defend in a global court of public opinion. Russia's government has long struggled to control media in an effort to push propaganda and Putin's narrative.

In particular, platforms like Facebook and Instagram threatened that strategy because Russia has no direct control over those platforms, so they are legitimate threats to authoritarian control. It almost became necessary for Russia to label Meta as an extremist organization just to prevent a place where opposing opinions could potentially take hold in Russia. Anyway, my best guess is that this will have little to no real impact on Andy

Stone's life. I mean, assuming he wasn't planning on vacationing in Saint Petersburg or something. If he had plans to travel to Russia, I imagine those are no longer on his calendar. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure this is just going to be a little intrigue into his professional career, a little interesting bit of trivia. I also expect he will continue to speak for Meta at least as long as

he is employed there after that, who knows. It'd be really interesting to talk with him post his career at Meta to find out, like, did he really believe in the cause that he was championing, And maybe he does, I don't know. I don't know Andy Stone. I feel like he's employing a skill set for an employer, whether he believes in that employer's actual choices. I do know. I couldn't say. Maybe he does it, just it seems odd to me considering his previous employers. But who knows.

I mean, and I don't know everything that's going on inside Meta either. I'm just basing this off things like the whistleblower report and that sort of thing. Anyway, that is the interesting and currently unfolding story of Andy Stone being wanted by Russia's Interior Ministry. We're gonna keep an eye on this. If I see updates, I will definitely follow up with it. I don't expect there to be

many updates. I think this is just a really kind of intriguing story that breaks on a Monday after a holiday. I don't necessarily think it's going to lead to anything else that's particularly newsworthy, but we'll see you never know. I hope you are all well. I hope those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving in the US had a wonderful time.

I hope everybody had a great week last week. As a remind this week we're back to normal, although tomorrow we'll have a Smart Talks with IBM episode published, and then next week I'm on vacation, so you're likely to hear some reruns next week. I'll see if I can record some new stuff for next week in advance, but it's a pretty packed week for me right now, so we'll see. I'll do my best anyway. I wish you all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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