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      in Elections

      Facebook says it rejected 2.2m ads seeking to obstruct voting in US election

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      A total of 2.2m ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120,000 posts withdrawn for attempting to “obstruct voting” in the upcoming US presidential election, Facebook’s vice president Nick Clegg has said.In addition, warnings were posted on 150m examples of false information posted online, the former British deputy prime minister told French weekly Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.Facebook has been increasing its efforts to avoid a repeat of events leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, won by Donald Trump, when its network was used for attempts at voter manipulation, carried out from Russia.There were similar problems ahead of Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union.“Thirty-five thousand employees take care of the security of our platforms and contribute for elections,” said Clegg, who is vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook.“We have established partnerships with 70 specialised media, including five in France, on the verification of information”, he added. AFP is one of those partners.Clegg added that the company also uses artificial intelligence that has “made it possible to delete billions of posts and fake accounts, even before they are reported by users”.Facebook also stores all advertisements and information on their funding and provenance for seven years “to ensure transparency,” he said.In 2016, while he was still deputy prime minister, Clegg complained to the Journal du Dimanche that Facebook had not identified or suppressed a single foreign network interfering in the US election.On Wednesday, Trump rebuked Facebook and Twitter for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose corrupt dealings by election rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.A day earlier Facebook announced a ban on ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated, in light of the coronavirus pandemic which the social media giant said has “highlighted the importance of preventive health behaviours”. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden

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      Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election.In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the “link may be unsafe”.Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.The company further explained the decision in a series of tweets on Wednesday, saying some of the images in the article contained personal and private information. Twitter’s policy against posting hacked material was established in 2018. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, said the company’s communication about the decision to limit the article’s spread was “not great”, saying the team should have shared more context publicly.Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
      Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.The move marks the first time Twitter has directly limited the spread of information from a news website, as it continues to implement stricter rules around misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. On Wednesday evening Twitter also reportedly locked the personal account of the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the article.In recent weeks Twitter announced it would warn users who attempt to retweet a link without first clicking on it for more context. It has also started to take action against misinformation and calls to violence posted by Donald Trump and other public figures.Wednesday’s actions around the New York Post article drew swift backlash from figures on the political right, who accused Facebook and Twitter of protecting Biden, who is leading Trump in national polls. The New York Post blasted the companies, saying they were trying to help Biden’s election campaign and falsely claiming no one had disputed the story’s veracity. “Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines,” it wrote in an editorial.Meanwhile, the Republican senator Ted Cruz wrote a letter to Dorsey, saying: “Twitter’s censorship of this story is quite hypocritical, given its willingness to allow users to share less-well-sourced reporting critical of other candidates.”Trump’s campaign director, Jake Schneider, called the blocking of McEnany “absolutely unacceptable” and McEnany herself tweeted: “Censorship should be condemned.”Trump tweeted that it was “terrible” that the social media companies “took down” the article – in fact, it was restricted, not removed – and renewed his calls to “repeal section 230”, a measure that keeps website hosts from being held responsible for content posted. Ironically, repealing section 230 would require Twitter to take down more content, including many of Trump’s tweets.Even non-conservatives criticized the choice to limit the spread of the article as one that will play into the rightwing narrative that big tech firms censor conservative views. The decision was indeed quickly politicized – with House Republicans publishing the text of the story on their website in order to share the link without censorship.The article implicates the former vice-president in connection with his son Hunter’s Ukraine business and was headlined: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”The unnamed owner of the computer repair shop told the newspaper he passed a copy of the hard drive on the seemingly abandoned computer to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.The story focused on one email from April 2015, in which a Burisma board adviser thanked Hunter for inviting him to a Washington meeting with his father. But there was no indication of when the meeting was scheduled or whether it ever happened.“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”The campaign said it was not told by Facebook or Twitter that any action would be taken regarding the article.“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” the Biden campaign added.Others cast also doubt on the report, citing Giuliani’s record of producing disinformation and making bogus claims about both Bidens and Ukraine.AFP contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      Facebook announces plan to stop political ads after 3 November

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      Facebook has announced significant changes to its advertising and misinformation policies, saying it will stop running political ads in the United States after polls close on 3 November for an undetermined period of time.The changes, announced on Wednesday, come in an effort to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming election “by fighting foreign interference, misinformation and voter suppression”, the company said in a blogpost.Facebook’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, had previously defended the controversial decision not to factcheck political advertising on the platform, but in recent weeks Facebook has begun to remove political ads that feature dangerous and misleading claims.In early September, the company pledged to stop running new political ads one week before 3 November, the day of the United States elections, to prevent last-minute misinformation. Now it will also disallow political advertising entirely following election day “to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse”.In other words, Facebook will not allow new advertisements starting one week before 3 November, and immediately after polls close it will stop running all political advertisements indefinitely. The company did not give a timeline for if or when political advertising would return.The new policies mark important progress toward protecting elections, said Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive officer of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of dozens of nonprofits and human rights groups advocating for democracy.“We are seeing unprecedented attacks on legitimate, reliable and secure voting methods designed to delegitimize the election,” Gupta said. “These are important steps for Facebook to take to combat disinformation and the premature calling of election results before every vote is counted.”Others said the change is too little, too late. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the changes “performative”. The internet freedom group Fight for the Future said in a tweet the change “isn’t going to fix the problem at all”. The group noted that Facebook’s recent decision to allow content from private groups to appear in newsfeeds will increase misinformation and negate any positive changes that come from an advertising ban.“Facebook is banning political ads but at the same time they’re tweaking their algorithm to go into overdrive recruiting people into groups where they’ll be spoon-fed manipulation and misinformation,” Fight For the Future said.Facebook is again making performative changes to try to avoid blame for misinformation on its platform. The problem isn’t the ads themselves. The problem is Facebook’s refusal to regulate its ads, change its broken algorithm, or take responsibility for the power it’s amassed. https://t.co/OkkyM1PtML— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 7, 2020
      Facebook is seeking to avoid another political disaster after it was found that Facebook was used by Russian operatives in 2016 to manipulate the United States elections.Since then, Facebook has hired thousands of people working on safety and security surrounding elections and has worked on more than 200 elections around the globe, “learning from each” and making “substantial progress”, the company said.Executives at Facebook, including Zuckerberg, reportedly became increasingly alarmed at language from Donald Trump suggesting the president would not participate in a peaceful transfer of power. Trump has also been accused of encouraging violence when he told white supremacists to “stand back and stand by” and encouraged supporters to “go to the polls” and “watch very carefully” at the first presidential debate.The company also said it will be removing calls for people to engage in poll watching that use “militarized language” or suggest the goal is to intimidate voters or election officials.Zuckerberg has previously expressed concern about challenges posed by the surge in mail-in ballots this year due to the pandemic.“I’m also worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country,” he said.Facebook said it would respond to candidates or parties making premature claims of victory, before races were called by major media outlets, by adding labels and notifications about the state of the race. More

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      in US Politics

      Revealed: Trump-linked consultant tied to Facebook pages warning election will cause civil war

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      A militia-promoting father and son duo of fake news publishers and a Trump-connected social media consultant are linked to pages which promote the idea of an American civil war with material presented in a way that appears to be an effort to sidestep Facebook’s fact-checking system.Comments on their Facebook pages and other materials obtained by the Guardian show that some rank and file Donald Trump supporters are enthusiastically receiving the message that they should prepare for violence against their perceived political enemies in November.The network is comprised of websites owned and operated by Dino Porrazzo Sr and Dino Porrazzo Jr, whose company, AFF Media, is headquartered in Pinon Hills in California. The pair have been running rightwing websites since at latest 2013, according to DNS website records.The Porrazzos now run a network of websites that enthusiastically promote Trump, and far right anti-government militias like the Three Percenters, and offer distorted versions of current events. One of their Facebook pages, “Prepare to Take America Back” (PTTAB) at the time of reporting had 794,876 followers. Analysis with social media metrics tool Crowdtangle shows that over the last three months PTTAB posts have been shared over 141,000 times, and on average 9,600 times a week.At that time, the page’s header featured the logo of the Three Percenters, a decentralized group that the ADL calls a “wing of the militia movement”; a group of armed men in tactical gear; and a modified copy of the US presidential seal.In general, the page promotes conspiracy theories and criminal allegations about Democratic party politicians, liberal celebrities and leftist protesters, some of which – like persistent claims that Hillary Clinton will be imminently arrested – overlap with aspects of the so-called “QAnon” conspiracy theory movement.The page makes free use of political memes, but many posts link to a small cluster of rightwing websites designed to appear like news outlets. Increasingly, over the course of 2020, the page has been warning of a stolen election, and suggesting this will lead to civil war.Repeatedly in September, the page linked to a story on the website Right Wing Tribune, headlined “Radical Left Prepares For ‘Mass Public Unrest,’ ‘Political Apocalypse’ And Possible Civil War Should Be Expected If Biden Loses [Opinion]”, with Facebook captions including “the left wants war”.The story had a limited basis in fact, in that a number of progressive groups had met in early September to discuss the prospect of civil unrest and political violence after the election with a belief that the violence they were anticipating would be coming from Trump supporters and the far right.Nevertheless, the Right Wing Tribune piece concluded with a conspiracy theory: “These groups are heavily focused on removing President Trump from office as well as different scenarios which all lead to a second revolution in which they control our nation as a “New America”.”Similarly distorted stories warning of a “siege of the white house”, peppered the page throughout September and warnings of a post-election civil war were posted over the last year.Last November, the page linked to a site called Flag and Cross, and a story which it described as an “excellent opinion piece”, entitled “Winning the New Civil War (OPINION)”.The piece claimed on the basis of antifascist protests and comments by Democratic politicians that, “We have many strong indications that this is a hot war”.The transparency page for PTTAB discloses that PTTAB is managed by Southern California-based AFF Media Inc, and that the Vici Media Group “partners with this page”.According to California records, AFF Media was incorporated on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, 20 January 2017; in other documents, Dino Porrazzo Jr is listed as CEO and CFO, and Dino Porrazzo Sr as secretary. But the Guardian has discovered that the Porrazzos are further involved in running a dizzying array of interconnected sites and social media pages. The Annenberg Public Policy initiative lists two of their websites on its “Misinformation Directory” of “websites that have posted deceptive content”.One of the listed sites is Right Wing Tribune. But all of the other sites linked to by the PTTAB Facebook page also appear to belong to AFF, with similar design, shared bylines and shared source code.This is not some dark corner of the Internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans.Becca Lewis, Stanford UniversityThe Porrazzos have been previously reported as having links to the Three Percenters, a decentralized, national militia movement that the Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes as anti-government extremists.Their online empire is large. Another Parazzo site, Flag and Cross is listed as the administrator of another Facebook page, United States Constitution, which has 1.2 million followers.A Guardian review of that site’s content shows a similar pattern of linking to Porrazzo-connected websites, and warnings of civil war stretching back to the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.Becca Lewis researches online extremism and disinformation at Stanford University. In a telephone conversation, she said that the page and the associated websites represented a sophisticated effort to skirt Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.“It seems as though they are being very strategic in their messaging so as to not be shut down,” Lewis said, adding that viewing the ostentatious labeling of opinion as an effort to sidestep fact-checking is “absolutely a reasonable assumption”.In June, Heated reported that climate change deniers were exploiting the same loophole to “make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it “opinion”. In August, NBC reported that Facebook had systematically relaxed its fact-checking rules for conservative outlets and personalities.In a telephone conversation, Dino Porrazzo Jr asserted that PTTAB had had “zero fact-check violations”, characterizing his websites as “opinion websites based on fact”. Asked if they were fact-checked at all, Porrazzo said “no”, but added: “I don’t work at Facebook”. Asked if he thought that there really was a civil war coming, Porrazzo accused the Guardian of “writing a hit piece to get me thrown off Facebook”, and then ended the conversation.Facebook Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Porrazzos also have links to Republican officials.The registered agent for the company is an elected official in California, Ensen Mason, who was elected as San Bernardino county auditor-controller in California as a nonpartisan candidate, but who is listed as a member of the San Bernardino Republican party.In an email, however, Ensen Mason said that in relation to the Porrazzos, his accounting firm’s role “is strictly limited to accounting services and registered agent”.The Vici Media Group, meanwhile, is run by Patrick Mauldin, who is a social media consultant for the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians, and his brother, Ryan.The company was hired in 2016 by one-time Trump campaign manager and recently-resigned campaign consultant, Brad Parscale, to be part of the team that was widely credited with winning Trump the election. In June, Patrick Mauldin was identified as the creator of a fake Joe Biden site that was compared in New York Times reporting to “disinformation spread by Russian trolls”.In an email, Ryan Mauldin disavowed the Porrazzos’ publishing output, writing, “Vici Media Group was engaged for a small, non-content-related project by the managers of the page.”Mauldin added, “We have no input on the content published by the various sites or the comments made on that content. We are not working for the Trump campaign.”Mauldin did not immediately respond to attempts to further clarify the nature of their work for the Porrazzos, and to clarify New York Times reporting as recent as June 2020 that said Patrick Mauldin was on a retainer for the Trump campaign, and considered a “rising star”.Porrazzo refused to specify the nature of AFF’s relationship with Vici Media Group.Meanwhile, the content of the Porrazzo pages does appear to trigger extreme responses among users. Hundreds of user comments on the page’s posts suggest the use of violence against perceived political enemies. On a 5 September post linking to a Right Wing Tribune article suggesting that Democrats will foment civil war if Biden loses, one user commented, “a short civil war with the democrats and those who support socialist policies will go a long way to help Make America Great Again”.Another connects civil war to their belief that a Trump loss is impossible, writing “If [Biden] wins, it’ll be from fraud on an industrial scale, and the lesson that’ll have to be taught for that will necessarily be no less industrial.”Many welcome the prospect of armed conflict – one writes “That’s fine with me open season on democrats!”. Another deployed accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse as a positive example, writing “I think it will be more whining, crying, rioting, looting and a lot of Kyles protecting their cities, towns and neighborhoods.”Asked to comment on the site’s apparent reach, and the nature of its community, Lewis, the extremism researcher, said: “This is not some dark corner of the internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans that are stoking this.”On links to the Trump campaign, she said that the distorted content and the violent user comments formed a kind of “feedback loop”, and that “Trump and his campaign staff have been masters at exploiting these feedback loops”.On Tuesday night, meanwhile, following the Guardian’s outreach to the Porrazzos and Facebook that day, Dino Porrazzo announced on Twitter that he “HAD TO DELETE A FEW ARTICLES I WROTE TODAY BECAUSE THEY WERE DEMED FALSE BY BASEMENT DWELLING LIBERAL FACT CHECKERS”. More

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      in Elections

      Facebook removes Trump campaign ads with misleading claims about refugees

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      Facebook has removed a number of ads from the Trump campaign for making misleading and inaccurate claims about Covid-19 and immigration.On Wednesday the social media platform took down the Trump-sponsored advertisements which claimed, without evidence, that accepting refugees would increase Americans’ risk of Covid-19. The ad, which featured a video of Joe Biden talking about the border and asylum seekers, claimed, also without evidence, that the Democratic candidate’s policies would increase the number of refugees from Syria, Somalia, and Yemen by “700%”. More than 38 versions of the ad were run on Facebook and were seen by hundreds of thousands of people before the company removed them.Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment, but said in a statement to NBC news the ads violated its policies. A version of the advertisement can still be seen in Facebook’s library but is now inactive, meaning it is not being run across any Facebook products.“We rejected these ads because we don’t allow claims that people’s physical safety, health, or survival is threatened by people on the basis of their national origin or immigration status,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told NBC News in a statement.The removal is the latest action taken against the Trump administration as social media platforms attempt to rein in misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. It follows other removals of Trump ads including one in June, which featured a Nazi symbol. The company removed another Trump ad in 2018 saying it violated its rules against “sensational content”.Facebook is also changing its policies to prevent ads that delegitimize election results, project manager Rob Leathern tweeted on Wednesday. Under the new policies, ads cannot prematurely declare victory, present any method of voting as fraudulent or corrupt, or make accusations of voter fraud. The changes to these policies apply to both Instagram and Facebook and apply immediately as of Wednesday, he said.Following the removal of the ad on Wednesday, Courtney Parella of the Trump campaign doubled down on the advertisement’s claims in a statement. She did not cite the source of the 700% figure featured in the ad. “While President Trump took decisive action to restrict travel from China to slow the spread of coronavirus and saved countless lives, Joe Biden was busy calling the president xenophobic and arm-chair quarterbacking his pandemic response,” she said.The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Although Facebook removed the ads regarding refugees and Covid-19, other misleading advertisements remain on the platform. One ad shows Joe Biden with a headphone photoshopped to his ear, perpetuating the false claim that the presidential candidate somehow cheated in the debates.The advertisement appears to have been launched on the day of the debate but remains active on the platform, with more than 800 versions still active. The ads have been viewed by more than 3.6m people, the majority of whom are in the key election states of Florida and Pennsylvania, according to Facebook data.The Trump campaign’s ads have led to the “earpiece” conspiracy theory spreading organically on other social media platforms, including TikTok, according to the watchdog group Media Matters. The group has found four examples of TikTok videos espousing the theory that have been viewed more than 560,000 times. A spokesperson for TikTok said the videos violate its policies on disinformation and it is working to remove them as they are posted.“You would not have seen the proliferation of conspiracy theories on TikTok today if there was not already an intense saturation of this idea from the Trump campaign yesterday,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. “They sort of seeded the ground with this idea until the users themselves were driving it.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'

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      Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.The secret effort concentrated on 16 swing states, several narrowly won by Trump after the black Democrat vote collapsed.The claims have come from an investigation by Channel 4 News, which was leaked a copy of a vast election database it says was used by the Trump campaign in 2016.Comprising the records of 198 million Americans, and containing details about their domestic and economic status acquired from market research firms, the investigation claimed voters were segmented into eight categories.One was marked “deterrence”. Those placed in the special category – voters thought likely to vote for Clinton or not at all – were disproportionately black.According to the investigation, the Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely by targeting them with “dark adverts” on their Facebook feeds, which heavily attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued she lacked sympathy with African Americans.The effort is said to have been devised in part by Cambridge Analytica, the notorious election consultant that ceased trading last year following revelations that it used dirty tricks to help win elections around the world and had gained unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles.In Michigan, a state that Trump won by 10,000 votes, 15% of voters are black. But they represented 33% of the special deterrence category in the secret database, meaning black voters were apparently disproportionately targeted by anti-Clinton ads.In Wisconsin, where the Republicans won by 30,000, 5.4% of voters are black, but 17% of the deterrence group. According the Channel 4, that amounted to more than a third of black voters in the state overall, all placed in the group to be sent anti-Clinton material on their Facebook feeds.Attacks ads that were used by Trump’s digital campaign included one known as the “super-predator” commercial, featuring a video clip of controversial remarks made by Clinton in 1996, which the Republicans claimed referred to African Americans.Arguing that it was necessary “to have an organised effort against gangs”, and their members Clinton said: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators – no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”The Democrat apologised for using those words shortly after being confronted by Black Lives Matter activists about them in February 2016, but the language was picked up by Trump during the campaign and heavily recycled online.Another attack ad reportedly came from a political action committee also run by Cambridge Analytica. It features a young black woman who appears to be a Clinton supporter abandoning her script to say: “I just don’t believe what I’m saying.”When reminded that she is an actor, she replies that she is “not that good” of an actorJamal Watkins, the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said it was shocking and troubling that there was a covert attempt to suppress the black vote in 2016.“So, we use data – similar to voter file data – but it’s to motivate, persuade and encourage folks to participate. We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home. That just seems, fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy,” Watkins told Channel 4.It is estimated that 2 million black voters across the US who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Hillary Clinton. In Wisconsin, Trump’s vote matched Mitt Romney’s in 2012, but Clinton lost because her vote collapsed. The Democrat polled 230,000 votes fewer than Obama.Key to the Trump victory was putting off black voters in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In one city ward, where 80% of its 1,440 voters were black, almost half or 44% of the ward was marked as for deterrence, a total of 636 people, 90% of whom were black.Many other factors accounted for Clinton’s defeat, including legislation that was accused of suppressing the black vote.Again, in Wisconsin, the Republican-run state has introduced measures requiring citizens to produce valid voter identification, which it was argued disproportionately affected poor and black voters.The Trump campaign spent $44m (£34m) on Facebook advertising and generated 6m adverts overall. But the passage of time has meant that only a handful of the attack ads used by the Trump campaign have been recorded, and Facebook will not say how many or which ads were used at the time.The company said that “since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook – what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today”. It added that it now has “rules prohibiting voter suppression” and was “running the largest voter information campaign in American history”.The Trump campaign, the Republican national committee and the White House all declined to comment.A senior official in the the Trump campaign has previously denied any targeted campaigns against individual groups. More