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      Facebook ‘tearing our societies apart’: key excerpts from a whistleblower

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      FacebookFacebook ‘tearing our societies apart’: key excerpts from a whistleblower Frances Haugen tells US news show why she decided to reveal inside story about social networking firm Dan Milmo Global technology editorMon 4 Oct 2021 08.33 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 10.30 EDTFrances Haugen’s interview with the US news programme 60 Minutes contained a litany of damning statements about Facebook. Haugen, a former Facebook employee who had joined the company to help it combat misinformation, told the CBS show the tech firm prioritised profit over safety and was “tearing our societies apart”.Haugen will testify in Washington on Tuesday, as political pressure builds on Facebook. Here are some of the key excerpts from Haugen’s interview.Choosing profit over the public goodHaugen’s most cutting words echoed what is becoming a regular refrain from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic: that Facebook puts profit above the wellbeing of its users and the public. “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money.”She also accused Facebook of endangering public safety by reversing changes to its algorithm once the 2020 presidential election was over, allowing misinformation to spread on the platform again. “And as soon as the election was over, they turned them [the safety systems] back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritise growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”Facebook’s approach to safety compared with othersIn a 15-year career as a tech professional, Haugen, 37, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest but she said Facebook had the worst approach to restricting harmful content. She said: “I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.” Referring to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, she said: “I have a lot of empathy for Mark. And Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful, polarising content gets more distribution and more reach.”Instagram and mental healthThe document leak that had the greatest impact was a series of research slides that showed Facebook’s Instagram app was damaging the mental health and wellbeing of some teenage users, with 30% of teenage girls feeling that it made dissatisfaction with their body worse.She said: “And what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use the app more. And so, they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more. Facebook’s own research says it is not just that Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers, it’s that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media.”Facebook has described the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the slides as a “mischaracterisation” of its research.Why Haugen leaked the documentsHaugen said “person after person” had attempted to tackle Facebook’s problems but had been ground down. “Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.”Having joined the company in 2019, Haugen said she decided to act this year and started copying tens of thousands of documents from Facebook’s internal system, which she believed show that Facebook is not, despite public comments to the contrary, making significant progress in combating online hate and misinformation . “At some point in 2021, I realised, ‘OK, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.’”Facebook and violenceHaugen said the company had contributed to ethnic violence, a reference to Burma. In 2018, following the massacre of Rohingya Muslims by the military, Facebook admitted that its platform had been used to “foment division and incite offline violence” relating to the country. Speaking on 60 Minutes, Haugen said: “When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarising content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.”Facebook and the Washington riotThe 6 January riot, when crowds of rightwing protesters stormed the Capitol, came after Facebook disbanded the Civic Integrity team of which Haugen was a member. The team, which focused on issues linked to elections around the world, was dispersed to other Facebook units following the US presidential election. “They told us: ‘We’re dissolving Civic Integrity.’ Like, they basically said: ‘Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn’t riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now.’ Fast-forward a couple months, we got the insurrection. And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’”The 2018 algorithm changeFacebook changed the algorithm on its news feed – Facebook’s central feature, which supplies users with a customised feed of content such as friends’ photos and news stories – to prioritise content that increased user engagement. Haugen said this made divisive content more prominent.“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimising for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarising – it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.” She added: “Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.”Haugen said European political parties contacted Facebook to say that the news feed change was forcing them to take more extreme political positions in order to win users’ attention. Describing polititicians’ concerns, she said: “You are forcing us to take positions that we don’t like, that we know are bad for society. We know if we don’t take those positions, we won’t win in the marketplace of social media.”In a statement to 60 Minutes, Facebook said: “Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true. If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.”TopicsFacebookSocial networkingUS Capitol attackInstagramMental healthSocial mediaYoung peoplenewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attack

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      US Capitol attackFacebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attackFormer employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes Edward HelmoreSun 3 Oct 2021 13.13 EDTLast modified on Sun 3 Oct 2021 13.15 EDTA whistleblower at Facebook will say that thousands of pages of internal company research she turned over to federal regulators proves the social media giant is deceptively claiming effectiveness in its efforts to eradicate hate and misinformation and it contributed to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.The former employee is set to air her claims and reveal her identity in an interview airing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes ahead of a scheduled appearance at a Senate hearing on Tuesday.In an internal 1,500-word memo titled Our position on Polarization and Election sent out on Friday, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, acknowledged that the whistleblower would accuse the company of contributing to the 6 January Capitol riot and called the claims “misleading”.The memo was first reported by the New York Times.The 6 January insurrection was carried out by a pro-Trump mob that sought to disrupt the election of Joe Biden as president. The violence and chaos of the attack sent shockwaves throughout the US, and the rest of the world, and saw scores of people injured and five die.Clegg, a former former UK deputy prime minister, said in his memo that Facebook had “developed industry-leading tools to remove hateful content and reduce the distribution of problematic content. As a result, the prevalence of hate speech on our platform is now down to about 0.05%.”He said that many things had contributed to America’s divisive politics.“The rise of polarization has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years. In truth, there isn’t a great deal of consensus. But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization,” Clegg wrote.The memo comes two weeks after Facebook issued a statement on its corporate website hitting back against a series of critical articles in the Wall Street Journal.TopicsUS Capitol attackFacebookSocial networkingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘They should be worried’: how FTC chair Lina Khan plans to tackle big tech

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      US politics‘They should be worried’: how FTC chair Lina Khan plans to tackle big tech Within weeks of her appointment to the commission, Facebook and Amazon asked that she be recused from antitrust investigationsKari PaulSun 15 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 15 Aug 2021 01.01 EDTLina Khan has some of the biggest companies in the world shaking in their boots.The 32-year-old antitrust scholar and law professor in June became the youngest person in history and the most progressive in more than a decade to be appointed as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).Khan’s appointment places her at the helm of the federal agency charged with enforcing antitrust law just as it is poised to tackle the giants of the technology industry after years of unchecked power. And it’s clear that big tech isn’t happy about it.Within weeks of Khan’s appointment, both Facebook and Amazon requested that Khan be recused from the FTC’s antitrust investigations into their companies, arguing that her intense criticism of them in the past meant she would “not be a neutral and impartial evaluator” of antitrust issues.Is Biden’s appointment of a pioneering young lawyer bad news for big tech? | John NaughtonRead moreKhan has forcefully argued for the need to rein in powerful firms like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google, developing an innovative antitrust argument that has revolutionized the way we think about regulating monopolies.“She understands how these companies are harming workers, innovation and ultimately democracy and is committed to taking them head on,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an antimonopoly advocacy organization.“This is a gamechanger.”‘A meteoric rise’Before Khan took it on, antitrust law enforcement in the US had atrophied. For decades, it had functioned under the “consumer welfare standard”, which meant that the government would only take action against a company for anti-competitive practices if consumers were hurt by increased prices. But by the time Khan was a student at Williams and then Yale Law School, tech behemoths had built de facto monopolies by giving away their products for free or at such low prices that no one else could compete.In the early years of the tech boom it was widely assumed that the industry would essentially regulate itself, according to Rebecca Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt University. That Yahoo’s popularity gave way to Google and Myspace to Facebook appeared to be proof that “competition in tech was intensive without any government involvement”, she said. “But we have seen how that has really changed, as has our understanding of how these companies can abuse the market.” Slipping through the cracks of these old antitrust standards, tech companies amassed unchecked power, acquiring competitors and scooping up billions of customers. In 2020, Apple became the first American company to be valued at $2tn. That same year, Amazon eclipsed $1tn, joining Microsoft, at $1.6tn, and Google parent Alphabet at $1tn.In her now-famous 2017 Yale Law Journal article, Khan argued that the rise of these mega companies proved that modern American antitrust law was broken, and that the traditional yardsticks by which regulators determine monopolies need to be re-examined for the digital age.Keeping prices low has allowed Amazon to amass a large share of the market, giving it a disproportionate impact on the economy, stifling competition and further perpetuating monopoly, she argued.“The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety and innovation – factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets,” she wrote.She also investigated mergers and examined the impact the resulting tech monopolies have on product quality, suppliers and company conduct. Even if these companies’ practices resulted in some benefits for consumers, they were harmful to markets and democracy at large, she said.The immediate impact of her thesis was undeniable, with the New York Times announcing Khan had “singlehandedly reframed decades of monopoly law”. Politico called her “a leader of a new school of antitrust thought”. Christopher Leslie, a professor of antitrust law at University of California, Irvine, characterized Khan’s rise in recent years as “meteoric”.“It’s unprecedented to have somebody ascend to such an important leadership role in antitrust enforcement so soon after graduating from law school,” he said. “But it’s also unprecedented to have somebody make such a significant impact on antitrust public policy debates so quickly after graduating.”Big tech in the hot seatIn 2019, Khan brought her new approach to antitrust to Congress, serving as counsel to the US House judiciary committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial, and administrative law. Spearheading the committee’s investigation into digital markets, she played a large role in the publication of its landmark report: a 451-page treatise on how companies including Google and Amazon abuse their market power for their own benefit.Khan also served as legal director at the political advocacy group Open Markets Institute and taught antimonopoly law at Columbia until her appointment to the FTC in 2021.Khan’s appointment marked a break from the “revolving door” between the FTC and the private sector, in which people with years of experience defending companies in Silicon Valley become regulators. Her new role also comes at a time when reining in big tech is one of the only issues that unites a deeply divided Congress.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said Khan’s leadership of the FTC was “a huge opportunity to make big, structural change” to fight monopolies and Senator Amy Klobuchar praised Khan as “a pioneer in competition policy” who “will bring a critical perspective to the FTC”. The Republican Ted Cruz told Khan he “looked forward” to working with her on these issues.Khan has her critics. The former Republican senator Orrin Hatch has condemned her thesis as “hipster antitrust”. Mike Lee of Utah said she “lacks the experience necessary” for the FTC and that her views on US antitrust laws were “wildly out of step with a prudent approach to the law”.But her appointment coincides with a growing drive among lawmakers to take on the major tech companies, Allensworth said. “Politicians, small businesses and the academic establishment are clamoring for it,” she added.Shortly after naming Khan as chair, Joe Biden signed an executive order calling on federal regulators to prioritize action promoting competition in the American economy – including in the tech space. “Let me be very clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation,” he said regarding the order, which contained 72 initiatives to limit corporate power. Biden asked the FTC to better vet mergers and acquisitions and to establish rules on surveillance. He also called for easing of restrictions on repairing tech devices and data collection on consumers.‘A different set of rules’In her first hearing as chair in July, Khan indicated that she was ready to get started, saying the US needs “a different set of rules”.She cited bad mergers – in the past she had criticized Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram, Giphy and WhatsApp as anti-competitive – as potentially fueling large tech monopolies: “In hindsight there’s a growing sense that some of those merger reviews were a missed opportunity.”One of Khan’s first tasks as chair is likely to be rewriting an FTC antitrust complaint against Facebook that was dismissed in June after the agency failed to demonstrate that the tech giant maintains a monopoly.Meanwhile, Apple and others are set to face FTC scrutiny over repair policies that restrict third-party companies from fixing devices. The agency voted unanimously in July to ramp up enforcement of the right to repair.The attempts by Amazon and Facebook to force Khan’s recusal are signs that big tech won’t go down without a fight. But critics say these efforts amount to intimidation tactics and not much more. Khan does not have any conflicts of interest under federal ethics laws, which typically apply to financial investments or employment history, and the requests are not likely to go far.This is “a PR move”, said Allensworth. “She has made a lot of very public, extremely influential arguments about exactly how tech suppresses competition and now she’s the chairperson of the largest and most important federal agency to do with competition,” she said.“They should be worried,” she added.TopicsUS politicsFacebookAppleGoogleAmazonfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Is Biden’s appointment of a pioneering young lawyer bad news for big tech? | John Naughton

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      A flashback: it’s Wednesday 29 July 2020. I’m sitting glued to the US TV network C-Span, which is relaying – live – a hearing of the House of Representatives subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law. The hearing is being held following the publication of a sprawling report of a year-long investigation into the market dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.Arrayed on big screens before the members of the subcommittee are the four bosses of the aforementioned tech giants: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, then midway through his Star Trek makeover; Tim Cook of Apple, looking like the clean-living lad who never understood the locker-room jokes; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, wearing his trademark glued-on hairdo; and the Google boss, Sundar Pichai, every inch the scholarship boy who can’t understand why he’s been arrested by the Feds. And on the vast mahogany bench towering above these screened moguls sits David Cicilline, subcommittee chairman and the politician who has overseen the investigation.To be honest, I was watching out of duty and with low expectations. All the previous congressional interrogations of Zuckerberg and co had alternated between political grandstanding and farce. I expected much the same from this encounter. And then I noticed a young woman wearing a black mask standing behind Cicilline. She looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a few moments before I twigged that she was Lina Khan. At which point I sat up and started taking notes.I had been following her for years, ever since a paper she had published as a graduate student in the Yale Law Journal in January 2017. The title of the paper – Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox – signalled that there was something radical coming up, because since the mid-1970s US antitrust philosophy had been shaped by a landmark book by another lawyer, Robert Bork. Its title was The Antitrust Paradox and it argued that the prime focus of action against monopolies should not be corporate power, per se, but consumer harm as measured by unreasonably high prices. And since many of the products and services offered by the tech giants were “free” to their users they could hardly be accused of this; their wielding of monopoly power should not therefore be penalised by the state, for doing so would be tantamount to “penalising excellence”. Thus was shaped the legal doctrine that allowed a small number of tech companies to acquire immense power without being unduly troubled by legislators.This was the doctrine that Khan set out to demolish in her paper. She argued that Amazon was a dangerous monopoly that charged unsustainably low prices because the company knew that its shareholders would allow it to lose money for longer than its competitors. And it was also able to operate a “marketplace” that competed with the businesses that relied on it to reach customers, while amassing data on them that further entrenched its advantages. In other words, it wielded significant power for which there was no real redress.Khan’s paper lit a fuse that’s been fizzing ever since. It informed the Cicilline investigation and the subsequent report. And it’s what underpinned four of the five new bills that were unveiled last week, each one co-sponsored by Republican as well as Democratic politicians and each one targeted at monopolistic abuses identified in the report. The “Cicilline Salvo” is how the incomparable tech analyst Ben Thompson summarises them. The American innovation and choice online bill forbids platforms from giving advantages to their own products and services on marketplaces that they operate. The platform competition and opportunity bill outlaws pre-emptive acquisitions by tech giants of startups that might threaten their dominance (such as Facebook acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance). The ending platform monopolies bill bans platforms from owning any product or service that rests on top of its platform and competes with third parties in any way. And the augmenting compatibility and competition by enabling service switching bill requires tech platforms to make it easy for users to switch platforms (and take their data and social graph with them); in other words, it imposes on platforms what many jurisdictions now enforce on mobile phone operators, energy companies and other businesses.Of course, there’s many a slip ’twixt drafting and the statute book, but these are very significant pieces of legislation that go some way towards bringing tech companies under democratic control. And, to cap it all, last week also saw the announcement that Khan was to become chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that, along with the US Department of Justice, has the legal muscle to enforce compliance with whatever these new laws stipulate.Which leaves us with two reflections. One is, as David Runciman pointed out in The Confidence Trap, his landmark study of the recent history of democracy, that while democracies can take a long time to awaken from their slumbers, once aroused they can be very effective. The other is a confirmation of the power of ideas, even those of a young graduate student, to change history.What I’ve been readingSituation vacant On Algorithmic Communism is a long, thoughtful review by Ian Lorrie in the LA Review of Books of Nick Srnicek’s and Alex Williams’s book, Inventing the Future, about a world without work.What’s in a phrase?There Is Nothing so Deep as the Gleaming Surface of the Aphorism is a nice – aphoristic – essay by Noreen Masud.Net costsThe Cost of Cloud: A Trillion-Dollar Paradox is a perceptive piece by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado on the expensive technology on which our networked world now depends. More

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      in US Politics

      Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats

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      A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020, earning a permanent ban from Facebook.“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”Devon Kearns, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: “We removed Rally Forge from our platforms for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Since the 2018 midterms, we have strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency. We continue working to make political advertising more transparent on our platform and we welcome updated regulations and help from policymakers as we evolve our policies in this space.”The revelation that the ads were linked to a rightwing organization raises questions about the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of campaign finance laws. APN and its ads appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the FEC and include proper disclosures on advertisements, as ProPublica and Vice News first reported in 2018.The non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint against APN and subsequently sued the agency in an attempt to force it to investigate the group. But in July 2020, the FEC voted to dismiss allegations that America Progress Now had violated federal law, after an individual, Evan Muhlstein, took responsibility for the ads and attributed the lack of proper disclosures and filings to his “inexperience”.It is illegal to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to federal agencies, and the FEC appears to have taken Muhlstein at his word that the ads were a sincere but novice attempt to support Green party candidates.The former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel, who reviewed the case at the request of the Guardian, said that were she still on the FEC, she would now refer this “stunning” case to the justice department for investigation.“It seems as if it’s a clear fraud,” Ravel said, noting that the FEC general counsel’s office appeared to have been “misled” by Muhlstein. “The requirement for the justice department to take on an electoral matter is that it be serious and willful, and clearly in this case it was willful, in my opinion.”Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, said: “This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw ‘America Progress Now’ ads promoting Green party candidates would’ve had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives. The FEC’s job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters’ right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation.”‘A crystal clear example of astroturfing’On 27 October 2018 – just days before the 6 November election – America Progress Now began running a series of ads that used leftist motifs, such as the red rose emoji and images of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to rail against the “corporate, two-party oligarchy” and the “corporate, capitalist wage system”. Some of the ads urged voters to choose a third party, but others endorsed Green party candidates by name – triggering FEC rules for independent expenditures.Following the 5 November publication of a ProPublica/Vice News report on the “mysterious” group behind the ads, Facebook launched a “hi-pri[ority]” escalation to investigate whether they constituted “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the name Facebook gives to the kind of deceptive tactics that a Russian influence operation used during the 2016 election.The investigation was straightforward since Facebook has access to information that regular users do not: the names of the people who control Facebook Pages. Investigators quickly realized that America Progress Now was administered by three individuals – Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg and Colton Duncan – who also served as Facebook Page administrators for Turning Point USA, the rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administrators for Kirk’s Facebook Page.“These admins are connected to Turning Point USA,” one staffer from the civic integrity team said, according to internal task management documents seen by the Guardian. “This is very inauthentic. I don’t know what the policy here is but this seems very sketchy.” Another staffer named Rally Forge as being responsible for the ads. APN had spent nearly $5,000 to have the ads shown to users nearly 300,000 times, a third staffer noted.A rightwing political marketing firm that ran a $350,000 pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2016 election, Rally Forge was founded and run by Hoffman, an Arizona Republican who was at the time a member of the town council in Queen Creek, Arizona. In November 2020 Hoffman was elected to serve in the Arizona state legislature.Clegg and Duncan were alumni of Texas State University, where they had been elected student body president and vice-president respectively in 2017. Clegg was impeached and removed from office shortly before his term would have ended in 2018. Duncan resigned from his post in 2017; he appears to have been hired directly by Turning Point USA in 2019.Since 2017, Rally Forge has been Turning Point USA’s highest-compensated independent contractor, paid more than $1.1m over two years, according to the non-profit’s public filings. Turning Point Action, an affiliated organization also founded by Kirk, paid Rally Forge $700,000 for work supporting Trump and opposing Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, and an additional $400,000 for work on the US Senate runoff races in Georgia.Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that neither Turning Point USA nor Turning Point Action had “any involvement” with America Progress Now or its Facebook ads.In addition to America Progress Now and Turning Point USA, Hoffman, Clegg and Duncan all also served as administrators for a number of other rightwing Facebook Pages. The trio each maintained two accounts to administer their Facebook Pages, one using their full names and one using their first and middle initials – a violation of the company’s policy that each user can only have one Facebook account. One of each of the three men’s accounts had been authorized by Facebook to run political ads, a process that required submitting a government ID to Facebook for verification.One of Hoffman’s accounts had spent approximately $650,000 to run Facebook ads on behalf of 40 Pages, including the official Page of Donald Trump Jr.The intention here is clearly to mislead usersHoffman declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about the nature of Rally Forge’s relationship with Muhlstein. “The premise of your questions is either ill-informed or intentionally misleading,” he said in a statement. “Rally Forge is a marketing agency, not a compliance company. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the small handful of ads, totaling less than 2,500 dollars, which qualified as independent expenditures, have been fully disclosed by the responsible organization in coordination with the FEC.”Duncan said that he had never heard of America Progress Now before the Guardian’s inquiries and had “zero knowledge or insight into the group”. When asked about the CG Duncan account, which had passed Facebook’s verification process and was an administrator of the APN page, he responded: “I urge you to reach out to JM [Hoffman]. Let me know what you find out, I’m as curious as you are.”Clegg did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.Despite possessing clear evidence of inauthenticity, Facebook staffers determined the Green party ads did not violate existing company policies related to political ads or CIB. They decided to deactivate the three men’s extra accounts, but after the election and only after providing them with advance notice.The episode inspired some disquiet among Facebook staff.“What I find very problematic is that the intention here is clearly to mislead users,” said the civic integrity staffer. “The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity, which would be grounds for removal on most surfaces,” she added, referring to Facebook’s rules requiring people to use their real names on their accounts.One product manager produced an internal postmortem of the incident in which she described it as “a crystal clear example of astroturfing” – deceptive campaign tactics designed to appear as grassroots actions – “… as well as playing both sides … and political ad opacity, since users cannot see who they are. Furthermore, I could see making a case for voter suppression.”“Unfortunately, it turned out there was nothing we could do against these ads,” she added. “We ended up only aiming to remove a few [duplicate] accounts under the fake account policy, but only after proper notice – and I believe we have not removed them yet.”“Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?” she asked.A Facebook spokesperson said that the company had indeed removed the duplicate accounts following the midterms, and that Rally Forge’s network of Pages and accounts had gone dormant after November 2018. The company made a number of updates to its policies on political ads before the 2020 elections, including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations before being authorized to run ads. It also introduced a new policy to encourage more transparency regarding who runs networks of Facebook Pages.Rally Forge reactivated its network of Pages and accounts in June 2020, according to Facebook. It established a domestic “troll farm” in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed.Facebook said that its automated systems had detected and deleted fake accounts made by Rally Forge, which then created “thinly veiled personas” to carry out deceptive campaigning. In October 2020, the platform permanently banned Rally Forge and Hoffman for violating its policy against CIB, work that Facebook said the firm had undertaken “on behalf of Turning Point USA” and another client.A spokesman for Turning Point USA disputed the characterization of the operation as a “troll farm” and noted that it was a project of Turning Point Action, which is a separate entity.Facebook did not take any enforcement action against Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action or Kirk with regard to the Phoenix operation. Facebook also did not disclose Rally Forge’s connection to America Progress Now and the deceptive Green Party ads.A forestalled investigationIn September 2019, CLC filed a complaint alleging that APN’s failure to register with the FEC violated federal law. The FEC responded by sending a letter to an inaccurate address that America Progress Now had listed on its Facebook Page, but it does not appear to have taken further action, prompting CLC to sue it in February 2020.“If nothing is done, the FEC will instead be sending a message that anonymous or fake entities like America Progress Now can pop into existence just prior to an election, exploit lax registration and reporting requirements by digital platforms, spend unlimited sums of money, and then disappear into thin air once an election is over,” the group said at the time.In April 2020, the FEC wrote again, this time to the address listed on an Arizona state business filing for America Progress Now.On 15 April 2020, Evan Muhlstein responded to the FEC by email. Muhlstein described the lack of filing as an “error”, writing, “I believe that it is important for the commission to understand that any potential failure on either of those items is based entirely on my inexperience to the process.” He wrote that he had “assumed that Facebook’s ‘political disclaimer/disclosure’ was all that was necessary”, said his expenditures totaled “only $2,467.54”, and expressed surprise that “a spend as small as this would require any type of reporting”.“I again offer my sincerest apology for any potential errors in failing to disclose,” Muhlstein wrote. “Given the apparent obstacles and unknowns of participating in the election process in this manner (of which I am learning some of now), it is highly unlikely I will ever participate in it again. I feel terrible for having been so ignorant to the process.”Muhlstein also expressed his desire to come into compliance “correctly and quickly”. At no point in the communication did Muhlstein disclose that the advertisements had been handled by a major political marketing firm.“Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC is extremely misleading and might warrant a criminal investigation,” said Fischer, of the CLC.Muhlstein did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact with him. His connection to Rally Forge is not known. He is a resident of Queen Creek, Arizona, the town where Hoffman also lives.The FEC has the power to issue subpoenas and carry out serious investigations, but only after a vote of four of its five commissioners.In a report dated 4 May, the FEC’s general counsel argued that, while it appeared that Muhlstein had violated federal law, the small amount of money involved and Muhlstein’s statement that he was unlikely to engage in further political spending led it to recommend that the FEC exercise prosecutorial discretion and dismiss the allegations with a warning.In July, the FEC voted to follow the general counsel’s recommendation and dismiss the case, forestalling any actual investigation.Commissioner James “Trey” Trainor went further, lambasting the CLC in a statement of reasons. “Contrary to CLC’s wild speculation, this case wasn’t about a ‘fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,’” he wrote. “In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech.”Trainor asserted that “there was no evidence to contradict” Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC “and no evidence to support CLC’s salacious theories about the ‘unknown person or persons’ behind APN”.It would not be until 23 December 2020 – six months after the FEC had voted not to pursue the allegations of law violations and more than two years after the election – that Muhlstein would provide the FEC with that evidence, when he finally registered APN with the FEC and disclosed that the independent expenditure had been made through Rally Forge.The FEC did not respond to questions from the Guardian, citing a policy not to comment on enforcement matters. Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. Fischer said: “It looks like we were right.”Daniel Hernandez contributed reporting More