Facebook happy to turn the page after woeful year of election meddling claims
Facebook and Twitter have removed fake news pages linked to supporters of Bangladesh’s government to counter the latest attempt to manipulate national elections using the social media companies.
Nine Facebook pages that mimicked genuine news sites, including the BBC and a Bangladeshi online newspaper, were taken down after they criticised the opposition in the run-up to polling day on December 30.
The pages falsely claimed splits in opposition ranks and sackings as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s party seeks to win a third consecutive term in power.
Twitter said it had also identified and suspended 15 accounts originating in Bangladesh for “engaging in co-ordinated platform manipulation”.
The case is the latest attempt to exploit social media for political purposes after Russian meddling in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. The issue has dogged Facebook and other social media companies throughout this year.
Facebook has been accused of failing to weed out fake news on its network and has been further pummelled over how it allowed the British polling company Cambridge Analytica to use the data of millions of users without their consent before the 2016 US election.
The scandals have led to calls for the social network to be regulated and sparked a battle of wills between parliaments and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who has refused to appear before a number of inquiries.
British MPs said Facebook should be held liable for transmitting harmful and misleading material and that similar companies should have to pay a tax so they could be regulated.
The problems have contributed to a woeful year for Facebook. The value of the company, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, has plunged by about $126 billion (Dh463bn) to about $410bn this year after years of sustained growth.
Facebook has also been criticised after the platform was used to incite violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar this year.
The criticism reached its height over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The British company, which worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, was closed after further revelations about its possible role in meddling with elections overseas.
Mr Zuckerberg gave evidence before the US Congress and said that one of his “greatest regrets” was the failure of the company to swiftly identify the Russian fake news operation in 2016.
He also appeared before the European Parliament but the session, which was carefully choreographed with the agreement of Facebook officials, failed to satisfy the company’s many critics.
Mr Zuckerberg refused to appear before other countries’ parliaments, including the UK and Canada, leading to a group of MPs from nine countries arranging a special session in London to allow Mr Zuckerberg to address them all. He failed to turn up.
The MPs made great play of his non-attendance at the hearing last month.
“The sense of corporate social responsibility, particularly in light of the immense power and profit of Facebook, has been as empty as the chair beside you,” Canadian MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith told Mr Zuckerberg’s stand-in Richard Allen, the company’s vice president for policy solutions.
Although Facebook has stepped up its fact checking, it still faces stinging criticism that it is too slow to close rogue accounts. The company had disabled 754 million fake accounts globally in the third quarter of this year, up from 583 million in the first quarter.
It is not just Facebook. About 30 deaths have been linked to rumours circulated on WhatsApp in India, according to The Guardian newspaper. It said eight people were killed in June after rumours spread through the app about alleged child kidnappers.
But the focus of MPs’ concerns has been the 2016 US election. In February, the inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the election highlighted how a notorious Russian troll farm sought to use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to stoke tension before the vote.
Research by cyber-security companies highlighted how Iranian trolls later used tactics similar to the Russians to spread discord in the US and Britain.
“It looks like the Iranian operation learnt lessons from observing the Russian operation,” said Ben Nimmo a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who examined the data.
Commercial and political pressure have played a key role in Facebook’s misfortune. After it warned in July of the cost of improving privacy controls after data breaches and slowing advertising revenue, its share price fell by 20 per cent.
Unlike Facebook and Alphabet – owner of Google and YouTube – Twitter has seen its market value increase this year. It has been linked to the proliferation of fake news but has made data available to researchers to analyse its significance.
Facebook faced further negative publicity when the
New York Times reported in November that the company had worked with a public relations company to undermine anti-Facebook groups by linking them with the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.