Facebook Allies with Donald Trump

While some social media services will not accept political ads at all, giant Facebook has elected an entirely different tact: “Facebook is sticking with its controversial policy of refusing to fact-check political ads or ban false ones, and has also decided not to limit microtargeting by political campaigns, the company announced in a blog post this morning [1/9].

“Instead, according to the post by Product Management Director Rob Leathern, Facebook plans to ‘add a new control that will allow people to see fewer political and social issue ads on Facebook and Instagram. This feature builds on other controls in Ad Preferences we’ve released in the past, like allowing people to see fewer ads about certain topics or remove interests.’

“The post doesn’t specify what seeing ‘fewer’ ads means, or promise that users can block all political ads… The political ads control will be deployed in the U.S. ‘early this summer’ (just a few months before the 2020 elections) and expanded to other locations over time, the post says.” MediaPost.com, January 9^th.

As Russia interfered with our 2016 and subsequent elections, it used some pretty sophisticated targeting and tracking software based on manipulating social media posts. It developed analytics that could recognize vulnerable biases in individual consumers, proclivities that would make appropriately worded messaging to elicit the desired response most effective. Conspiracy theories, completely false but aimed at undermining a specific political candidate or policy, were Russia’s bread and butter.

Russian analytics knew what messages would resonate with individuals searching for buzz words and “events” that support their beliefs, but which would also support a chosen candidate or policy and undermine, with falsehoods and mythology, candidates and policies who might be harmful to Russian goals. Add the exceptionally well-developed automated systems – the use of “bots” – to implement these efforts on a mass scale without the need of concomitant human actions. Masses of Russian disinformation and manipulation have been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Every US intelligence agency so affirmed without dissent.

Facebook thus opened the door to corrupting the 2020 presidential campaign, and Trump’s well-oiled campaign mechanism dived in with both feet. “What did Facebook expect? The company has doubled down on its policy of allowing political ads that contain lies, explaining that it shouldn’t be in the business of evaluating ads. One unfortunate (and predictable) consequence of that is that the Trump campaign, the biggest overall buyer of Facebook ads, would take advantage. In fact Facebook’s policy looks almost tailor-fit to Trump’s Facebook ad game.

“When you look through President Trump’s voluminous collection of ads in the Facebook Ad Library, you see all kinds of oddities, from contests with the prize of seeing Trump’s Superbowl ad early to sales of Trump hats that say ‘Woke’ on the front. And hidden among the thousands of ads you occasionally find ad copy and video containing lies and half-truths. But in the last few days, as the president’s impeachment trial hit full stride in the Senate and on national TV, the campaign seems to have bumped up the misinformation level a few notches. Here are a few examples.

“This one, found by Popular Information’s Judd Legum and posted on Twitter, makes the false claim that ‘dirty cops’ illegally spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016. The president has long defended the conspiracy theory that the Obama administration wiretapped his campaign headquarters. He even ordered a government investigation, which came up with zilch. He later claimed the FBI placed a spy within his campaign. Actually, the FBI placed a confidential informant near, but not within, Trump’s 2016 campaign while investigating suspected Russian interference in the election. The FBI inspector general found no wrongdoing. Nor is there evidence that Hillary Clinton or the DNC spied on his campaign… The ad began running on January 21, and is still running.

“In another ad (which barely makes sense), the Trump camp claims that the president has been ‘exonerated twice.’ One of those ‘exonerations’ surely refers to the Mueller Report, which found ample evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It also found evidence that the Trump campaign tried to conspire with the Russians but not enough to recommend charges. And it explicitly said that it could not exonerate Trump of charges of obstruction.

“A number of other Trump ads show mere half-truths or milder distortions, like this ad, which is also in circulation now. The text says Trump ‘obliterated’ Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, which is an odd way of describing the result of an election in which Trump lost the popular vote by close to 3 million votes…

“[In December,] [Facebook] board member Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter and advisor, urged CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the board to ignore public concerns and adopt the company’s current political ads policy… In a speech at Georgetown last fall, Zuckerberg said that Facebook doesn’t fact-check political ads because it doesn’t want to be an arbiter of truth and believes that people are entitled to hear what public figures are saying. Whatever the motivation, the policy allows politicians to spread as much BS on the world’s biggest social network as they wish—as the president’s campaign keeps on proving.” Mark Sullivan writing for the January 24^th FastCompany.com.

The ability to spread disinformation and completely fabricated conspiracy theories combined with the ability of individuals to filter out any “news” that disagrees with their basic desired perspective – “I don’t want facts that disagree with what I think those “facts” should be” – have distorted the necessary and accurate information our electorate needs to vote intelligently. It was a total shock to me, knowing that during the House presentation of their impeachment to the Senate – materials already widely reported other than by clearly biased conservative media – there were Republican US Senators who were forced to listen to facts completely ignored by Fox News and most of the conservative press… and were truly surprised at what they were hearing apparently for the first time. Can democracy survive on a diet of lies, where truth is buried and easily extinguished?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I do not have a Facebook account… and never will!!!