Una Mullally: Are Facebook and Twitter manipulating our opinions?

What would make you boycott a company? Poor work practices being exposed? Criminality? Nefarious activity? General ethical concerns? The United States Senate intelligence committee hearings last week with legal representative of Google, Facebook and Twitter continued the revelations about the damning involvement of what is in effect Russian cyber warfare in the 2016 US presidential election. These revelations can be added to a feeling of growing unease regarding how social media and tech companies operate.

The ineptitude of social media platforms in dealing with the manipulation of information and spreading of propaganda at crucial political moments is terrifying. The internet adage goes that if you’re not paying for something, you are the product. At what point will people begin to remove themselves wholesale from social-media platforms in the wake of such revelations? Are we satisfied with the addictive treats and avenues for communication and procrastination these platforms provide us with, as they profit not just from regular users, but also, it seems, from those seeking to damage western democracy?

The tech world operates with a strange dichotomy of total control and a hands-off attitude. Platforms are designed and engineered, and they morph and grow “organically”. Many tech bosses will say they didn’t realise what the impact of what they were making would be, or how what they intended it to be would change depending on how the product was received and utilised. Yet these companies preach to us with never-ending hyperbole about the massive social changes they have instigated. They cannot have it both ways. For all the masters-of-the-universe portrayal of tech bosses, they seem curiously shrugging when told to get a handle on their empires.

Russian propaganda

In October, Facebook that 10 million Americans had seen Russian propaganda advertisements on their platform. Now they say 126 million Americans saw such content. How did that under-reporting occur? Did they know what was happening and failed to see the scope of it, never mind address it, or did they fail to see what was going on? It's hard to determine which is worse: irresponsibility or stupidity. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Californian Democrat, put it most succinctly when she said, "I don't think you get it," calling out the lawyers of such companies at the hearings.

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With a potentially contentious referendum on abortion on the horizon, what steps are being taken here to regulate Facebook advertising, or to identify what and where the source of funding for political advertising is?

In one case, in an example of how Russian propaganda could cause things to spill out on to the streets, a Russian group called Internet Research Agency bought $200 worth of ads on Facebook to publicise fake events. One was about “Islamic knowledge” and another, a protest against the “Islamisation of Texas”. The resulting gathering groups clashed outside the Islamic Centre in Houston. The Internet Research Agency created 80,000 pieces of “content” (potential or real propaganda in this case) from 470 accounts that reached 126 million people. Nearly 139 million Americans voted in their presidential election, so the ads weren’t too far off reaching as many as they needed to.

“We don’t have state-sponsored manipulation of elections as one of our rules,” said Twitter’s chief attorney, Sean Edgett. Twitter has since banned Sputnik News and Russia Today from buying advertising on its platform. While that is an important step, those two sources are known and well-established. What about the countless other nefarious actors and trolling networks that push propaganda or sow divisiveness?

With Facebook, there is an intrinsic paradox regarding the radical transparency they demand of their average user, and the fact that fakery reigns on the platform, particularly when it comes to news.

"You have one identity," Mark Zuckerberg said several years ago, "The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." He needs people to be their most accurate selves online, for both ideological reasons, and to boost Facebook's bottom line – so that advertising can be more targeted to individuals. But why was Facebook so slow to root out these other fake identities?

Disruption

Underpinning the tech industry has been a bizarre evangelism that they are the future, that they are right, that “disruption” is a decent business model even when it leads to the disruption of the fabric of society itself, that change – any change – is always good. That evangelism has been necessary to create a workforce that buys into employers. It also fosters a fawning tech media that shies away from examining the less cool, less sexy implications of social-media tools. In Irish political discourse, tech companies are rarely spoken about beyond the vernacular of jobs, and the sentiment of slickness that sees the country congratulate itself for being home to headquarters of tech companies due to our low corporation tax rate.

But knowing what we know about what happened in the US context, so far, and knowing that elsewhere in Europe, particularly regarding our neighbours with Brexit, Twitter “bots” at the very least influenced the conversation, is it not time to examine the actions and methods of such companies in a different way?

With a potentially contentious referendum on abortion on the horizon, what steps are being taken here to regulate Facebook advertising, or to identify what and where the source of funding for political advertising is? Are we happy to walk into referendums and elections with our fingers in our ears, knowing how actors can influence debate and votes without us knowing who they are or what their motivations are?