Facebook Still Lying about its role in 2016 Electon: Talking Points Memo

[Stuart G]

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebook-still-lying-about-its-role-in-the-2016-election
By Josh Marshall | Saturday February 17, 2018 7:34 pm
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I flagged this on Twitter before President Trump started flogging it. But I’m not at all surprised that he did. Because, somewhat to my surprise, it revealed that Facebook seems still to be committed to lying, albeit now more artfully, about its role in the 2016 election and more broadly as a channel of choice for propaganda and misinformation.

First, here’s the tweet I saw from Facebook’s VP of advertising: Rob Goldman

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Rob Goldman @robjective

Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.


The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election.
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There is, as they say, a lot to discuss here. Facebook was a bad actor by complicity in the entire 2016 election Russian interference campaign. As I’ve noted in other posts, it’s an engine built to maximize engagement for ad sales and data collection which operates with no need to price its negative externalities. To pull that out of jargon into more concrete terms, it’s like a factory that is highly profitable in large part because it can dump its toxic waste into the local river. Facebook is designed to do stuff like this. So it’s not some shocking or unexpected occurrence that this happened.

For months, Facebook’s executives, including its founder and CEO not only denied but mocked the idea that its platform had been used to distribute misinformation and propaganda during the 2016 campaign. It came clean only under tremendous pressure, both legal pressure and the pressure of public opinion. It’s laughable and frankly offensive that any executive from Facebook thinks he can lecture anyone on this topic. Facebook had dirty hands in this whole drama and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any discussion of its responsibility.

Of course there’s no bright line between the goal of electing Trump and the broader goal of sowing discord and confusion. The essence of the whole story is that both overlapped. But note Goldman’s effort to deemphasize the election and argue that the real goal wasn’t electing Donald Trump. Presumably an ad executive wouldn’t feel like he had a particular dog in that fight either way. But it’s clearly a pretty key thing for him. He even apes what amounts to quasi-Trumpian rhetoric in saying the media distorts the story because the facts “don’t align with the main media narrative of Trump and the election.” This is silly. Elections are a big deal. It’s hardly surprising that people would focus on the election, even though it’s continued since. What is this about exactly? Is Goldman some kind of hardcore Trumper?

(rest at link above)

[dalton99a]

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