Shocking. Honest. True. Based on hundreds of interviews, the book is a record of the tremendous success and numerous failures of the Zuckerberg empire.
As a sophomore, Mark created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. Today, Facebook is the largest social networking platform in the world with almost three billion users, and its value is growing day by day.
Facebook is not just an innocent posting network. It is a powerful tool that can be fatal if misused. Data leaks, manipulation of users, dissemination of false information …
- Is Zuckerberg a computer genius thrown into the world of politics or a calculating businessman?
- How does the company deal with changes and subsequent scandals?
- What is the future of social networks?
Read an excerpt from the book “Facebook. It was supposed to be so beautiful”:
A month after the publication of the Stamos report, Time magazine reported on its front page that intelligence agents had detected that part of the 2016 Russian propaganda campaign was targeted at vulnerable audiences.
“They buy ads that are described as” sponsored “, which is what everyone else does, said the” senior intelligence officer. “
An angry Virginia senator Mark Warner visited Menlo Park, demanding that Facebook look more closely at the source of the fake news. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he constantly criticized social media, especially Zuckerberg’s website. After the elections, he ordered the company to take a deeper look at Russian interference.
“I was extremely disappointed with the initial resistance from Facebook, which basically seemed to say,” This is crazy, Warner doesn’t know what he’s talking about, “he later told Frontline.
Until now, Facebook has not paid much attention to the role of advertising in the fake news scandal that was supposed to manipulate the elections. This did not stop the company from denying advertising allegations in the case, even as the threat intelligence team was already conducting its own investigation.
“We had no evidence that the Russians were buying Facebook ads in connection with the election,” a Facebook spokesman told CNN on July 20.
It wasn’t easy to check the ads. Facebook had 5 million advertisers at the time who created hundreds of millions of ads every day. Moran began to sift them. This was done not only by his team, but also by a part of the advertising organization called Business Integrity. They chose the three-month period before the 2016 elections and began looking for advertisers from Russia or using Russian ISPs, as well as for those who used Russian in their posts or paid for advertising in rubles. In this way, they managed to limit the resource to several hundred thousand ads. Then they checked them carefully for political content. They searched for keywords like “Trump” and “Hillary”. This was difficult because some of the content was in a graphical, not text, format, so it was not searchable. Nevertheless, the team narrowed the field of their search even further.
Moran then started looking for links between advertisers: through ad similarities or the links they shared. It was then that he encountered a darkroom phenomenon that most young Facebook employees did not experience. Just like when the photo you develop takes shape, he suddenly notices a dispersed network of 20-30 users. They had one thing in common: they came from St. Petersburg.
It was something. Moran recalled an article by Adrian Chen in the 2015 New York Times. It described the toxic “Internet troll farms” operating in St. Petersburg known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). Their goal was to manipulate public opinion in free lands, all for the glory of their homeland. “Russia’s information warfare may be considered the greatest trolling operation in history, and its purpose was nothing less than to question the usefulness of the internet as a democratic space,” wrote Chen.
Moran and his team went to work. According to their calculations, the IRA could spend about $ 100,000 on 3,000 ads, most of them paying in rubles. In this way, it promoted 120 pages with 80,000 posts that reached 129 million Facebook users.
As soon as Moran realized that the Russians were posting ads on Facebook, he looked closely at their content. Thousands of ads were supposed to come from news agencies and caught the attention of American citizens with terrifying stories (such as Hillary Clinton’s intimate encounters with Satan), stirred up race unrest, and played out the darkest fears.
This gastric virus flew through Facebook like E. coli – many company executives watched tranches of ads purchased by the Russians and circulated on their networks.
– We watched them in the conference room and it was downright disgusting. We felt they had taken advantage of us and we were furious, ”explains Colin Stretch.
One thing particularly struck him: the shot of a person firing a flamethrower at an unidentifiable crowd, signed with an offensive phrase and the text: “Let’s burn them all!”
“This kind of violence, and the thought that it was used to incite people with certain prejudices, was just terrible,” he says. It was frightening, and it worried all of us, especially me, that we did not notice it.
Nothing was said about how easy it was thanks to Facebook to leverage user demographics and interests to target vulnerable people. Both sides of the dispute were often targeted: one set of ads motivated those leaning towards Trump to vote, while the other aimed at alienating the Democrats so that they would stay home on election day. Some of these ads were just plain gross. People fearful of immigrants were shown stories of the crimes they had committed, which deepened divisions in a country that was already shaken by them.
The company admitted that Instagram was also infected. The indictment by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller stated that the IRA had created a “Woke Blacks” account whose role was to persuade this group not to vote.10 “We cannot choose the lesser evil. Certainly it would be better not to vote at all” – one of the posts read. Another account, called “Blacktivist,” called for a vote for the ultra-liberal candidate Jill Stein. “Choose a room and vote for Jill Stein.” “Believe me, this is not a lost voice” – read the posts.
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team investigated the Russian involvement and looked closely at the IRA. It will later be found out that this operation was known as Project Lakhta (Lakhta Center is a new skyscraper in St.Petersburg). The IRA basically used Facebook as its marketing engine, as did many other companies. She monitored metrics through internal panels and reprimanded managers who had no results. The indictment text from the special prosecutor shows how a specialist from an IRA-created group called “Secure Borders” was kicked out for “low number of posts criticizing Hillary Clinton.” He was told that in the final weeks of the election campaign, “the attacks on Clinton must be stepped up.”
The indictment was not due for a few months. So far, Facebook only knew about thousands of ads and tens of thousands of posts that indicated an attack by Russians in connection with the elections in the United States. Not only did he allow this poison to spread over his platform, but he also did not block the dissemination of these ads. (The company’s standards for ads are stricter than for user posts.)
How is it possible that Facebook did not notice what was happening? One of the reasons was technical: Project P analysts researched fake news by searching for words in English only. The ads posted by the Russians did not contain these words in a text, but in a graphic form. Whether on purpose or not, they managed to avoid a manhunt.
‘Facebook cover. It was supposed to be so beautiful, ‘Steven Levy Mova publishing house
Facebook. It was supposed to be so beautiful, Steven Levy, trans. Katarzyna Sosnowska, Mova Publishing House 2022.
Source: Gazeta
Tristin is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his in-depth and engaging writing on sports. He currently works as a writer at 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the sports industry.
