The NPR Politics Podcast - Facebook Removes Accounts Involved In Deceptive Political Influence Campaign

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

Facebook announced Tuesday afternoon that it has removed 32 Facebook and Instagram accounts or pages involved in a political influence campaign with links to the Russian government. This episode: political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter Tim Mak, and Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. Facebook is making political headlines again, this time for removing 32 pages or counts that they say were staging a deceptive political influence campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. And I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. So, Tim, Facebook made this announcement on its website.

You were on a phone call today where Facebook explained what happened. So what did they say? What's what's going on? OK, so they took down more than 30 accounts, Facebook accounts that they say were involved in a fake influence campaign and that this campaign has ties with the Russian government. One thing that was imminent, though, was that this campaign tried to organize fake counter-protests at a white nationalist rally planned here in Washington, D.C. later this month. And they said, OK, well, this is an imminent event that will occur. We're going to make this public, and we're going to come forward with our investigation. Basically, they have not been able to definitively determine who was behind this campaign, but there certainly are a lot of clues that suggest that it was the Russian government.

So what kind of clues are there that these groups were tied to Russia here? So Facebook said it observed similar tools, techniques, and procedures to those used by the Russian Internet Research Agency. You remember that troll farm that was producing all that fake content on Facebook and other social media networks during the 2016 campaign. Right. And Mueller indicted them earlier this year, right? That's correct. In February, 13 individuals and the IRA, among other companies, were indicted as part of the special counsel Mueller's investigation into whether or not there was any coordination between Donald Trump's campaign and

the Russian government. Hey, Tim. Yeah. You mentioned that the imminent issue here had to do with some sort of counter-protest, right? That's right. So how does this relate to the election? We've got just, what, less than 100 days to go. How does this relate to interfering in the election? This isn't about any particular candidate or any particular party per se. You'll remember that a lot of what the Internet Research Agency has done in the past was really meant to stir up chaos. They did have a general preference, as the special counsel's indictment says, and the intelligence community have said, that they had a general preference for Donald Trump's campaign, but they played both sides in an effort to create chaos and turn Americans against each other. So this is more of that sowing division and, you know, making people distrust the electoral process that we've been hearing about. Right. This wasn't targeting any particular candidate. Later this month, there's going to be a white nationalist rally in front of the White House. And the last time,

this is the part two of what happened in Charlottesville. Right. This is on the anniversary of that, right? Or near the anniversary of that. And so basically this foreign campaign was meant to create a fake counter-protest. Okay. And they coordinated with real organizations and real people to try to gin up this counter-protest. So I want to go one step further than this question of sowing political division. Okay,

so what is the ultimate goal of that then? Is the idea to just weaken American democracy? It's to create confusion. It's to create chaos. It's to divide Americans and turn Americans against each other. And that's the fundamental effort here. I mean, did the Russian government want Donald Trump because of Donald Trump in particular? Or did they want Donald Trump because they viewed him as a more chaotic force? You could argue both ways. You could argue both ways. But what's the underlying kind of line of thought across all of this is that a more divided America is a weaker America, which is less of an adversary for Russia in whatever geopolitical strategy they're trying to pursue. Gotcha. But getting back to this, to be clear, we aren't totally sure if or how much these 32 pages or accounts are connected to Russia, right? Well, we have clues and we have

indications and they are linked in at least one way to the Internet Research Agency. So Facebook said that it noticed that a known Internet Research Agency account had been made a co-administrator on a fake page for a period of seven minutes. And Facebook said, look, that was interesting. It was not determinative. So they're not ready to cast specific blame. But there are tons of clues. I mean, you get the sense that Facebook just doesn't want to quite pull the trigger. They don't feel like they have 100 percent certainty on who was behind this. But you'll notice that members of Congress didn't have that sort of reservation. I know Kelsey spoke to some folks on the Hill about this. Yeah, I mean, they all were very careful to repeat

that it hasn't been verified that it's Russia. But they all said that they're really happy that Facebook is starting to disclose this because, you know, in the greater scheme of things, 32 may not seem like that many accounts, but it's 32 accounts that get posted and then reposted and become part of this kind of web that, you know, all these campaigns are really worried about. They're worried that they can't control the information and they can't control when false information is getting out to voters.

This is in addition to their own fears about having specific campaigns hacked or the security of the actual voting and elections that happen at the ballot. Kelsey made a really good point about the scope. And it may almost be a little bit misleading to say, oh, well, it was, you know, it was 30 accounts. What does that mean? So there are some facts here that kind of give us a sense of exactly how much content and influence this campaign might have had. Sure. So the pages, they were created between March 2017 and May of this year, and they had a total of 290,000 followers. And over that same time period, they generated 9,500 posts and ran 150 advertisements. They organized approximately

30 events. So 30 accounts can have massive influence and following hundreds of thousands of followers and thousands of posts. Yeah. And just think about your own Facebook timeline here. Right. You see a lot of things that just kind of you scroll past or they pop up several times from people, you know, posting them. So there's also an additional impact that this has, not just people who share it, but think of the number of times that one person sharing something is seen by their friends and family. It is a very, very difficult thing to kind of wrap your arms around. You know, this is not going to be the last time Facebook's going to have to make hard decisions like this. This is not going to be the last time a foreign government is interested or a foreign actor is interested in manipulating or interfering with American elections, that that door is now open

and it's wide open. What we heard from Facebook today is that it expects to find more efforts to interfere with the American democratic process as their investigations continue. And you hear lawmaker after lawmaker and Trump administration official after Trump administration official say, look, the Russians continue to want to interfere in our electoral process and in our democracy. It's not the end of it. This is just the beginning. You know, one of the things that I think is really interesting is I talked to somebody up here on the Hill who was saying they hope that people do not get desensitized to the idea of Russia interfering in the election. It's something we hear about in little bits and people are have a hard time, you know, seeing what the consequences are. But that this is really viewed by the intelligence

community and lawmakers and the people running these campaigns as a serious, serious threat to the whole process of elections. And there is a concern that this is becoming something that people think is just what happens. Right. Well, it's easy to see looking at some of these sample posts that Facebook put up from these groups today. There was a group called Resisters, for example, which looks a lot like a whole bunch of the anti-Trump resistance groups that have popped up on Facebook since his election. It's easy to see how someone who has that sort of political ideology might like this group, follow this group, go to its events without any sense that that is who they are following, that they're following someone who's fake. Yeah, absolutely. And I can imagine a sense of helplessness of not knowing, you know, what to trust. And that's, I mean, part of the whole issue here, right? That's the power of this information campaign. This is the big challenge that America faces with these sorts of information campaigns, because it makes you question reality. What's real? What's not real? Does that Facebook commenter on the other side of the screen across the interwebs, do they exist? Do they not exist? Are they Kremlin bots? Are they real people? And it makes,

it dehumanizes people and it creates a total confusion about what exists and what doesn't exist. Right. Well, on top of all of this, Tim, in the information that Facebook released today, they added that it seems that the people who were behind this, these groups, were better at covering their tracks than the people in the Internet Research Agency and that last batch of people who were indicted, right? Like that these bad actors may be getting better at what covering up their IP addresses, that sort of thing. Yeah. So what was interesting is that if the Russians are behind it, the Russians are getting more sophisticated in their methods. So in the past, the Internet Research Agency has kind of gotten caught flat footed at points, they would use occasionally a Russian IP address or something like that. And Facebook doesn't have that in this particular case,

that they weren't able to find evidence of a Russian IP address that was used. What they did find is that whoever these actors are, they used virtual private networks to cover their tracks so you wouldn't know the origins of the campaign. They used third party agents to place advertisements. They were trying to hide where they were coming from. Right. And they were connecting with actual legit groups, right, to help promote their events. Right. So you mentioned the Resisters group. The Resisters group reached out to five other legitimate groups that are in opposition to the Trump administration and tried to coordinate with them in order to disseminate logistics information and basically organize this event. There's no way

that those individuals would have known, that these real individuals would have known that they were communicating with some sort of foreign entity. It's kind of like piggybacking credibility almost. Right, like giving you the veneer of being legit. All right, so that is the rundown of what happened today. We're going to take a quick break, And when we get back, we're going to talk about what this means moving forward. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Lisa. The mattress with over 11,000 five-star reviews and a mission to end bedlessness in America. The Lisa mattress was designed to provide support and pressure relief to every body type and sleep style for a deeper night's sleep. Lisa plants a tree for every order and donates a mattress for We'll see you next time on ask me another we are joined by actress jessica walter she shares tales from her lengthy career on stage and screen and her role as lucille bluth on arrested development

find us every week on the npr one app or wherever you listen to podcasts and we're back so we just walked through with tim and kelsey what we know about Facebook's announcement that it removed 32 accounts. These accounts were accused of stoking political divisions and being inauthentic, was Facebook's word in doing so. So now we're going to focus on how Congress is reacting to this news. So Kelsey, congressional reporter, let's start. This story just dropped today. How are people on the Hill reacting to it? They all are happy that Facebook is putting out more information about this. But they're also saying that they aren't totally surprised, right? Because they have been all along saying that they agree with the intelligence community that Russia has interfered in past elections and plans to interfere in the upcoming election.

And to a person, Republicans, Democrats, they all said that today. One thing I think was really interesting was at this press conference that happens weekly after both parties go off to their separate lunches in the Senate, Senator Schumer came out and he was asked about it. And he said, when Donald Trump can't make up his mind as to whether the Russians are continuing to try to attack us in 2018, it sends a signal to the whole federal government that maybe this isn't so important when it is. And that is the tension that I think we're going to see go forward here, is that this isn't just about Facebook, right? Like this is about a broader conversation about elections. One thing that I'm really curious about in the news coverage of this is we've heard some talk of regulation from Capitol Hill towards social media networks. You're laughing. So where does that stand right

now? How much of a push is there still? Does this intensify that push? Does this dampen it? What do you think? I mean, it's possible that this will continue to be a conversation in some ways because they feel like they have to talk about something. But this is a Republican-controlled Congress with a Republican president that has a history of being deeply averse to government regulation of private industry. And at the end of the day, that's what this conversation is about. And so I don't know that, I mean, Tim, you may have some thoughts on this as well, but I don't picture it being in the offing. The question also is, what regulation could you impose, right? You can't make it illegal to post false information, otherwise all of our relatives would be in jail. I mean, yeah, there's a spiraling conversation

about intent and about falsehood, and it's just not that easy. The fundamental thing about this is to have Americans understand what I understood as a 13-year-old when my Neopets account got hacked and all my money stolen, which is you can't control, you can't trust people on the Internet. And that you need to rely on trusted sources of information and be judicious about what information is provided to you, what to believe, and who to interact with. Yeah, and I'm not sure how Congress has a role in that other than, you know, to say that that's something that should be done. Because what I mean, primarily, that's the thing that we learned in school and through civic education and things like that, that is not something that Congress traditionally gets involved in. The vast majority of proposals put forward by members of Congress never become long. Is it worth thinking about what good laws would be made of or what direction regulations should proceed in? I think it is. Well, like we were talking about earlier, the big challenge is you can't regulate truth or untruth.

But there are things that you can do with regards to the first bucket of privacy, the second bucket of transparency and punishing bad actors. one Republican, one Democrat, is that they would automatically impose new sanctions on Russia if the director of national intelligence determined that they were trying to interfere with elections again. I mean, isn't that like the platonic ideal of the way we would write law in this country, right? And people would put out their ideas in a transparent way. They would write them into legislative language, and then they would debate them in an open way. And we would all see that turn into something that passes. I mean, yes, that is the platonic ideal of how this would all work out. But instead... Instead. They didn't say that in Schoolhouse Rock.

I don't think they did. I think I used a little too many words for that. I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill. Well, it's a long, long journey to the capital city. It's a long, long wait while I'm sitting in committee. But I know I'll be a law someday. At least I hope and pray that I will. But today I am still just a bill. All right. So with that, we are going to wrap it up.

As the story develops, we will be following it closely. We'll be back in your feed the next time there is political news you need to know about. Until then, follow us on Twitter at NPR Politics and send us your timestamps at NPRPolitics at NPR.org. Pi-related timestamps are always welcome. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. And I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.