Business Insider reports:

Early drafts of a 2017 Facebook white paper on security concerns included mentions about Russia’s role before company executives decided it was “politically unwise” and told them to remove it, a new book says.

The first draft of the white paper from Facebook’s then-chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and his team had “an entire section devoted to activity by state-backed Russian hackers,” according to an advance copy of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination that Insider reviewed.

The book’s authors write that the draft contained “concrete examples from the 2016 presidential elections that demonstrated how Russia had used the platform to spread hacked documents.” When Facebook executives, including then-Vice President of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage viewed the draft, they told Stamos and his team to cut out this section, according to the book.

“They didn’t want to stick their heads out,” a person involved in the discussions told the book’s authors, who note that management thought it would have been “politically unwise to be the first tech company to confirm what U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered.” [Continue reading…]