Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: The Justice Department has charged two former Twitter employees with spying for Saudi Arabia in a case that raises concerns about the ability of Silicon Valley to protect the private information of dissidents and other users from repressive governments. The charges, unveiled Wednesday in San Francisco, came a day after the arrest of one of the former Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo, a U.S. citizen who is alleged to have spied on the accounts of three users…

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The New York Times reports: In the Oval Office, an annoyed President Trump ended an argument he was having with his aides. He reached into a drawer, took out his iPhone and threw it on top of the historic Resolute Desk: “Do you want me to settle this right now?” There was no missing Mr. Trump’s threat that day in early 2017, the aides recalled. With a tweet, he could fling a directive to the world, and there was nothing…

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CNN reports: A controversial policy allowing politicians to run false ads on Facebook will extend to the United Kingdom as the country prepares to vote in a historic December election, Facebook confirmed to CNN Business. The policy is being championed by Facebook executive Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom who himself once complained about “lies” spread during the 2016 Brexit referendum. The company will not fact-check ads run by British political parties and the thousands…

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David Patrikarakos writes: For centuries information was scarce. The math was simple: The higher up the societal food chain you were, the better the information you had. And it could be explosive. Information made Microsoft and it brought down Richard Nixon. It helped us navigate the globe and it feeds the Facebook algorithm. But what happens to society when information ceases to be scarce? This is the question Peter Pomerantsev explores in his finely written and deeply intelligent This is…

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The New York Times reports: Russia has been testing new disinformation tactics in an enormous Facebook campaign in parts of Africa, as part of an evolution of its manipulation techniques ahead of the 2020 American presidential election. Facebook said on Wednesday that it removed three Russian-backed influence networks on its site that were aimed at African countries including Mozambique, Cameroon, Sudan and Libya. The company said the online networks were linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch who was indicted…

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The New York Times reports: The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network’s recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted — even false ones — in ads on the site. It asked Facebook’s leaders to rethink the stance. The message was written by Facebook’s own employees. Facebook’s position on political advertising is “a threat to what FB stands for,” the employees wrote in the letter, which…

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Sue Halpern writes: In the course of the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent eighty-one million dollars on Facebook ads. With a little more than a year to go until the next election, candidates have already spent more than sixty-three million dollars marketing themselves on Facebook and Google. Trump’s campaign has spent more than anyone else’s, with a total of twenty-four million dollars in digital-ad buys. Two of those ads, which were released on Facebook on October…

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The New York Times reports: On any given day, the Trump campaign is plastering ads all over Facebook, YouTube and the millions of sites served by Google, hitting the kind of incendiary themes — immigrant invaders, the corrupt media — that play best on platforms where algorithms favor outrage and political campaigns are free to disregard facts. Even seemingly ominous developments for Mr. Trump become fodder for his campaign. When news broke last month that congressional Democrats were opening an…

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The New Republic reports: The post popped up in select Instagram feeds shortly before the election in 2016. Its photo depicted an anonymous black-clad woman on an airport tarmac, crying over a metal casket covered in an American flag. “Killary Clinton will never understand what it feels like to lose the person you love for the sake of your country,” the caption began. “Honoring the high cost paid by so many families to protect our freedom. Buy a T-shirt—help a…

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Sarah Jeong writes: On the night of Aug. 15, 2014, Zoë Quinn was out having a drink with some friends in San Francisco when her phone began to blow up with messages. Something was exploding on the internet — a strange, incoherent maelstrom of outrage that would take over her life. Ms. Quinn, a 27-year-old video game developer, lived in Boston and was in San Francisco only to visit, but the visit turned into exile. “I never went home from…

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NBC News reports: By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times. The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months, according to data from Facebook’s advertising archive — more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns. Those video ads — in…

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The New York Times reports: China has adopted Russia’s playbook for spreading disinformation on Facebook and Twitter, deploying those tactics in its increasingly heated information war over the protests that have convulsed Hong Kong. In recent weeks, Facebook and Twitter accounts that originated in China acted in a coordinated fashion to amplify messages and images that portrayed Hong Kong’s protesters as violent and extreme, the two social media companies said on Monday. On Facebook, one recent post from a China-linked…

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